You’ve perfected your website. The design is attractive. The navigation is intuitive. Your writing is informative, engaging and edited to perfection. You’ve even followed best practices to optimize each page for relevant keywords.
Congratulations!
Is it time to relax? Nope!
No matter how compelling and engaging your site is, it needs traffic. Build it and they will come? Sadly, driving traffic to your business website is not that simple.
In addition to your on-page SEO efforts, off-page marketing tactics are essential.
Here are our top 10 off-page SEO tactics, a list of the best off-site marketing activities that will drive traffic to your website.
- Social Media. Maintain social media accounts to increase inbound links to your site. For most businesses, the 4 most important platforms are Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. Increase your customer base by adding contacts, and promote your site by sharing content. An active social media presence, which factors into search rankings, is also valuable for online reputation management.
- Guest Blogging. Pitch timely, well-developed content to high-quality blogs. Don’t overload your guest posts with backlinks and anchor text. Caution: Your online reputation will suffer if your guest post reads like an advertisement. Maximize your return and establish yourself as a thought leader by providing original information that is useful to the blog’s audience, not by selling your service or product.
- Photo, Video and Slide-Presentation Sharing. Get extra mileage out of slide presentations, photos and video content from your website by creating accounts in multimedia-sharing websites such as Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, and Vimeo. Pictures of new merchandise and video reviews add appeal to your service or product. Comment fields provide a forum for connecting with potential customers.
- Press Releases. Write and submit press releases to announce a new product or partnership. As with guest blogging, keep links to a minimum. If your press release is doing its job, it will generate organic links from journalists and bloggers.
- Reviews. Consumer review sites such as Yelp and Trustpilot are often the first place a prospective customer looks when considering your company, so positive reviews are of vital importance. While you should never offer rewards for good reviews, you can link to review sites.
- Social Bookmarking. Submit blog posts and articles to quality social bookmarking sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, and Delicious. Although social bookmarking sites do not always link directly to your site, they are a proven way to increase brand awareness. For this reason, check the accuracy of tags applied to your content.
- Directories. Submit your website to high-quality directories (such as Google My Business and Yellow Pages) to increase traffic directly and indirectly. Some directories will publish your listing promptly. Others can take months. Don’t expect changes overnight, but don’t neglect this activity either. Monitor directory listings for accuracy and upload captivating photos. Listings with reputable directories boost your search rankings.
- Co-Marketing Partnerships. Develop mutually beneficial relationships with companies offering complementary services or products. You can boost your partners’ visibility. They can boost yours. That’s a publicity win-win.
- Blog and Forum Marketing. Participate in “do-follow” blogs and forums in your product area that encourage linking in the signature line. Answer questions, comment on articles and follow threads about your business to showcase your expertise.
- Build Relationships in Your Industry. Write about and link to articles written by established thought leaders in your field. Comment on their posts. Engage with them on social media.
