You must’ve heard that ranking your website needs consistent hard work and effort. But consistency and hard work can’t bring you the best result if you do it wrong. A few lacks can cause huge damage that you won’t even notice.
To avoid such situations, you must have a complete off-page SEO checklist that guides you through the path and ensures you haven’t missed any important tasks. Also, such a list allows you to avoid silly mistakes that you aren’t aware of.
Keeping that in mind, I’ve designed a complete checklist for off-page SEO that keeps you aware of the basic and must-do tasks regarding off page optimization. The rest depends on your competition.
Without further ado, let’s start.
Off Page SEO Checklist for Everyone
Optimize On-Page SEO
Without proper on-page SEO, your off page efforts won’t work properly. So, you must optimize on-page first. You can follow our on-page SEO checklist to make sure that your website is properly optimized for on-page SEO.
One of the most important things here is internal linking. Link your internal pages properly to guide visitors and search engine crawlers. Another thing is fixing 404 errors. 404 error happens when a link doesn’t take you to any webpage. Create a page of the link or remove it from the website.
Fix on page before putting effort into off-page SEO.
Check Your Backlink Profile
Evaluating own backlink profile is something most people overlook, especially when it is a new site. But websites are always vulnerable to link spam, even new ones. So, check your backlink profile.
Tools like Ahrefs, Moz, Semrush, etc. will help you evaluate your website. Check the number of backlinks, sources, their quality, and other factors. If you find any negative, irrelevant, or spam links, remove them.
Keep an idea of the types of links you already have. It’ll help later.
Investigate Competitor’s Backlink Profile
If you understand your niche, you already know who your competitors are. Pick the top 3 competitors and evaluate their backlink profile. Check their sources of backlinks, types of backlinks, backlink count by type, and other information.
The same tools in the first step can help you with this. Export the results into an Excel sheet for further inspection.
You’ll need them to beat them.
Look for Link Building Opportunities
Several free link-building opportunities are there. Also, some opportunities are paid. You should utilize both to add quality links to the website’s link profile. Some of the free opportunities are-
- Broken links
- Local citations
- Guest posting
Some paid link-building opportunities are- link outreach, paid promotions, etc.
Explore the opportunities and start with a few.
Replicate Competitors’ Links
It’s time to use the information found from competitors’ backlink analysis. Look for scopes to build backlinks like your competitors. Similar backlinks from the same or better sources help you reach close to them.
Scan the websites your competitors are getting links from. Then look for broken links on those websites. If found, pick a suitable page in your website (or build one) for the broken link, and reach the web admin with a request to link. This may take time but saves money and effort.
Monitor Anchor Text Ratio
An off-page SEO checklist is incomplete without the point of checking the anchor text ratio. All the links you have shouldn’t come from the same anchor text. They should vary to avoid search engine penalties.
Typically, it is suggested to keep 5%-10% of anchor texts exactly as the keywords. The major portion (about 60%-70%) should match the keyword partially. The rest (around 20%-30%) shouldn’t match your keywords.
Maintain this ratio to keep your website safe.
Monitor Link Count
Just like your website gets organic links from sources, it loses links too. Losing links affects performance. Monitoring them is a great way to make sure that the overall link count is not dropping.
Monitor the backlink count of the important pages every month. If you find a downward trend, build additional links to avoid the downfall.
Create Sharable Resources
Sharable resources like PDFs and infographics bring you backlinks from many sources. People love to share such content. Whenever they share it and tag you as the source, you get a backlink.
This is a great way to increase the number of backlinks as well as authority. So, pick suitable content and transform them into infographics or PDFs.
Videos do the same. So, you can create quality videos too.
Stay Active on Social Media
Social media platforms can be a great way to increase your reach and bring you some awesome backlinks. When you publish a post on your social media profile linking to a webpage, you instantly receive a link.
Posts spread quickly on social media if they can create a buzz. Thus, you can multiply your visitors by sharing quality content that offers value to the target audience.
Final Verdict
In this off-page SEO checklist, I’ve included everything necessary to optimize your website for SERP ranking. Do everything stated here and you’ll see a drastic change in your ranking, if not done already.
SEO is a field that needs strategy, time, and effort. The lack of one among these will make it way tougher than it should be. So, instead of just hard work, do smart work following this off-page SEO checklist.
In case you need any assistance with SEO, don’t hesitate to reach us. Our team is built with diverse quality and expertise to handle all sorts of SEO and content issues.
