You may be familiar with digital marketing but do you know there’s a huge difference between on-page SEO and off-page SEO? Your search engine optimization strategy can be divided into two different categories: on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
Both are essential to the success of a marketing strategy, but they’re on completely different sides of the fence.
Each works differently to help make your website appear more authoritative in the eyes of Google and other search engines which in turn increases the ranking of a page in the search engine.
What Is On-Page SEO?
On-page SEO (also known as “on-site” SEO) is the act of optimizing different parts of your website that affect your search engine rankings.
On-page SEO is all of the stuff you do to tell Google what your post is about and what search terms it should come up for. There are also some things you can do on-page that can help you to rank higher for those terms by reducing your bounce rate, increasing your click-through rate, increasing your dwell time, etc.
The biggest factors include fast-loading pages or general website speed. The search engine aims to help its users to find answers as fast as they can. Optimizing for load speed ensures that your customers get a good experience–resulting in higher search rankings.
Another thing you need to pay attention to is your content. Your pages should contain useful information for your potential audience. If they use specific search words, your page should give them what they’re looking for.
Your content should give value to your end-users while making it easy to read. Google’s algorithm measures your pages’ usefulness and relevance.
What is Off-Page SEO?
Off-page SEO refers to the measures that can be taken outside of a website to improve its position in the rankings. Although many people associate off-page SEO with link building, the process goes far beyond that.
Off-page SEO is about link building and other signals you can give to search engines to convince them about the quality and usefulness of your website.
What this means is that off-site SEO should make shareable content. This improves your chances of earning those valuable links and improving your entire campaign. After all, your competitors’ domain authority can dictate the number of good links you need to surpass them.
To further understand the difference between the two, you have to understand, at a basic level, how search engine algorithms work. Let’s break it down.
There are two main things that search engines look at when evaluating your site compared to other sites on the web.
- What your site (or your page) is about.
- How authoritative and popular your site is.
What you rank for is largely determined by on-page factors, while how high you rank in the search results is largely determined by off-page factors.
Why You Need On-Page SEO & Off-Page SEO
In today’s competitive SEO market, amazing content unfortunately isn’t enough. Ranking well in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) isn’t just about finding the right keywords and writing an article. You need to consider the structure of your website and the technology used to create it and how that impacts both readers and search engine crawlers.
Once your website is live, it’s time to think about how to garner high-quality backlinks and get your readers to share your site with their networks. All of this contributes to the overall strength of your domain.
Understanding what goes into nailing both on-page and off-page SEO will level up your content while increasing its ranking potential.
Conclusion
It’s always great to use these two types together to ensure that your search engine rankings improve.
As a final important note, remember that the absolute best thing that you can do for SEO is to optimize your posts for humans. Generally, the more people-friendly your posts are, the more you will be rewarded by Google. Not only that, but pleasing people is what’s most important for your business.
Always write your blog posts for people, while keeping the search engines in mind using the above tips. If you need more help with your SEO campaign, reach out to us at LBDIGITAL. We’re a results-focused agency that specializes in SEO and other services that will help make your website flourish.
