Last updated - August 3, 2022
To get your WordPress site to appear at the very top of search results, you must deploy a complete SEO strategy. While most businesses have excellent on-page and technical SEO, they often overlook the most daunting yet effective type of SEO, i.e., off-page.
Off-page SEO involves the activities undertaken off of a website to boost its search engine rankings. Common examples include backlink building, increasing shares on social media, and encouraging brand mentions online.
Off-page SEO shows search crawlers that a website is authoritative and popular. In this article, we will study five off-page SEO strategies to help you rank your WordPress site at the very top:
1. Build Links by Guest Posting
Guest posting is a common off-page technique that can earn your business an increase of 10-20% in new readership. It helps get a link from a high authority website and fetches referral traffic to your WordPress website from the link.
The fact there are millions of sites accepting external articles makes guest posting an effective strategy for your business. The first step is to find relevant blogs in your niche and industry. Use any these or similar search strings on Google to identify writing opportunities:
Your Keyword “write for us”
Your Keyword “become an author”
Or, your Keyword “contributing writer”
When you narrow down the target portals, study their content and brainstorm a few blog topics using BuzzSumo or UberSuggest. And before contacting them, review the guidelines to draft a desirable pitch so that your chances of getting accepted increase.
While writing, please ensure including links to blog posts published on your WordPress site, infographics, or other bits of insights that add more to your guest post. You also want readers to gain takeaways from your article, not just visit your website.
2. Create and Promote Linkable Assets
Linkable assets are content pieces created to attract links, particularly from other websites in your niche. Below are its three significant benefits:
a. Increased organic search traffic
Linkable assets help you create certain links that pass value and authority from one page to another on your WordPress site. This can help your pages rank higher for their target terms.
b. Increased brand awareness
Imagine having your business talked about on some of the most well-known and high-ranking websites in your industry. Linkable assets help boost your WordPress site’s authority and value and enable consumers to relate to you better.
c. Increased referral traffic
This one’s obvious: links help people move around the interweb. So if you get visitors from high-traffic websites in your niche, your referral traffic is bound to increase.
Resource guides, infographics, surveys, tutorials, online tools, and calculators can be different types of linkable content.
Linkable assets are ideally evergreen. For example, pre-treatment of food waste with Anaerobic Digestion is something that an environmental website is likely to link to. Remember to answer specialized, industry-specific questions. People are more likely to share information from sources that share their interests.
3. Reclaim Links and Build Broken Links
Link reclamation is the practice of finding, fixing, or replacing broken pointing to your website. It also involves replacing internal links on your WordPress site or external links others are using on theirs that are not passing any value as efficiently as they should.
Use tools like Ahrefs to identify broken links on external sites pointing to competitors. If you currently have similar content on your website, approach and ask those sites to link to your content instead.
On the other hand, broken link building is the process of building backlinks by replacing links to 404 pages with a working link to a target website.
The reason it works so well is that when you tell people about broken links on their website, they realize they are offering a poor web experience and even attracting Google penalties. Hence, they are happy to replace them with working ones quickly.
Here’s the email Ahrefs wrote to Neil Patel when they found a broken link on QuickSprouts:
source
ScreamingFrog is an excellent tool to identify if you have any broken or dead internal links. Besides, any SEO agency can help with it. Whenever you approach the third-party, tell them exactly where the broken link is, suggest an apt replacement, and also explain why it is a suitable replacement.
4. Earn Brand Mentions on Authority Websites
Simply put, a brand mention happens when someone talks about your offering online. For example, if your product ends up on the first page of ProductHunt, it will create a lot of chatter that could increase brand awareness (and new sales).
The most recent in our memory is Peep Laja’s Copytesting, a sales copy optimizing tool. When it was announced on ProductHunt, it quickly became the #1 Product of the Week and was the #4 Product of the Month for May 2020.
You can earn brand mentions in many ways, including:
a. Customer reviews
Customer reviews are an effective marketing instrument as they can reach thousands of target customers and help drive more sales. But more importantly, they greatly influence SEO. The logic is simple: the more content you have about your business online, the more options you will have for keywords to appear.
Depending on your business type, your platforms for fetching reviews will vary:
- Yelp and Zomato for restaurants
- G2 Crowd for SaaS and tech apps
- GoodFirms for IT companies
- Clutch for various other kinds of businesses
- TripAdvisor for hotels
b. Influencer marketing
With the help of brand monitoring tools like Awario, you can track mentions of industry keywords and find out influencers who could be a good fit to market your business and WordPress site. The more authoritative the influencer mentioning you, the more weight the endorsement has, and the higher your website traffic is.
5. Garner More Social Proof
Social proof attempts to build the credibility of your business by promoting what others think of it. Reviews and social mentions are the most common examples of social proof.
For example, your business launches a new product. Apart from promoting its features on social media, you also post customer reviews. Such social signals add to your trustworthiness and also improve rankings. Search engines appreciate them even more if they keep coming frequently.
For instance, user reviews may help with long-tail keyword searches as the language used could be similar to the type people use when searching for your product. This increases the chances of targeting the right audience.
Adding to #4a, keep track of all the reviews your customers drop on different platforms, and integrate them within your WordPress site to showcase your credibility. For instance, to further increase your new eBook downloads, insert a copy in the download form, something like, “87% of first-time users find our SaaS product exceptional.”
Besides, insert social media widgets on the blog pages displaying Likes, Comments, and Shared received on a particular blog. Social proof acts as a vote of confidence, and search engines don’t ignore such signals.
Over to You
Take your WordPress site to the next level with the SEO strategies, as mentioned above. With a solid plan mixed with link building, brand mentions, guest blogging, and social proof, you can boost your website traffic and raise your brand credibility.
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This article is very worthful for beginners.
Great article with lots of knowledge related to SEO.
Thanks for sharing this informative content.