What is off-page SEO?
Signals from outside your site, above all links from other websites and mentions of your brand. It is how Google judges whether the wider web vouches for you.
Off-page SEO is everything that happens on other people’s websites and still affects how you rank. Your own site can say anything it likes about itself. Off-page signals are the rest of the web deciding whether to agree.
The biggest of them is links. A backlink from a relevant, well-read site is one of the clearest signals Google has that a page is worth ranking. After that come mentions of your business by name, reviews, local listings and the sort of coverage a real business picks up simply by being good at what it does.
The trap is treating it as something to manufacture. Links bought in bulk from sites nobody visits pass nothing, and a pattern of them can do real harm. What works is slower and harder to fake: being worth linking to, and then making sure the people who would link to you know you exist. We cover the practical side in our guide to link building.
Search that compounds, run by people who show their work.
Strategy, technical, content, links and local, planned together and reported against the numbers your business cares about.