Offsite SEO and Brand Promotion

As a small business owner, you’re hoping for great rankings and strong lead generation performance with your SEO-optimized content.

There’s an issue though. Typcially, owners aren’t prioritizing promotion of their business and this makes it tough to build ranking power within search engine algorithms.  Without the ranking power of backlinks, citatations, mentions, shares, and visible promotion of your business, Google/Bing/Duckduckgo/Yahoo will not rank your site high, even if your content is spectacular.

Google’s algorithm in particular leans heavily on ranking power, because their choice of content is narrow which means the top 20 results are basically all the same. The winner is the site with the most good quality backlinks (ranking power).

Great Performance Takes More than Excellent Optimized Content

We must reach out to a targeted audience of customers and influential people, so they can hop on board your special content journey.  SEO needs offsite promotion. 

This is where you Market your Marketing.

Is there a cost? Yes, and a good portion of your digital marketing budget should be invested in this offsite project. You’ll be delighted to know that this spend is done to create direct leads and sales via ads, boosted social posts, and paid promotions.  In fact, those clickthroughs are a key part of the learning solution. Without the analytics, we’re operating in the dark.

SEO strategy needs assets, sustenance, guidance, and access to real, valued prospects.  A prospect who really likes your travel package, real estate listing or software product is the likeliest to create a blog post or social post and talk about your company.

Below, I discuss all the components and assets needed so you’ll understand the effort required. It is daunting. It’s the toughest digital marketing task, a task almost no one wants to undertake.  A project-based approach gives us clear purpose and feedback.  Because this is more than basic SEO. This is advanced SEO.  You’re reaching your ideal target audience and it’s a great way to test out your value proposition, campaign ideas, and offers.

Offsite Strategy Has Several Purposes

If prospects like your UVP/offer they might stay on your site longer, and not bounce, which tells Google your site is relevant to their search. It’s all about signals.  SEO is about amplifying ranking signals for an unfair advantage over your competitors. Rankings mean competition.

When your company does a great job of advertising and promotion on the web and social sites, it gives SEO a big boost.  Social pages count as a backlink.  Of course, if your content is low quality, not impactful, engaging, and persuasive, then your ad and promotion budget might get wasted.  So, it’s essential create great relevant content, otherwise they won’t be motivated to promote your brand or content page.

So there are two issues: (1) that your content and offer needs to be significant to them, and (2) they need to be moved emotionally to give you a nice mention or a backlink.  There is some psychology involved where we try to motivate them to promote your business on their blog, or better yet, link directly from their product pages. If your company or product adds value to their brand/UVP, then they might do it.

Your offsite promotion efforts need some nice packaging to look like a special gift. In fact, you may need to give a gift like a freebie of some kind, trial offer, contest, or even persuade them to do some comarketing.  So many possibilities. If yours is a travel agency, gifts might be a big trip discount, a contest, free branded merchandise, free tour or surfing lesson, etc.  And for travel influencers on social media, a payment might be needed. Keep in mind that Google is punishing “reputation abuse” and they don’t particularly like rewarding Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, Twitter because that’s their competitors.

It’s important to know that great content isn’t enough.  Somehow, everyone wants something, whatever that might be.

Backlinks Produce Most of Your Ranking Power

For SEO, backlinks are King.  Google regards backlinks to your site very highly.  And without links from authoritative websites (e.g., top travel websites), yours is unlikely to rank well on valuable keyword phrases, and your overall traffic will suffer as well.  Backlinks provide the ranking power (PageRank) to grow your most important keyword rankings, but also all related keyword phrases.

It’s almost like electricity feeding into all your pages, especially your most successful pages/posts.

Google, in its attempt to discourage search engine optimization came up with a plan to discredit ranking power with an idea that PageRank was dead.  It was just to confuse everyone. But ranking power, by whatever name you want to call it still exists. It arrives via backlinks from top industry sites that shape the rankings you might achieve on all of the keywords you’re hoping for. Some big corporate sites get a lot of power due to million-dollar ad campaigns.  They are so strong that even their crappy content shows up in the top ten.  I know, it’s not fair.

Google says recently that their algo updates are trying harder to show good content from weak sites. From what I’ve seen, it produces a small amount of traffic. Bing and Duckduckgo are much better at this.

Further Dividends Will be Paid

We’ll do more than build backlinks. We’ll build a comprehensive promotion strategy to connect with high credible publishers and industry influencers to establish your company’s reputation. You will have to build relationships and there’s many ways to do that. Often, we promote the CEO or marketing manager, product developer or even someone like a travel marketer. Because people out there want to engage with those key people. Business is about significant people and trust.

As your trust, relevance and backlinks increase (authority) your click-generating rankings will grow, and you’ll also get direct leads.  I need to nurture all of that.  Consider when a travel influencer, airline executive, industry association chief, or a hotel manager writes a blog post with a mention of your company and links to your website.  And then share it on their company’s social pages.  These backlinks are the ones Google respects – not spammy links.

So stop for a moment now, and think about how a travel agency owner might communicate with influential people to be significant to them. That’s part of the brainstorming we’ll be doing.

Prove to Google, Bing and Duckduckgo that You’re Active

I’ll bet your software company, real estate firm or travel agency has very low traffic from Google or other sources. But a good outreach campaign can create awareness and leads from a large variety of sites. And Google/Bing/Duckduckgo like to see that you’re promoting hard and that other websites are mentioning your company and linking to it. You’re putting yourself out there and getting reactions, which search engines can see.  These are key ranking signals in Google’s algorithm.

The challenge with digital PR, outreach and link building is it still requires a good value proposition for other publishers, influencers, bloggers etc. and very often excellent content and promotability.  We need content pieces (articles, news, photos, products, etc.) that are easy to promote – the content they would love to have from someone with a great reputation.

This is the most difficult type of digital marketing work, and you’ll need to craft a decent strategy to be taken seriously by high-reputation websites and companies.

They have their standards and you’ll have to meet them.  If you own a travel agency for instance, you might need some spectacular, well-written articles on specific destinations, an outstanding product they’d like to promote, a video, beautiful photographs, customer stories, and news that’s relevant to them.  So, it’s all about them and what you can do to be an asset for their business.

To summarize, our offsite SEO strategy aims to amplify a presence on the web and social media platforms.  That wide presence signals to the ranking algorithms that your website is significant and deserves to be ranked. Promotion too is evidence that your business is viable and successful.

Let’s do a quick review of offsite promotion:

Digital PR & Media Outreach

• HARO (Help a Reporter Out) – Providing expert insights to journalists in exchange for mentions and links.
• Guest Contributions & Thought Leadership – Writing for high-authority industry blogs, online magazines, and news outlets.
• Press Releases & News Syndication – Publishing newsworthy stories on PR platforms to gain media coverage.
• Podcast Guesting – Appearing on industry-related podcasts to gain brand exposure and backlinks.

Link Building (Beyond Traditional Outreach)

• Brand Mentions (Unlinked → Linked) – Finding brand mentions on blogs and reaching out to convert them into links.
• Niche Edits (Contextual Backlinks) – Reaching out to relevant sites to update existing content with a link to your valuable resource.
• Broken Link Building – Identifying broken links on industry sites and offering your content as a replacement.
• Competitor Backlink Replication – Analyzing competitors’ backlink profiles and replicating their high-value links.
• Sponsorships & Scholarships – Partnering with universities, charities, or events that offer backlinks in return for sponsorships.

Strategic Social Media & Community Engagement

• LinkedIn Thought Leadership – Publishing in-depth posts, engaging in discussions, and getting shares from industry leaders.
• Reddit & Quora Marketing – Answering questions with valuable insights while subtly promoting your content.
• Facebook & LinkedIn Groups – Participating in niche groups where potential clients and customers engage.
• X (Twitter) & Threads Visibility – Engaging in industry conversations, tagging journalists, and driving discussions.

Influencer & Partnership Collaborations

• Co-Marketing Campaigns – Partnering with complementary businesses to create content and gain backlinks.
• Influencer Reviews & Mentions – Collaborating with influencers in your niche to promote your services or products.
• Roundups & Expert Collaborations – Creating expert roundup posts where influencers contribute insights and link back.
• Affiliate & Referral Programs – Encouraging partners to promote your brand in exchange for commissions.

Content Syndication & Repurposing

• Syndicating Content to Medium, LinkedIn Articles, and Industry Sites – Republishing content on high-authority platforms to extend reach.
• Repurposing Blogs into SlideShare, YouTube Videos, and Infographics – Making content more shareable across platforms.
• Publishing Whitepapers & Case Studies – Providing data-driven insights that others will reference and link to.

Local & Niche Directory Citations

• Google Business Profile & Bing Places – Optimizing for local SEO with active posts and updates.
• Industry-Specific Directories & Aggregators – Listing your business on high-authority niche directories.
• Local Sponsorships & Event Listings – Getting featured in event directories and local publications.

Advanced Brand Awareness Tactics

• Wikipedia Page & Mentions – Creating or improving a Wikipedia page for credibility and citations.
• Brand Monitoring & Sentiment Analysis – Using tools like Brand Mentions or Google Alerts to track and engage with brand mentions.
• Viral & Trend Hijacking – Creating relevant content around trending topics to gain backlinks and media attention.

That’s a good collection of basic assets and tactics we might use to deliver value to other publishes to earn mentions, citations, and backlinks. If we’re good, they might even share and promote our content/brand in their networks (bonus!).

How would you go about planning a strategy and launching into this effort?

Carry Out Each of these Tasks:

• review your current marketing and promotion strategy and summarize what you’re accomplishing and what wasn’t accomplished.
• review your UVP and selling offer and how web publishers would be interested in it
• review your content production talent and whether you have the skills needed to create content those publishers out there are demanding
• review your content and creative producers and determine what great content you can create (what’s their skill and limits)
• decide on keywords and specific topics you need to focus on for the outreach effort (this is project unto itself)
• conduct an offsite outreach and PR needs assessment (what do these website owners want and need?)
• have a meeting between SEO specialist, copywriters, visual designers, content strategist, PR specialist, digital marketing strategist, or any other staff who work on web publication.
• create a promotion budget to engage meaningfully with publishers
• contact key industry publishers, magazines, associations etc. to discover their needs, content gaps, projects they’re involved in and how you might help them
• brainstorm a topic theme for article/image/video content production effort to produce the exact type of content and value publishers want

There are big digital PR and link-building companies you can hire. They charge a very high price.  If your company is notable, generates news, and has great content and interesting products/services, they can leverage all of that. They have more success with big successful companies who overspend.

Whatever way you decide to do your offsite SEO project, I’ll use all my skills, insights and energy to make it successful.

Contact me at 416 998 6246 to discuss your SEO and content needs and begin building a plan.