So you’ve created content about hearing loss that potential customers are looking for, and you have changed aspects of your hearing practice website so that search engines can understand them better. But it doesn’t guarantee your website is going to rank well. To ensure this, you need to establish authority in your domain. This is where you must begin to think about off-site optimization.
Hearing practice owners looking to push their website up the rankings are usually told to do on-page SEO first. But don’t stop there. Because the factors that matter to Google often occur away from your website, to a big extent.
What is off-site optimization?
On-page optimization takes place on the website, while off-site optimization happens away from your site. These could be any activity to enhance the popularity, significance, and authority of your website and brand. It’s relying on other websites to tell Google that you are trustworthy.
Off-page SEO informs Google merely what others opinion is of your site. For instance, if you have a lot of useful links to your websites, search engines will believe you have excellent content— the kind of content that gives users value.
The SEO Community is in broad consensus that site authority, confidence and relevance provided by efficient offsite SEO still plays an important part in the ranking of your website, even though search algorithms and the factors used to rank websites are changing continuously. According to the SEO website Moz, “offsite SEO-related factors likely carry more than 50% of the ranking factor weight.”
The importance of links for off-site SEO
If fresh, relevant content is the backbone of on-page SEO, then backlinks are perhaps the most important aspect of off-page SEO. Links are like the strings that keep the internet tied together. Search engines use links to establish how important a specific piece of content or website is.
You get a backlink when other sites link to yours from their own website. For example, if you went on your local morning TV show to talk about hearing loss, they may link to your site when posting the video of your except on their website.
In fact, Google search was historically established based on PageRank: an algorithm that identifies how important the backlinks pointing to a web page are. Although recent questions have been asked about the continued relevance of backlinking in ranking websites, Google has said that it is still an important factor.
There are three types of backlinks:
- Natural links are published by a website owner without any prior intervention. For instance, adding a link to an article pointing the best burgers in town might be a natural link from a food blogger.
- Manually built links are obtained by intentional relationship-building with others. This could be getting your customers to provide a link to your website on their social media posts, or asking celebrities to share your content.
- Self-created links include adding a backlink to a business directory, a forum, your internet forum persona’s signature, or a press release with links back to your website. Due to their artificial nature, these are perhaps the least well-regarded links to pursue.
Other types of off-site SEO
Aside from links, anything else that you do outside your webpage to help you tank can be considered off-site optimization. This includes social media outreach, blogging on other websites as a guest, mentioning brands, and employing the services of an ‘influencer’.
But since all of these activities are carried out with the intention of directing potential customers to your website, it could be argued all of these activities are really just types of backlinking.
Time for your hearing practice to benefit
On a very general level, to use off-site SEO to improve your ranking means getting your potential customers to see your hearing practice in a better light by way of other websites. The higher quality websites that ‘vouch’ for you by sharing your content or mentioning your hearing practice, the better you will look and the higher you will rank.
Optimizing the search engine can be daunting, particularly if you are a business owner with many other things to think about. However, you’ll be well ahead of competition if you can develop a good knowledge of on-page and off-page optimization.
AuDSEO
Are you looking for help with your website’s off-page SEO strategy? We’ve been helping hearing websites rank well for years, and can do the same for yours. Contact us today to see how we can help.