A Complete Off-Page SEO Guide for Your Retail Business

Running a retail business in 2024 is not for the faint of heart.

It’s a fiercely competitive industry with a business fail rate of 69.6 over five years plus multiple challenges including constantly changing consumer expectations, behaviour, economic volatility, and technology disruption

The competition is even worse online where every content has one goal: get into Google’s first page, preferably among the top three results.

Is it possible for a retail business to achieve this?

Yes

How?

The short answer is consistent SEO (search engine optimization) execution.

To succeed as a retail brand with SEO, you need the following:

1. On-page SEO: This is about creating your website and the content itself.
2. Off-page SEO: Involves building up your site’s reputation and authority
3. Technical SEO: This is all about the engine of your website, such as meta descriptions, title tags, and your site loading speed.

In this article, we’re focusing on the off-page part of SEO and how you should use it to get your brand to rank higher with search engine algorithms and achieve maximum success for your retail business.

Why your retail business needs an off-page SEO guide

In a digital age, where over 7.5 million blog posts get uploaded to the internet daily, standing out and staying at the top of your customer’s mind on the internet is extremely difficult.

To succeed at it, SEO is critical.

You must combine all parts of on-page, off-page, and technical SEO. Most retail brands focus on optimizing their website to improve their website content, structure, loading speed, and mobile optimization.

They neglect off-page SEO activities which greatly influence how search engines like Google perceive the authority, relevance, and trustworthiness of their websites.

For retail brands that must invest in good branding to optimize sales and market reach, and create personalized shopping for all customers, off-page SEO offers:

• Increased visibility at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs)
• Positive reviews, mentions, and backlinks to establish your brand as a trusted authority.
• Increase reach via social media engagement, influence collaborations, and community participation.
• Increased organic traffic and conversions to boost your retail business’s profits.

Lots of retail businesses struggle with off-page SEO because of limited resources, intense competition, and changing search engine algorithms.

To overcome these challenges and implement an off-page SEO strategy that works, it’s important to partner with top link building service providers to elevate your retail business’s online reputation and establish your authority as a brand leader.

How to create an off-page SEO for your retail business

In simple language, off-page SEO is the science of connecting your website to reputable websites.

You must focus on three important factors before linking with any site:

• Relevancy: It’s often best to connect to websites that are within your niche
• Authority: The websites you’re connecting with should already be ranked high by search engines.
• Reputation: Take a look at the reviews and traffic numbers of the websites you’re connecting to before you do.

Executing your Off-page SEO strategy requires:

• Analyse your current backlinks and begin link-building
• Begin content marketing for off-page SEO
• Use local SEO
• Don’t forget online ratings and reviews

Let’s talk about each off-page SEO tactic, how to implement them, and how effective they are for retail business.

Analyse your current backlink profile and begin link-building

The basis of your off-page SEO strategy should be an analysis of your current backlink profile. Your backlinks are the most important part of your off-page SEO strategy because they tell search engine algorithms that other websites are connecting with you and like your content. The more backlinks your website has, the more organic traffic it gets from Google.

When analysing your backlinks, it’s important to look out for:

• The page authority score
• The number of different IP addresses linking to the domain
• The number of different IP addresses linking to the page
• The number of different domains (URLs) linking to the page
• The total number of backlinks pointing to the domain
• The total number of backlinks (URL) pointing to the page

To begin link building, you must understand the kind of links that exist. Typically, there are three backlink types:

• Naturally built links: This happens when websites link to your content without you making any effort.
• Manually built links: These links are built through physical outreach to businesses, influencers, bloggers, and customers from their platforms. This can also be done by finding broken links and suggesting your content as a replacement.
• Self-created links: These links come from self-submission on forums, press releases, or directories. However, search engine algorithms can consider it a bad SEO practice if not done well. It’s often best to focus on naturally and manually built links.

To create new backlinks for your retail businesses, you’ll need to:

• Repair broken links: This involves finding broken links, emailing the site owners, and suggesting your content as the replacement.
• Help a journalist request: Oftentimes, journalists have articles that require opinions from experts. Providing content will most times lead to them linking to your website.
• Unlinked brand mentions: If you see your retail business name on a site not linked to your brand name, you can reach out to the website owners to change it. This works well for news articles sites especially when your retail business is mentioned positively.

Begin content marketing for off-page SEO

Creating SEO content on your blog is as important as distributing it to other channels. The channels you can distribute your content through include:

• PR campaigns involving press releases and free media coverage
• Creating shareable content on social media that people can directly link to your website.
• Research shows that businesses make $5.20 for every $1 spent on influencer marketing. With influencers pushing your products or services, you can drive traffic and conversions to your website from new audiences. It’s important to approach influencers for collaborations with a clear idea of what you want and negotiate terms from scratch.
• Getting your brand with guest posts in front of different audiences within the same niche is a great way to build backlinks. Make sure to do it right with helpful content on publications in the same industry with a good reputation.
• With the rise of video marketing, podcasts have taken over. You can create short snippets of your recorded podcasts that can be shared on social platforms with a link back to your website to watch the full podcast episode.
• Re-publishing your blog content on platforms like Medium, LinkedIn, Outbrain, and Taboola, can drive traffic to your website.
• One of the easiest ways to build trust, relevance, and authority is to answer questions on forums like Reddit and Quora. When you consistently provide valuable content and avoid spammy behaviour and self-promotion, you’ll be seen as an authority.
• You can create infographics, videos, guides, tutorials, and case studies on platforms like YouTube, Slideshare, and Scribd with the appropriate tags, titles, documents, tags, and references to your website. Also, other website owners can choose to use your creations as part of their content and link to your website.

Use local SEO

For retail businesses especially with physical walk-in stores, creating local SEO is very important. You can do this in three ways:

• Google My Business: You should update your business category, contact information, location, business place pictures, and business hours, plus try responding to all reviews as quickly as you can.
• NAP SEO: You’d add your retail business’s correct name, address, and phone number (NAP) in listings and local citations including business public diaries, social media profiles, and review sites. Avoid inconsistency in how you appear across multiple listings so that you don’t confuse search engine algorithms.
• Hosting local events and promotions engages your audiences, especially with advertisements, free media coverage, and social media mentions.

Online reviews and ratings

A key part of off-page SEO is what customers think about you. According to this report, 95% of customers read online reviews before buying a product. It’s important to:

• Request nicely for all your customers to leave reviews and rate your business.
• Make sure to respond to all reviews (especially the negative ones).
• Never exchange money or your product/service for customer reviews.

How to monitor and measure off-page SEO efforts

Measuring and monitoring your off-page SEO efforts for your retail business comes down to your goals. To achieve success, you need to do the following:

• While increased website traffic is good, you should focus your off-SEO efforts on your audience, not search engine algorithms.
• Track analytics on social media platforms where you post shareable content. For guest blogs, you should get access to data for posted content after a few weeks.
• Sites like Google Analytics provide data on which specific links people visited your website which can include adverts, influencers, social media links, or a search query. When you understand how people are coming to your website, it will influence how you concentrate your off-page SEO efforts.
• Increased sales, inquiries, and content downloads on your website are an easy way of determining if your off-page SEO efforts are working.
• Increased domain ranking and page authority help you evaluate your off-page SEO efforts. However, you might take a look at your competitors’ SEO efforts too to compare notes.
• If you don’t see an increase in the number of links to your website, you should review your off-page SEO activities. For different reasons including competitors outworking you with ads, the quantity of links might have stayed the same or regressed.
• It’s also important to monitor online sentiments to blow up positive reviews and mentions while keeping a close eye to quickly diffuse negative sentiments that could completely derail your off-page SEO strategy.

While evaluating and monitoring your off-page SEO strategies, it’s important to keep an eye on your highest-performing channels, constantly optimize your content and outreach strategies, adjust your audience targeting and messaging, and always experiment with new trends and ideas.

Off-page SEO and Your Retail Business

In today’s hyper-competitive retail landscape, there’s a need for strategic SEO efforts to stay at the top. Throughout this off-page SEO guide, you’ll find strategies to take your retail business on a path to continuous growth.

Remember, off-page SEO is more than just ranking higher on search engine algorithms; it is about creating real-life connections with your audience, establishing trust, and driving visible profits for your retail business.