Off-page SEO refers to the techniques that go beyond a website. People associate off-page SEO with link building, but it is not only that. In this post, I will talk about the best free off-page SEO tools that you can use to run successful SEO campaigns.
A lot of people think backlinks are the only thing that matters in off-page SEO, but this is not true. There are other factors like social signals and domain authority that also play a major role in your search engine rankings.
The tools I am going to list below will help you succeed in both aspects of your off-page SEO campaigns: link building and other factors like social signals.
Best Off Page Seo Tools
Off-page SEO can be a chore for some. Link building isn’t easy in the modern age of SEO and with so many signals, techniques and prospects out there, it can be hard to know where to start.
Luckily, there is a whole arsenal of tools at our disposal – both paid and free – that you can use to make your life easier in all these areas. Not only can these tools speed up some of the more long-winded processes that come with the territory, but they can also increase the scale of your strategies and improve success rates.
In this article, we’ve got an up-to-date list of the best tools available in 2020 for off-page SEO. Here’s a quick preview of which tools we’ll be looking at today:
Google Search
Ahrefs
Majestic
Moz’s Link Explorer
Linkclump
Check My Links
Web Archive
Talkwalker Alerts
SEOquake
Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider
BuzzStream
Streak for Gmail
SEOTools for Excel
SEMRush
Kerboo
Contentbird
The more advanced tools on that list are paid but there are plenty of free tools in there, too, for specific off-page SEO and productivity tasks. So let’s get started.
Google Search
Price: Free
Google search for SEO blogs
I know it seems really obvious to include Google here, but so often we see curated SEO tool lists that omit it, so for the sake of being pretentiously obvious, it makes an appearance.
Google indexes the entire web. Translation: Google has a list of every place you could potentially ever want to get your site linked!
When you’re looking for off-page SEO opportunities (eg: the best SEO blogs to get juicy backlinks from), it makes sense to get this list directly from the source by searching for “seo blogs,” “seo news” and other related queries into Google Search.
Backlink explorers: Ahrefs, Majestic & Moz’s Link Explorer
Price: Ahref prices start from $99/month (you’ll be charged in USD)
AHrefs website
Backlinks make the web go round in terms of traffic, for both referrals and search visibility. Therefore, analysing and keeping track of this data is key on both your own and your competitors’ websites. All three of these tools work hard to crawl the web and keep an extensive index of backlink data.
You can also use these tools to unearth new link opportunities relevant to your industry. Some also offer additional analysis features, such as Majestic’s Clique Hunter tool, which can make this process much faster.
Linkclump
Price: Free
Linkclump is a Chrome extension that can highlight multiple links at once on a page and then serve an action for those links, whether it be copying them to paste into a spreadsheet or opening them in multiple tabs.
This may not sound like a lot, but if you’ve ever had to copy or click a huge list of links one by one, you’ll know it’s one of the most tedious things on earth. This will not only save you time and effort when doing your job, but a tiny fraction of your sanity too.
Check my links
Price: Free
Check my Links is my go-to tool when carrying out broken link checking on external sites.
Found a resource list you’d quite like to get your content cited on? A broken link check on said page which identifies some issues means you A) have a helpful reason to contact the webmaster to begin with, and B) have given the webmaster a reason to edit the site, thus increasing your chances of gaining a backlink.
You can then also use Linkclump to copy and paste all the broken links you find into your outreach email, too.
Web Archive
Price: Free
Web Archive is exactly what it says on the tin – a historic index of pages and sites across the web.
Web Archive is exactly what it says on the tin – a historic index of pages and sites across the web.
As for using this for off-page SEO, it can be incredibly useful when you find broken links with Check My Links. When you find a link to a 404 page, the chances are that there was once good content on it and other sites will be linking to it too.
You can use Web Archive to find out what this content was, recreate (and improve) it, and then outreach to other sites requesting they update the broken link back to the updated resource.
Talkwalker Alerts
Price: Free
Talkwalker alerts
Talkwalker Alerts is an alternative to Google Alerts that simply works better.
Don’t ask me why, but for some reason around 2013, Google Alerts broke, and although it’s been “fixed” since then, it hasn’t been updated to meet the needs of modern SEO. Talkwalker’s offering delivers either immediate, daily or weekly alerts when it finds whichever search term you are following on the web.
These alerts are useful for no end of things; tracking brand mentions, tracking competitor mentions, unearthing new off-page opportunities via footprints and much MUCH more.
SEOquake
Price: Free
SEOquake showing SEO volumes and analysis
There are numerous plugins you can get for your browser that give you separate metrics on the web page you are browsing, however SEOquake has most of what you need under one roof, including page rank, domain age, Cache date, social shares and more.
SEOquake also works in SERPs, allowing you to see metrics of every website from a single page and has a handy option that highlights nofollow links with a strikethrough.
Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider
Price: Free version available, paid version £149 per year
Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider
Screaming Frog is mainly praised for being an excellent, on-site SEO tool, however, once you understand the ins and outs of the software you’re sure to find uses for off-page SEO too.
A personal favourite use of mine is for brand mention link reclamation by using Screaming Frog to crawl the complete list of pages I have found and using a custom filter to see if there is a hyperlink back to said brand’s website or not in the HTML. This can save hours (or even days!) over manually checking each mention.
BuzzStream
Price: Prices start from $24 per month
Buzzstream
For outreach management, there are very few rivals to the online software platform Buzzstream. Divided into two key areas, Buzzstream is a tool for managing A) link building and B) PR and social media.
What they say: “Media fragmentation has resulted in millions of micro-influencers having conversations about products and services across the social web. Building and effectively managing relationships with these influencers is the key to getting found by customers.”
Due to the evolution of search engines and the introduction of social media, people have fundamentally changed the way they shop and learn about products. What does BuzzStream do? The aim is to bring order to the chaos of developing authentic relationships with word-of-mouth influencers across the social web.
Whether you are new to link building or an experienced ‘outreach-er’, you’ll understand the power of management and organisation in this department. Staying on top of things can become overwhelming and this quirky platform will keep you on top of opportunity.
Streak for Gmail
Price: Free version available, paid versions start from $49/month per user
Streak for Gmail
Streak for Gmail is exactly what it says on the tin – customer relationship management for your inbox.
Not only does it have a pretty interface that is very intuitive to use, but it’s fantastic for managing your outreach process from “Hello, how are you?” to “Thanks for the link!”
This means no prospect currently in the outreach pipeline gets lost or forgotten. You can also add useful notes to emails for both current and future reference.
If you can’t afford to splash out a few bucks on BuzzStream, consider this as the alternative.
SEOTools for Excel
Price: Free
SEO tools for Excel
The first line on Niels Bosma’s page for SEOTools for Excel is “Real SEOs work in Excel.” We can’t argue with that statement, and we also can’t argue with just how useful his brainchild is either.
SEOTools for Excel can import a whole wealth of data into your spreadsheets, for both on-site and off-page SEO purposes. Not only can you access page rank and social shares, but it makes good use of Majestic’s API too.
One of my favourite uses for this tool is sorting prospect lists by their authority and signals, thus meaning I can prioritise them in terms of importance and benefit.
SEMrush
Price: Free tools available, prices for full paid version start from $99.95 per month
SEMrush
SEMRush has a lot of data, which can be useful for everything from penalty analysis to backlink audits. A great all-rounder.
Kerboo
Price: Starting from £249 per month
Kerboo
Kerboo is a tool developed by hands-on SEOs for hands-on SEOs, which gives it a very competitive edge for a wealth of activities, from discovering and disavowing links to ongoing monitoring and reporting.
The feature particularly of interest for off-page SEO is the “Peek” function. By simply adding relevant keywords relating to a site’s industry or subject matter, Kerboo will go off and do the prospecting for you. Not only will it discover potential sites for outreach, but it can sort these by SEO value and authority, as well as harvest contact and social channel information.
Kerboo’s most impressive aspect we felt was their email search. Going a few steps beyond the LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Kerboo brings back all that information and then some!
A great example of how you could use this feature is that it can track down almost everywhere online a person is writing and contributing content using their email address, thus opening up a wealth of further link building opportunities.
Contentbird
Price: Starting from €100/mo per user
Contentbird
Contentbird is a tool that serves as an all-round hub of information and data tracking for SEOs, however I feel it favours link building primarily.
Almost every step of the link building process is incorporated into Contentbird from start to finish. First, it has a link prospecting tool that goes off and does the bulk of the hard work for you. From there you can then send outreach from within the tool itself and track this outreach from pending to success. The outreach feature also allows you to save templates and pull in information about the person/site you are contacting automatically, so every email is easily customised for the recipient.
Second, Contentbird doesn’t stop working once a link has been built; your entire backlink profile is monitored and checked regularly, meaning no removed or lost link will go under your radar.
Contentbird also offers an alert service to track your most important business phrases around the web, be it your own brand, competitor mentions or those discussing subjects relevant to your industry.
However, by far my favourite feature is how easily you can create and tag almost anything, be it contacts or stages in the outreach process. Not all agencies and marketers follow the same process for outreach, so being able to tweak this to your own style of working is a massive bonus.
Bonus tool – Apollo Insights
Of course, we can’t write an article like this without mentioning our own prescriptive marketing platform, Apollo Insights. Much more than just a link-building too, Apollo collates every piece of data available about your website from lots of the tools mentioned above, analyses it and identifies any threats and opportunities in your search marketing campaigns. It’s what sets us apart from other SEO agencies and why we’re able to give our customers the edge in their industries.
Check out how Apollo can help prevent link penalties
Apollo Insights dashboard on screens
More SEO articles
If you’d like advice from our SEO experts, call us today on 02392 830281. In the meantime, you might find these other SEO-related articles useful:
Google’s mobile-first indexing: what you need to know in 2020
SEO tactics for discontinued products
3 ways to bridge the gap between SEO and PPC
Lee Wilson profile picture
Lee Wilson
Lee has been working in the online arena, leading digital departments since the early 2000s, and oversees all our delivery services at Vertical Leap, having joined back in 2010. Lee joined our company Operations Team in May 2019. Before working at Vertical Leap, Lee completed a degree in Business Management & Communications at Winchester University, headed up the online development and direct marketing department for an international financial services company for ~7 years, and set up/run a limited company providing website design, development and digital marketing solutions. Lee had his first solely authored industry book (Tactical SEO) published in 2016, with 2 further industry books being published in 2019, and can be seen regularly expert contributing to industry websites including State of Digital, Search Engine Journal, The Drum, plus many others. Lee has a passion for management in the digital industry and loves to see the progression of others through personal learning, training and development. Outside the office he looks to help others while challenging himself, having skydived, bungie jumped and abseiled (despite a fear of heights) with many more fundraising and voluntary events completed and on the horizon. As a husband and dad, Lee loves to spend time with his family and friends. His hobbies include exercising, trying new experiences, eating out, playing countless team sports, as well as watching films (Gangster movies in particular – “forget about it”).
Benefits of off page seo
In Digital Marketing, Search Engines like Google, Bing, etc, are using complex algorithms to determine the ranking of your website on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). One way to increase traffic is by optimizing your website which is majorly based on the content present on the page and off the page. This article will focus on Off-Page SEO and its processes.
These are the topics that will be covered in this article:
What is SEO?
Different SEO Techniques
Off-page SEO
Importance on Off-Page SEO
Link and Non-link related Off-page factors
Backlinks
On-page vs Off-page SEO
Benefits of Off-Page SEO
Let’s begin!
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization or simply SEO is the process of increasing the traffic onto your website for free. To put it across in a better way, I’d say, it is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.
SEO-What is Off-page SEO- Edureka
SEO is increasing the chances for companies to grow and flourish. This is because organic traffic is more reliable and is got without investing much. So, if you want to learn about how SEO works, check out Edureka’s latest video on SEO. No wonder On-Page SEO is very important but, if you don’t focus on Off-Page SEO, you wouldn’t be able to meet your desired target.
SEO Tutorial For Beginners | Learn SEO Step by Step | Digital Marketing Training | Edureka
This video will help you learn Search Engine Optimization (SEO) from scratch with examples. You will get to know about powerful SEO tips and how they are important for your business ventures.
Now that you’ve understood what is SEO, let’s move ahead and take a look at the different types of SEO available in the market.
Different SEO Techniques
Often people get confused between the types and the techniques. Types include Black hat SEO, White hat SEO, and Gray hat SEO. Now, the techniques include
On-Page SEO
Off-Page SEO
Technical SEO
Let’s understand what they are.
On-Page SEO
Well, On-Page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages to rank higher on the SERPs and get more relevant traffic from the search engines. As the name suggests, it optimizes the content that is present on the page.
On-Page SEO-What is Off-Page SEO-Edureka
Now, what do you think is the content present on a page? It is nothing but the Title Tags, Meta Tags, Keyword Density, URL and so on. These are nothing but the strategies that you follow to gain more traffic by having content on the page. You might think what’s so special about working on the content present on the page? Well, there is.
As long as you focus on giving more attention to the content and the way it is presented to the viewer, you’re in safe hands.
Moving on, let’s learn about what is Off-Page SEO.
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Off-Page SEO
Off-Page SEO deals with the actions that are performed outside your website to improve your ranking on the SERPs. A recent study also states that Off-Page SEO makes up to 75% of a good Digital Strategy.
Off-Page SEO-What is Off-Page SEO-Edureka
It has everything to do with your social presence, link building and many more that don’t really have to be present on the page. Putting it layman terms, I’d say, Off-Page SEO simply tells Google or Search Engines about what the audience think about your website.
Also, I often come across people who say Off-Page optimization is just link building. But, there’s definitely more wings to it. It has strategetic control over the ways of making you famous on the internet.
Very widely used Off-Page’s elements are:
Backlinks
Follow and Non-follow
Anchor text
Link Juice
Relevancy
Now that you know what is Off-Page SEO, let’s see why is it so important.
Importance of Off-Page SEO
Search engine algorithms, ranking factors, and the tactics are constantly changing. Parallelly, the general concord is that the trustworthiness, relevance, and authority that an effective Off-Page SEO can afford still plays a drastic role in that page’s ability to rank.
Links are very important to make your website rank on the SERPs. So, having links (inbound, outbound links) in your website could just increase your chance of ranking on the first page on Google.
To make sure that your content ranks, there should be proper visibility of your website.
Often, websites don’t rank because of Off-Page SEO. This is due to the absence of link building, social media, videos, blogging, etc.
Moving on, let’s understand the different Off-Page factors that influence the page ranking.
Link and Non-link related Off-page factors
Backlinks are the heart of Off-Page SEO. Search Engines like Google, Bing and many more make use of backlinks as certain indications for good quality content. Backlinks are also the most critical part of Off-Page SEO.
For this purpose, you can make use of SEO tools.
Ahrefs is one such tool that has a backlink checker that helps you in understanding how to create backlinks and handle them.
Link-related Off-Page SEO
When I say the link, I’m talking about the links that are present on the webpage, connecting it to the other website. I’ll be mainly talking about three types of links.
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Natural Links
Manually Built Links
Self-created Links
Major factors which influence these links are:
The linking site’s popularity
The freshness of the link
Proper usage of anchor tags/texts
Authority of linking domain and website
Link Building
One of the most effective and most popular ways of dealing with Off-Page SEO is Link Building. Here, we have the concept of “votes” which helps in gathering the ranking position of your competitors and your company.
There are many ways through which you can include links. A few notable ones are:
Blogs: You can always have articles pointing to your website. Getting traffic from other mediums like guest blogging and so on. It also helps you get recognized in the field of Digital Marketing and also have exposure to the current market trends.
Comment link: One way to achieve more customer engagement is by solving their problems and guiding them right. So, you always have the chance of linking your content in the comment section.
Article Distribution: This is another way of getting more traffic to your website. Content Marketing deals with creating videos and writing blogs. These business articles are not just composed of fancy words but also contain the thirst for getting more traffic and leads. You should be able to distribute your content right.
Next, we’ll talk about the Anchor Text that is used for creating links off the page.
Anchor Text
This is a visible and clickable text in the hyperlink. These links are the ones you can find in any article when they are linking to another web page. It is often the blue and underlined text.
Example:
Anchor Text-What is Off-Page SEO-Edureka
These Anchor texts are used by Search Engines to show how the reflection of how the audience view your website. The “anchor” was used in the previous HTML specifications. Now it’s used as the “a” element.
Non-Link related Off-Page SEO
These factors have a lot more influence on your traffic compared to the ones you’ve got without SEO or Social Media Marketing. These are a few notable ones among the Non-link related Off-Page SEO.
Social media marketing
Guest blogging
Linked and unlinked brand mentions
Influencer marketing
Note: The net result of each of the activities on your website is to somehow create a reference to your site from elsewhere on the web, reference a link, a mention of your brand or website.
Now, focusing on the backlinks part, let’s see what it is.
Backlinks
Backlinks also called inbound links or incoming links. These are created when one website links to another. The link to an external website is called a backlink.
Google and other major search engines consider backlinks as votes for a specific webpage. It means that the page with a higher number of votes will rank higher on the SERPs.
Example: Imagine I like a post from X on Instagram. I share the corresponding post on my profile and my followers will click on the post I shared. This is actually going to create a backlink to the post from X. It means, here, I’ll not only be including the post from X, but I’ll also be getting more views and clicks because I shared one of the top posts from X. It’s a Win-Win situation.
Why need a Backlink?
Backlinks are important to make sure the audience know about your business. Also. lookout for people to find other sources of information on the same or related topics.
How to get a Backlink?
Write a lot of guest posts
Build a good public rapport
It helps to reduce broken links
Note: To check how many backlinks your website has, paste your domain into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer or it’s free backlink checker.
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On-Page vs Off-Page SEO
Comparing the two most widely used SEO techniques, I’ve noted down the major differences between them.
On-Page SEO Off-Page SEO
Involves optimizing content, meta tags, description, title and every other element on the website. Involves activities that drive significant traffic, awareness about your website and linking.
On-Page SEO deals with Content marketing, keyword optimization, page speed and so on. Off-Page SEO deals with linking, Social media, backlink and guest blogging.
Now, in the last part of this article, we’ll have a look at the benefits of having to use Off-Page SEO.
Benefits of Off-Page SEO
Increases Ranking:
It helps your website rank higher on the SERPs hence resulting in earning good traffic.
Wonderful exposure:
Higher the ranking, more will be the traffic because of the numbers of links, social media mentions and so on.
Increase in PageRank:
Getting your website to rank on the first page on Google is quite challenging but, by making use of Off-Page SEO, you will be able to learn about the ranking factors. This page rank number is between 0-10 that is important according to Google and is placed on the first search result page.
With this, we come to the end of this article on “What is Off-Page SEO?”. I hope you are clear about the topics that are discussed and added value to the knowledge of Digital Marketing.
If you wish to enroll for a complete Digital Marketing course, Edureka has a specially curated Digital Marketing Post-Graduate Program which will help you gain expertise in various digital media aspects like Keyword Planning, SEO, Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Email Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, and Google Analytics.
Conclusion
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