What Is Off-Page SEO? A complete guide to Off-page optimisation in 2025

Have you written so many blog posts that your fingertips hurt?

Have you posted so many social media post that people are starting to unfollow your business because you are annoying them?

Well, it’s time to take a break.

It’s time to do something new, something different, and what’s that we hear you cry?

 

Off-page SEO

So, business owners across the land make this mistake: They write a few pieces of content marketing and then sit blinking at their SEO tools until the organic traffic starts flowing in.

However, search engines are much, much more complex than this. You could write blog posts until you turn blue in the face and fall out of your seat in complete exhaustion, but it just doesn’t work.

You must improve your off-page signals, such as business citations, reviews, backlinks, and even mentioning your business name in the right places.

This increases your business’s authority and trustworthiness, which are some of the most critical metrics Google (Alphabet) uses to decipher whether you should be at the top of the pile or languishing on page 10 of Google’s SERPs.

 

Search engines

Let’s talk a bit about Google and how the search engines work.

Have you heard of Google’s PageRank?

Well, if not, do not fear. It was one of Google’s first and most basic versions of its algorithm.

Playstation 1 was so good, but it later evolved and improved.

Well, Google’s algorithm got better and better into the complex but fantastic piece of mathematical engineering it is today.

In its early days, PageRank used links to decipher how good a website’s SEO was.

Fast-forward to today, links are still an essential part of the algorithm, like petrol is to a combustion engine: essential.

So, the top businesses and leading companies whose SEO could be deemed “ACE”—how did they get there?

Well, through a link builder at a top agency, it would generally have been a busy bee building a heap of do-follow and no-follow links. The top business of Google, occupying the number one spot, will have good, rock-solid backlink profiles.

When you see backlink profiles using a backlink-checking tool, you can only sometimes conclude that they have been working hard.

It’s not unusual for top UK firms, say PLC businesses, to have 30,000+ links!
So, this is sometimes a barrier to entry for small businesses that want to sell items in highly competitive business sectors. It’s not that they can’t write as many guides and blog posts and add new pages because they can, but backlinks are often not built enough, and even if they could, you do have to take your time.

 

Backlinks, and what we call the “rev limiter.”

 

Have you ever driven a small engine car at the red line?

Well, a rev limiter kicks in to stop you from blowing your engine up and opening the bonnet of your car to a face full of hot steam.

When building backlinks for your business, consider the “rev limiter.”

That’s “link velocity.”

Even if you can get the best links, you still have to build them gradually, and they must be quality.

Build them too fast; it looks like you bought them.

Build them in a timeframe that is too short, and you hit the rev limiter. The “link velocity” looks like you’re implementing spam methods, and you get hit by a big fat Google penalty.

Business owners who have been hit by Google Penguin link penalties, manual or algorithmic, will cry on their way to the office.

They will be crying because your website can get removed from Google.

It can vanish.

Link hires the wrong SEO agency, and if they buy links or just build a ton of spam, well, bang!

A Google Penguin update will remove you from the index faster than you can say, Bob. What’s happened to our sales? (that’s presuming Bob is your sales manager?)

 

What are we going to cover?

Our SEO boffins, some of the best in Cardiff, will cover the following topics.

• Off-page vs on-page SEO- what’s the difference?
• Is off-page SEO worth doing?
• Why is it so hard?
• Off-page SEO vs. on-page SEO- What are the main differences?

 

This may sound self-explanatory to those of us SEO experts out there.

However, to someone who hasn’t the foggiest idea what an anchor is or why Google has something called a RankBrain, it will be less than clear.

On-page SEO

So, on-page SEO is a massive part of search engine optimisation. It’s like building the office block where a business is based.
It must be built right, sturdy, and robust to last.

So, your team needs to write content marketing that will have a super high Google EEAT score. So it has high dwell times, low bounce rates, and offers a good U.X.

Then, all technical stuff ensures Googlebot can index the page.

All of that and more are the on-page elements. Basically, anything on your website is on the on-page. It must be right before you can really start to work on the off-page.

 

Off-page SEO

It is about showing you’re the don

The bees ’ knees

You cut the mustard, and you’re a big noise in your town, city or globally.

How do you do that?

Well, improving the authority.

And how do you do that?

You need more links.

But there are good links, bad links, and just, well, average links.

You need powerful, good links.

High DA, plus a mix of do-follow and no-follow, nicely written anchor text written in a white-hat way, and then link velocity needs to be slow.

Slow and steady is the name of the game.

So many SEO agencies make a hash of this, building rubbish, spam, and low-quality links, like blasting a hole in the side of a ship. Things will go down quickly.

So, whoever is building links, say it’s Sally in your office. Say, Sally, take your time. Don’t go wild on those energy drinks, building a ton of spam links, Sally.

There you have it; quality is the name of the game.

 

 

Vote of confidence

As you read more and more blog posts regarding what backlinks are and why they are so crucial to the overall SEO process, you are bound to hear this phrase:

That is, “links are like a vote of confidence.”

So, they like another business, giving a thumbs up like you would on Facebook.

They’re like a way of expressing that a business has liked your company and the information you offer and that it’s so good that they wish to cite it in their own work to help their customers even further.

Let’s give you an example: You are a DIY car mechanic / YouTube blogger with your own WordPress website. You blog about how to care for certain cars, how to do oil changes, etc.

Now, if a company sells car parts or offers advice on car restoration, they may even mention your website in a long blog post. Therefore, create a hyperlink, or just a link for short, to your business’s website.

And there you have it: You have created a backlink, which will get picked up by Googlebot. Then, it will calculate how much link equity and link value, also known as “link juice,” that link offers.

As you would expect, businesses with thousands of good-quality links have the most substantial backlink profiles and rank much higher in Google’s SERPs.

 

Relevancy and authoritativeness (winning combination)

Google ranks these businesses right at the top of Google, which is the relevant business with firm authority.

So, what do we mean by that?

Well, even a product that’s not in that huge demand, such as “ice skates,” there will be thousands of suppliers online.

So, how does Google know which businesses to rank in the top 3 SERPs on Google’s results for ice skates?
Well, it uses over 200 ranking factors. Yet all of these somehow fit into Google’s advice on how to best improve a company’s search engine optimisation, which is called Google EEAT.

The two core areas are ensuring your website is as relevant as possible and, in this case, ice skating. Then, you have to ensure your website is seen as a best seller so that backlinks improve the website’s authoritativeness.

 

Number and the quality of links

So, top SEO agencies worldwide spend hundreds of hours using tools called backlink checking, checking which backlinks their competitors have.

And why do they do that?

If your direct competitor has a strong backlink, your business could do the same.

That’s to say, if a direct competitor selling ice skates gets a good link from a sporting news website, your business could do the same.

However, remember this: your links need to be:
– Good quality
– Therefore, it will enhance your backlink profile
– Should only build relevant links
– Need a mixture of do-follow and no-follow
– Take it slow and build backlinks over an extended timeframe
– Write the anchor text in a white hat way
– Use internal links to spread link juice to other pages

 

Off-page SEO strategies

DA and domain authority

So, what does DA mean (domain authority) mean?

Well, you may have paid for an SEO tool subscription, and one that we use is called Moz Pro.

Now, Moz actually first came up with the DA metric, which mostly uses backlinks to determine how authoritative a website is.

So, generally speaking, the higher the DA score, the more quality backlinks the company has.

Therefore, if you have just bought your domain name from GoDaddy and entered it into Moz Pro-Link Explorer, you will generally find that you have a DA score of zero.

But do not fear.

We all have to start somewhere.

As you drink more espressos and work on building more links, you will slowly see the number of backlinks to your website increase. As long as you create the right and good links, your DA score will improve.

Also, use Google Search Console’s links tab to see which links Googlebot has indexed.

Do bear in mind that it takes weeks, sometimes months, for Googlebot to find a link, so you won’t see an SEO improvement overnight. It does take some time for new links to get indexed.

 

Link building

How do you go about building links (backlinks)?

So, as we will come onto a bit later, we think there are really only two main ways of building links here at this digital marketing agency: using “outreach” and “earning” links.

We have to say that we prefer building links by earning them. So what we mean by that is offering world-class, top-quality advice. If your content marketing, such as offering advice, stands out as being better than the competition, then quite simply, Google will rank that page higher.

Does this take a monumental and massive effort?

If you want a page to be ranked higher than a direct competitor who has already pushed the boat out of writing a comprehensive answer, you need to aim to be better.

If you’re aiming to be better than a piece of work that is already very high quality, well, that’s not going to be straightforward. However, as the old Guinness slogan once said, good things come to those who wait.

What this means is that if your business publishes a beneficial blog post with a very high Google EEAT score, that page will rank higher.
And when it ranks higher, it receives more visitors; if it gets more, some may run their businesses and cite your business.

For example, let’s say a business is based in another country. You don’t ship goods or services to that country. However, if the advice is still helpful in that country, then that business may link to you because you are offering good and helpful advice. At the same time, you are not a competitor to that business because you don’t sell goods or services in that location.

So, this is just an example of why a business may link to you. They will see that you offer quality advice that’s helpful and, therefore, will help their customers.

 

Content marketing

Why your business must have content marketing with a high EEAT score

As we mentioned earlier, we at this company think that the best way to obtain new backlinks is to earn them. To do this, we recommend writing top-quality blog posts and conducting research.

For example, if you conduct consumer research, these statistics may be cited by potentially thousands of other companies. When they do, some may link to your website, so you are earning backlinks.

On the other hand, if a business mentions your statistic, such as 78.1% buying fizzy drinks every week, then this statistic may get mentioned by many different companies. If it does, you contact the business and say your statistics are cited. Can you also have a backlink pointing towards the original page on your website where the statistics were initially published?

 

Come to one of the best agencies in the whole of Cardiff.

The business is owned and managed by Ryan Walsh.

Ryan has some of the best SEO consultants working for us, and our work has been cited and linked to by some of the best SEO minds not just in the U.K. but across the world.

We can build links, write content marketing, improve technical SEO, and more.

Prices start from 700 PCM. Come to one of the best SEO agencies around.