SEO Techniques To Increase Brand Awareness And Organic Traffic

Raising brand awareness while driving up organic traffic to a website requires effective SEO practices. However, it can be difficult to know where to start when it comes to off-page practices.

Most information focuses on on-page SEO, so here we take a closer look at off-page techniques that will help you with your strategies.

The majority of user searches have one of two purposes – either to find out information or to get that information then buy. Both kinds of users are needed to achieve success.

So, let’s take a look at what off-page SEO really is.

What Is Off-Page SEO?

SEO or search engine optimisation is vital to make brands stand out in a highly competitive marketplace and to help them reach the top spot in SERPs. It also satisfies the users’ demand for high-quality, fresh, useful and relevant information.

Webmasters and marketers use SEO as a language to communicate effectively with search engines. Effectively, it bridges the gap between robots and humans. There are two forms of SEO – off-page and on-page.

On-page techniques include optimised snippets and titles, URL structures that are search-friendly, user-friendly navigation, user sitemaps, breadcrumbs, text formatting, internal links, mobile-optimisation, accelerated pages, external links, image names, ALT tags and optimised images as well as fresh, high-quality content.

Meanwhile, off-page SEO is any optimisation activity that can be done outside the website. This includes influencer and social media marketing, guest blogging and mentions. Off-page SEO gives the search engines insight into how digital entities and people worldwide read the overall features of your website.

If you can deploy optimal off-page SEO strategies, you can prove that your website is relevant, authentic, trustworthy and popular industry-wide. There are many benefits of off-page SEO including:

• Increased rankings
• Increased PageRank
• Increased visits
• More visibility
• More mentions on social media

So, which off-page techniques work best?

Link Building

It’s clear that building and chasing high-quality links is vital. It’s a popular technique that professionals worldwide use frequently. Content and link building go hand in hand. In order to naturally attract links, extraordinary content is vital.

A link may be seen as an appreciation of a brand so they’re essential to building up trust and authority.

Natural links are one type of link, where customers, readers and users have a positive viewpoint of the brand and so link to the business as an endorsement.

Manually built links are another which have been gained via direct efforts i.e. asking customers deliberately for links and shares.

The third type is self-created links such as posting a website link within comments, or in forums, directories or press releases.

Natural links are best and they can be achieved by ensuring that content is truly worthy of being linked to.

Social Media

When Google ranks pages, social signals probably matter. It’s important to win over an audience so that Google will rank your site highly. This is why having a Twitter, Instagram and Facebook presence is so important. Likes are shares are essential for making businesses spread and grow, and sharing engaging and fresh content with users is a great way to win over new fans, subscribers and leads.

The trick to harnessing the power of social media is to be responsive and engage regularly with followers, monitor your reputation online, and befriend influencers and thought leaders in your field.

RSS Feed Subscription Boxes

It’s actually better to have fewer subscribers who regularly visit your website than just a lot of single-time visitors. For this reason, most reputable brands will provide RSS subscription boxes.

Rich Site Summary boxes make the page’s information available in XML format. Often, people will be attracted to the term “subscribe”, leaving their email so they can get the information they want without needing to actively search for it online.

Getting information via one of these contact forms enriches your subscriber and contact agenda and also gives you another recipient to send company news, blog posts and updates to.

Commenting On Blogs

Commenting on blogs is a helpful off-site SEO technique that can drive up organic traffic to your site and boost your ranking in the SERPs. It’s important to comment on blogs in a “white hat” manner.

Give insight into topics and use your comments to attract the reader’s attention to your site, but don’t go over the top. Only mention your brand within the context of useful and relevant tips.

Guest Posts

Just like commenting on blogs, guest posting is another popular opportunity to raise brand awareness. Many guest blogs can come across as blatant advertising and they can be irritating to readers.

It’s best to focus on giving fresh, relevant and actionable information and then only mention your website briefly. If you occasionally write guest posts you’ll build up your backlinks, drive up website organic traffic and also set yourself up as an authority in your field.

Building Up Trust

A key component of off-site SEO is building up trust. Transparency is vital if you’re going to increase trust in your brand, so make sure that the content you post is useful rather than just a catchy title with pointless content.

Getting reviews for your business is one of the best ways to build trust, so ask customers to leave their contributions and testimonials on your rating section.

What Can You Take From This?

It’s important to remember that, while on-page SEO techniques tend to get the most publicity, off-page SEO tactics are equally important and have a key role to play in getting your brand noticed. It’s also essential to avoid using black-hat techniques for off-page SEO.

Subscribers, visitors and search engines can easily become your enemies if you go down this road. Google penalties, being blocked and blacklisted will do your website no good at all, so stay with above-board, white-hat practices and you’ll go a long way towards boosting your ranking in the search engines and increasing engagement with your brand.