There are many facets of off-page SEO, but in our opinion, the needle mover is what we call link building. This is when a website that isn't your own hyperlinks a keyword or has your website on their site.

Off-page SEO is distinct from on-page SEO. It's not about what you do on your website's pages but rather what happens off your site. This includes links to your website and mentions or citations of your brand on external sites. A healthy backlink profile, crucial for improving website rankings and authority, involves achieving new links from other websites.

The quality of these links is paramount. Ideally, these criteria are the metrics we use to determine quality links:

Large authoritative websites, like news.com.au or a government site, linking to a small bakery. Small to medium authoritative websites have their place too, as long as there is a clear, direct relationship. If you have a bakery, don’t get links from a dog store – where's the relevance? What would be sufficient is, let's say, blogs that review bakeries or websites that cover different types of dessert recipes. They may not be as big as CNN, but there is clear relevance.

These types of links don’t just drive extra traffic from the sheer audience size they command, like CNN, but they also pass on authority to smaller sites. Each link is essentially like a vote in a ballot, except rather than a single vote counting as a single vote, these votes have different weighting depending on the domain/entity/business that’s linking to your website. In the eyes of Google, it’s passing authority and therefore helping Google determine which sites are trustworthy, boosting your SEO performance and rankings.

It's important to remember that Google frowns upon irrelevant or spammy links. A healthy backlink profile should consist of relevant and diverse links. For instance, a link from a football website to a mousetrap seller might raise eyebrows.

To top it off, there is a clear pattern when you deep dive into any keyword or phrase ranking in the first five positions of a Google search. The pattern is that all of them have a certain amount of backlinks/referring domains. What more proof do you need that off-page SEO is critical?

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Link building, backlink profiles, and the various types of links that can benefit your website are complex topics with many facets. If you need help improving your off-page SEO, our experts here at Blurry Marketing are here to help.