What Is Off-Page SEO? A Comprehensive Guide

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What exactly is off-page (A comprehensive Guide for 2026)

Author: Digital Tailors
Table of contents:

  • How do you distinguish between on-page and off-page SEO?
  • Why is off-page SEO important to get right?
  • How do you build quality and relevant backlinks?
  • How to improve your social media following?
  • How to improve your local SEO
  • Why business reviews matter, especially business reviews left on Google My Business
  • Finally, how Digital Tailors can help your business in Bristol

Broadly speaking, search engine optimisation can be split into two main areas: on-page and off-page. In order to improve a website’s rankings, you need to optimise both.

Therefore, when you hire an agency, they should devise a really good and effective white hat search engine optimisation strategy. This is to detail how the agency will go about improving the company’s on-page as well as off-page SEO. It’s also worth bearing in mind that some of the world’s largest marketing agencies believe that the business’s backlink profile is key to the success of the business’s SEO.

Therefore, when you’re writing your marketing strategy, do make sure that in the section regarding off-page SEO, you carefully consider how your business is going to build links.

Tell me the main difference between on-page and off-page SEO

Let’s start with what on-page SEO actually is:

Keywords

If you design a rather Brillant website, all the services and products should be set out on their own pages. Then you should describe the products and services in the best way you can. As you do this work, you will naturally write into the sentences keywords that describe the product or service that you’re offering.

As you do this, Googlebot will pick up on what the main products or services are that you sell. For example, if you’re heavily discussing Giant or Trek e-bikes, then it’s more than likely that is the products that you’re selling.

If Google’s algorithm then deems the information as having a high Google EEAT score, you will simply rank high for keywords regarding, say, Giant E-bikes.

 

Local SEO

If you want to rank higher in Bristol, or perhaps let’s say that you own an SME in Bath, then you’re often going to need to improve your off-page SEO to improve the local SEO.

This can mean getting more business reviews on your Google Business account, more backlinks, and more NAP citations.

 

Social Media

If you have a lot of comments, links and shares, then Googlebot can notice this.

Plus, social media can be a great way of bringing more visitors to your website.

Brand mentions and the semantic web.

Some businesses think that the only off-page signal worth optimising for is backlinks.

Now, don’t get me wrong, backlinks are really important when it comes to improving your off-page SEO. However, because of the semantic web and Google’s Knowledge Graph, it’s also a great idea to get your business mentioned.

For example, let’s say that you run a solicitor’s practice in the heart of Bristol. If you get your company mentioned on, say, Solicitors Journal, that can have many positive effects on the business’s SEO, even though you might not have gained a backlink, just a business mention.

Why is off-page SEO so important?

You may have noticed that in this article, we mentioned Google EEAT, and you may not know what this means.

It basically stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.

Now, let’s take the last two, that is, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.

Now, if you have a strong backlink profile, let’s say hundreds of backlinks have been gained.

This can mean that the website is more authoritative.

The reason is, let’s say you’re dental practice in Bristol has hundreds of do-follow links. These links are from awards that you have won, from other dental websites, and from suppliers. Your business, therefore, has a very strong backlink profile. The DA is therefore very high.

This means that this part of Google EEAT, the authoritative aspect, means that your business is strong, and this means you could therefore be ranking much higher than the competition.

Then there’s trustworthiness. Well, a great way of improving this is simply to gain more positive reviews. For example, a pizza restaurant in Clifton, in Bristol, if it has hundreds of positive reviews left on the business’s Google Business account, well, this can massively help to improve the business’s local SEO.

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How do you go about building backlinks?

Well, you need the following.

High-quality content marketing

If your business is simply publishing some of the best advice in Bristol, other businesses may choose to link to you.

The work would need a high Google EEAT score, plus be well-written.

It should also be long form, try to aim for around 2000 words if you can.

Make the work high-quality and well-written.

Then, for example, let’s say that you run a solicitor’s practice, you offer helpful advice via the blog. Other businesses may link you to other lawyers, for example.

 

Broken backlinks

Some SEO agencies spend a huge amount of time trying to locate broken backlinks on a website that is relevant to their business. They then sometimes contact the business to tell them that there’s a broken link, and that they could offer a replacement link, to perhaps information that is more up to date.

Therefore, gaining a new backlink.

Social media

Your business will likely be publishing a lot of content marketing.

Perhaps many blog posts per month, and over the years, these add up.

Therefore, sometimes you can publish a blog post that you have spent over 7 hours writing and researching, only for it to get practically no organic traffic.

Therefore, what you can do instead is promote the work on your business’s social media channels.

And therefore, this could bring more traffic, but also, some of those people might choose to link to the work.

It’s therefore a great way of telling people who are interested in your business, in the goods and services that you offer, that you have published a brand-new article.

You might retail high-performance car parts, and you have written a rather brilliant article about some of the best turbos on the market.

Petrol heads all over the world would be interested in reading this work, the content marketing that you have written. They may way to link to the work as well.

Business reviews on Google Business

Another area of off-page SEO to improve is the number of business reviews.

You will want to gain as many positive business reviews on your company’s Google Business account.

This can massively help to improve your company’s local SEO.

For example, if you run a business in Bristol, let’s say you’re an electrician, it’s normally the businesses which have the most positive Google

Business reviews which rank in the Google Map listings.

Therefore, gaining positive reviews is very important.

 

Why hire Digital Tailors?

We have some of the best SEO minds in the business.

For example, if you would like an SEO consultant, who has over 10 years’ experience of helping to improve organic SEO, then we are the agency for you.

For example, we have consultants who have literally taken businesses from no-where to the first page in Bristol.

We do this by using white methods.

Prices per month start from 1k per rolling month.

This includes improving technical, on-page, off-page and local SEO.

 

Come to one of the best SEO agencies in the business, come to Digital Tailors, we have put many businesses on page 1 in Bristol.

 

 

 

What are header tags, and how can they be used to improve your SEO?

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Author: Digital Tailors:

Table of contents:

  • What exactly is a header tag?
  • Why the H1 tag is considered the most important on-page SEO element
  • Use header tags to also split up the text to offer a better user experience
  • Why you shouldn’t keyword-stuff the header tags
  • How to best use your header tags to improve your on-page SEO

Header tags are one of those elements of search engine optimisation that sometimes get overlooked.

However, the importance of header tags shouldn’t be ignored. As a matter of fact, header tags can be used to better structure your business’s content marketing.

Therefore, if you’re writing about a subject, let’s say to do with offering legal advice, you can use header tags to add structure to the page. This then should make it crystal clear to Googlebot, plus the reader, what the page is actually about.

Therefore, the titles, as you progress from H1 down to H6, should all indicate what that section of text is about. This then allows a very good idea of what information the page is offering.

Tell me more. What exactly is a header tag?

A header tag is simply HTML code that is used to mark up the main headings on a page. It really is as simple as that, and the best part is, if you have a WordPress site, or another good CMS, with a few clicks of the in-built editor options, you can mark-up those different header tags on the page.

Therefore, no HTML or coding experience is often needed.

Yet, the benefits are clear.

A good set of header tags, ranging from H1-H6, simply allows Googlebot to gain an understanding of what the page is about. Then, from there, Google can use its semantic web knowledge, gained from Google Knowledge Graph, to gain a good understanding of what the page is about.

For example.

If header tag 1 was H1 (Pin-striped suits)
H2 was (light grey suits)
H3 was (Hugo Boss suits)
Its pretty clear to both the reader and Googlebot that the page is discussing suits and formal workwear.

But what’s the purpose of the H2 tag?

It’s important to acknowledge that the H1-H6 tags are ranked according to how important the page titles are. Think of the H1 header tag as the main purpose of why you are writing that work, then as you move down to H6, the other header tags are the related questions.

Just as you would answer a shopper’s questions, addressing perhaps the most important question first. Then there’s normally a set of follow-up or additional queries, these are your H2-H6 tags.

Therefore, the H1 tags offer the most important text.

Helping Googlebot to understand the page

What header tags can do is to help Google to understand the page and the information it is about. This can therefore help improve the business’s search engine optimisation.

Why you should only use one H1 tag per page

It’s important to bear in mind that the header tags are ordered in terms of importance. Therefore, choose how you write the H1 tag carefully. Don’t keyword stuff, but also don’t write multiple H1 tags; there should only be one.

Logical structure

A lot of us today are impatient.

You have to keep this in mind when writing content marketing for your business. That is, you may write a 4,000-word article, and it may rank very high on Google.

But the average reader often they are not going to read the whole post.

Therefore, use the header tags as a way of splitting up the text, as well as helping the reader to skip to the section they want to read.

You may think that helping a shopper to skip to the relevant section, and perhaps ignore the rest of the article, could actually decrease the dwell time.

However, what it might actually do is greatly decrease the bounce rate.

Therefore, instead of potentially thousands of shoppers getting to the page, being greeted with a huge amount of text, and thinking to themselves, “I am not reading all of that”,- well, instead, they can skip to the section that they are interested in reading.

This, therefore, helps to decrease the bounce rate.

Add relevant keywords, but don’t keyword stuff the text

A common mistake in SEO is for a business to read that the header tag is the most important part of on-page SEO, and this is true.
But then the business can make the mistake of “keyword stuffing”, for example, if they are selling, let’s say, a certain brand of shoe, they may keyword stuff that title with the brand of shoe.

This causes keyword stuffing issues, which can trigger a Google penalty.

Therefore, our best advice, at this agency, is rather simple: just write your header tags as if you were talking to a customer. Write them naturally, write the keywords as if you are talking to a customer, write in front of you.

 

Google EEAT

A really crucial part of getting that page or blog post to rank on page 1 of Google is all about improving the Google EEAT score for that page.

This means in the text, demonstrating that the work shows real experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.

Therefore, you can use the page titles (H1-H6) to show that you have answered the question in a comprehensive way.

That is when Googlebot “crawls and indexes the work”, it will be clear as crystal that you have offered a comprehensive answer to the question.

The best SEO consultants in the entire world will tell you, that the pages which rank say number position, they offer a lot of information.

These pages therefore normally have a very high word count.

 

Google Helpful Content Update

Its also important to remember a very important Google update.

That’s the Google Helpful Content Update.
Therefore, you could make the page more helpful, by for example using the H1-H6 titles as questions that your customers ask around that topic.

For example, have a main question, such as “which is the most energy efficient washing machine of 2026”. Yet then the other subheading could be follow up questions, such as which is the best energy efficient washing machine below £700.00.

How our agency can help

We are one of the best SEO agencies in the whole Bristol.

How can we make such a bold statement?

Well, quite simply because we have SEO consultants who are you are simply the bee’s knees, they have over 10 years of experience.

Therefore, whether your website needs help with the technical, on-page or off-page SEO, we are the experts to call.

Monthly packages start from £1000.00 for local SEO; we also work with businesses based throughout the whole of the United Kingdom as well.

 

Does Long Form Content Rank Higher?

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How many words should our blog posts be? What’s the word count to aim for?

 

Introduction

We get it, it feels like writing blog posts, main pages and evergreen content marketing takes forever.

Therefore, businesses up and down the country when they are writing a blog post often want to know- how long should the article be?

 

What is the ideal word count that Google is looking for?

Okay, lets make this super simple, writing 3,000 plus words until your hands hurt, well that doesn’t automatically mean that the content marketing will be considered better.

 

For the content marketing to be considered high quality, it needs the following attributes:

– High Google EEAT score
– It needs to be really useful for the customer
– Needs to be kept up to date
– Written in a way that holds the customer’s interest

 

What is the ideal word count?

Here’s the thing, there’s no ideal word count. You could write below 700 words and it ranks on page one of Google for some queries.

Alternatively, you could write 3,000 words plus, and that’s what’s needed to rank on page one of Google.

 

Here’s how Google decides what the word count should be for that question:

– Which page best answers the query?
– Which page has the highest dwell time?
– Which pages have the lowest bounce rate?
– Which pages cover the topic in-depth?

 

A word on the semantic web

This is not something that SEO agencies discuss enough in our opinion, that is the semantic web,

Basically, without getting too technical, if you mention say a famous racing driver, the Google Knowledge Graph will know who the race team is the driver works for.

Google Knowledge Graph will also know the drivers sponsors, information such as how many races that they have won in the past.

Also Google Knowledge Graph will know who the co-driver is, major events such as where a crash might have occurred.

Therefore, the point that we are trying to make is Google Knowledge Graph understand “entities”.

Entities can be a race team, a famous bridge or a product- it can be anything.

 

Now what has this got to do with writing blog posts?

Well Google understands the semantic web.

Therefore, if your content marketing is detailed, if its full of facts and figures which Google can cross-check with the semantic web, well this means Google trusts the content marketing even more.

Yes but why is it that long form content marketing seems to rank higher on Google?

The reason is simple, but there are also multiple reasons.

The first reason is if the work is long form, if its evergreen content marketing for example, that’s 4,000 words, if its well written it will cover a lot of questions and entities.

 

This means that Google can check if the answers are correct.

Plus, also because you mentioned so many entities, Google will know that they are offering a detailed answer to a question.

The other reason comes down to user engagement, for example, if you can get the dwell time really high, this shows to a search engine like

Google that you have gained the shoppers interest for potentially many minutes.

It’s a bit like when you wander into a clothes shop and you instantly know the items are not too your style.

You therefore walk out in a matter of seconds.

This is the exact same with a webpage that doesn’t answer the query.

You leave more or less straightaway, you don’t read another page, this sends the bounce rate higher.

This therefore contributes to lower engagement, if this happens for many weeks, and months, Google knows that the page is not answering the query.

Therefore, Google RankBrain and Google’s algorthim then ranks the work lower.

For example, lets give you an example of what might occur.

Two businesses are selling high-end running shoes.

One page has a dwell time of 4 minutes; plus other pages are visited.

The other business has a dwell time of 30 seconds, and no further pages are often clicked on by the customer.

Therefore, it’s clear to Google’s algorithm that one business has much higher engagement from shoppers, and therefore will rank higher than the page with low dwell time, but a high bounce rate.

Better answers the original query

A page that simply answers the shoppers query better will rank higher on Google.

This comes back to where we were talking about, the semantic web, and also user engagement signals.

Many people will have landed on a page and read it for a while, and then learnt that doesn’t even answer their query.

This is fairly common, because well rubbish SEO companies, sometimes write a title that they know will grab a lot of interest, yet then don’t answer the question.

They just go on to overly promote a set of products, or just write marketing waffle.

For example, it could “best ski-gear to buy for 2026”
Somebody going skiing to the Swiss Alps might read that, but then learn that only one brand of product is constantly being pushed as the best.

Therefore, another page, by a e-commerce business, might have different products, different items depending on budget, better quality advice.

Perhaps writing the pros and cons of a particular pair of ski boots, therefore the customer is better informed.

By being better informed through reading a more informative blog post , there likely to read the work for longer.

Therefore, the dwell time is higher.

A word on Google EEAT

Whether your writing a main page or perhaps your writing a blog post always think about Google EEAT.

In relation writing content marketing, you want to show that you’re the expert on the subject.

Plus, you have real experience.

It’s the articles where its clear to the reader and Google, that you know what your talking about, that work will always rank higher on Google.

The reason is simple, a lot of work is written by AI today, and this often doesn’t rank that high on Google.

The reason is AI hasn’t experienced the real world.

It hasn’t fixed a car, its hasn’t fixed a dripping tap, it just learns from existing knowledge from existing pages.

It’s therefore the pages which offer in-depth advice, where its clear that the person say an expert lawyer, and an expert on that subject, those pages will rank higher.f

Therefore before you start writing blog posts, and perhaps evergreen content marketing for your business do make sure that you have a good read of Google EEAT, its really important that you understand this, as integral to improving your businesses organic SEO.

 

What should we do we haven’t got the time to write 1000 word plus articles?

In our opinion, there are two options here.

You could write less articles, but when you do, make sure that they are high quality and remember a golden rule when it comes to search engine optimisation.

 

That is quality is always better than quantity.

Although you could also hire one of the best SEO agencies in the whole of Bristol, and that is Digital Tailors.

Packages start from 1k per month.

Included in that fee will be content marketing writing.

And who better to write your content marketing and improve your on-page SEO, that having SEO consultants, which have over 10+ years of experience.

We therefore have experience of writing hundreds of thousands of words per year, and because of that we know which content marketing works and what doesn’t.

Some rather lazy SEO companies, use AI tools, and sometimes mix AI text with human written text, that’s no good in our view.

Instead, we research, we use some of the best SEO tools in the world, they we write the work.

Partner with one of the best in Bristol.

We are one of the best SEO businesses in Bristol, for a quote why not call us?