SEO stands for ‘search engine optimization’. When we are talking about ‘Offsite’ SEO, we are referring to SEO that does not involve making direct changes to the website to improve optimization. The goal is to focus on link building, social media optimization as well as guest posting. Utilizing offsite SEO can make your website seem more credible or trustworthy to visitors, which is definitely something you should want, especially if you want your customers to come back.
Offsite SEO is essentially trying to build your website/brand a good reputation with consumers. Think of it in terms of a yelp review. If you see a horrible review about how not friendly a website is or the information is inaccurate, you most likely will not want to use it. To combat this is offsite SEO. Backlinks, reviews and recommendations can make your website seem more trustworthy to the search engines, which will be more willing to push your website out to others. More simply, offsite SEO can make or break your websites ranking, it is important to take this seriously when building your site.
There are many ways to build your websites ranking up. You can post links to your website on places such as reddit, good reads, quora, etc. to try and build backlinks. In general getting good reviews or recommendations to your website can translate into trustworthiness. The most popular example of offsite SEO would be influencer marketing. In the world of TikTok and Instagram, there are constantly brand deals being made where they have popular internet personalities use and recommend their products to their watchers. This is a fast and effective way to have people purchase things or draw traction to your website.
A very popular example I could describe from this is how the brand Tarte took a bunch of social media influencers on a huge luxury beach vacation, where hardly any of their cosmetics were used by the influencers. The thing was, EVERYONE was talking about Tarte and the influencer trip they hosted. That is a perfect example of offsite marketing / social media marketing.
Where does offsite and onsite SEO differentiate? Onsite SEO is more focused on direct changes on the actual website. This could be page speed, user engagement, external linking, keywords, site content, etc. Both of these ideals are important in drawing traffic and keeping the traffic at your website and to have people continuously returning. If you do not have a good web page with good keywords and user engagement, no one will want to use it or come back. Your ranking will tank. If you do not build backlinks and focus on more offsite tactics, then you will not seem as reputable as the next website, and search engines will not trust your brand to push it out to consumers. This is also where recommendations can come into play and help a lot with creating a reputable page and drawing people to your site. As you can see, both of these are important, yet very different.
