Off-Site vs On-Site SEO – What is the Difference?
Both off-site vs on-site SEO is important and should be a part of any complete SEO strategy, as your website will underperform without ensuring work is done on both ends of the spectrum.
On-Site SEO
This is any SEO related work done on your website. This can include creating content that targets specific keywords (KWs) or topics, and optimizing your website code for fast speed and usability.
On-site SEO also involves optimizing your on-site elements such as:
SEO title – The page title you see on your browser tab and normally the title displayed on Google search. An extremely important ranking factor as it tells users and search engines what the page is about.
Meta Description – This is a description of what your page is about, again this information is normally displayed on Google search when the page shows up. This will help with users clicking only your page and improve click through rate (CTR).
Alt Tags – A description of your images. Optimizing this can help your images rank higher in Google search and if someone really likes your image your website can potentially obtain a backlink.
Internal Links – Adding links to your services, product, or general content through a blog page or through navigation bar is important because it helps users find your content, as well as provide a signal to Google your linked content is important and relevant.
Technical Fixes – You will also want to ensure your website is technically sound which includes ensuring your website speed is up to par. Google recommends that sites should not load longer than 5 seconds, that all parts of your website work without error, and all elements of your website are responsive, especially the mobile version.
Off-Site SEO
Off-site SEO is anything involving backlinks & directories for local SEO.
Backlinks empower your website to perform better in search engines. Essentially what a backlink does is tell Google and other search engines your website is an authority on the subject or it’s important in that region or subject.
A backlink is a link back to your website from another source. As seen in this Jelly article here where we link out to various different SEO tool websites.
For local businesses this also includes adding your website to local directories such as Google My Business (GMB) which is the most important listing on the internet.
A few other important directories/listings that are important are Bing Places, Yelp, and Yellowpages.
You will want to ensure all your listings have a consistent name, address, and phone number (NAP).
The reason it is important to add/update these listings as it provides further evidence that your business is real and it is located at the address you state it is at.
SEO Strategy In Conclusion
Doing all of the above as part of a comprehensive SEO strategy will ultimately help your business be more discoverable for your most important keywords, services, and products.
Which will ultimately help your website/business show up higher in the search engine results page (SERPs).
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