Fundamental SEO Rules: On and off-page SEO
SEO. The promised land. Rank high on Google.
The heaps of traffic sounds great, but how does it even work for most of us? It sounds like complete wizardry.
I get it - it took me a good year to actually learn it properly.
How SEO works?
We simply break it down into two parts: on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
On-page means it's on your website, on the pages of your website: you're doing things to the pages of your website.
Off-page means you're not doing things to your website, but you're helping your SEO and helping yourself rank high.
Now let's just draw a pretty green line here. And then let's talk about these a little bit.
Off-page SEO
Google My Business
Let's start with off-page. Your Google My Business page is off your website. It's a separate thing that sits on the search engine results page of Google. It's something you access by logging in to your Google account and entering your Google My Business page. It's what appears in Google.
When you search for something on Google, e.g. “flower delivery Auckland”, you get a few ad results. After that, you get a box that shows like three results with the math and reviews. That little thing - there is your Google My Business. It's one of the best things you can do to get local traffic to your business.
That's an off-page piece of SEO. Doing that will improve your ranking online and you get more people coming to your store.
Backlinks
Next - backlinks. It’s arguably the most important thing for off-page SEO.
A backlink is a link from another website to your website. So if you have a website, then a backlink is when I write something on my website and link it to yours. What follows after? BOOM! You get a backlink.
The more high-quality backlinks you get, the better it is for your business. You generally want to improve this number consistently over time.
If you do it too quickly, Google freaks out. Yet, if you're consistently building 10, 20, 30 backlinks per month, that's completely fine.
You want to reach out to business directories. You want to reach out to other websites in your industry, speaking about similar things, and ask them to post your content or link to your pages.
Off-page SEO effect
This way you are slowly but surely building a number of backlinks and doing so you build your trust with Google: you're obviously relevant and trustworthy. If more people link to you, your content is good and it helps people solve their problems or answer their questions. If that’s the case, you'll be rewarded even more, since people will actually consume your content and engage with it.
That's essentially what off-page SEO is. You build a content strategy, you write content, you get backlinks to it, you make sure your Google My Business is optimized, and you post there as well.
On-page SEO
Headers
Next - on-page SEO. Let’s start with the header tags: H1, H2, H3, etc. If you've ever seen different fonts on a blog page or any other piece of content - those are most likely the headings. Generally, the bigger font tells Google “hey, this is the most important thing you should be focusing on,” or “this is the second most important thing,” “this is the third most important thing.” Simple as that.
This is a big part of what on-page SEO really is - optimizing the headers.
Content
The next part is the content itself. I have to have enough content on my website so I can actually solve someone's problem properly or help answer their question. We do that by making sure that the content includes the right keywords.
Once more - people proactively search for things, so your content and the way you answer that question need to mention what they're looking for, right? This means you need to include what they're talking about, make sure you're writing enough content, and have everything optimized.
Technical On-Page SEO
There are also a few technical factors that go into on-page SEO. Here are just a few examples:
Broken links
Broken links appear when you create a link, but it doesn't actually work anymore. That's not so great.
Speed
Next - getting cut up on speed. How quickly your website loads, core vitals - we won't really talk about them, because it's too complicated, but it basically represents how fast your website responds and how quickly people can engage with your website. Let's call this user experience - it’s becoming a huge thing and you’ll see that going forward as the June of 2021 updates roll out. If you don't offer a good user experience on your website (fast loading speed, different ways people can engage with things), you're going to get penalized by Google as well.
Conclusion
There, on-page SEO is all about optimizing the website itself: making it fast, relevant, letting people understand what's going on, and engage with it in a good way. And the off-page is all about building trust, right?
Relevancy and trust - that's way easier. Sorted.
Yes, there's a bit of wizardry going on, but once you understand it and break it down, you will surely understand it better.
I’ve got training on how to understand this better if you’d like to learn more. I get that it can look scary, but it's actually quite easy to roll out You could start by building a 90-day plan or learn the fundamental marketing rules quickly.
Ready to take these learnings and put them into action with your website?
Grab the SEO Checklist - our 8 step guide to optimise your SEO and start showing up on Google! 🎉