TOP recommendations for 2025!
Become an SEO rock star!
On-Page SEO is extremely important. It helps with building relevant content that your audience wants. Did you know that a HUGE factor in rankings comes from Off-Page SEO? We can go on for days, weeks, and years talking about all the Off-Page SEO factors that contribute to a successful blog or business website ranking. The goal here is to increase visitors, buyers, and customer acquisition, right? In this post by the HeadStart team, we are going over some of the best Off-Page SEO factors that we suggest will help you
- Rank higher on search engine result pages “SERPS”
- Increase audience and visitor retention
- Build an authority – very important for any industry
- Scale your business or online store
- Build a reliable client acquisition funnel
- Digital Marketing Techniques To Boost Your Business Online
Now SEO is amazing, it helps connect with the people already looking for your services, content, and website. But one thing we like to mention is that you have to put in your part of the effort outside of the On-Page/Technical SEO. Off-Page SEO is a collection of things that supplement your website.
Such as promotion, or having an actual sales strategy in place to close those deals. A big misunderstanding that business owners have when hiring SEOs and digital marketing agencies is that their SEO team is going to wave a magic wand and rain clients, magically 3x their business. The right SEO strategy, such as Head Start’s “Digital Clarity Method” takes time. Rankings can be accelerated but a truly effective SEO campaign can take 6-12 months plus continued maintenance.
Truly then you will reap amazing SEO results.
Now that you know that SEO is a process that takes an investment in yourself to reap huge rewards. Let’s get into our list of the best Off-Page SEO practices you can start implementing!
Brand Building
- Expertise
- Authoritativeness
- Trustworthiness
Google algorithms have bots that crawl your web pages and make sure the search results page is free from untrustworthy indexed pages. They look at both the On-Page and also off-page authoritativeness of your site. It is important to build a brand for your business. Take for example Nike Shoes. I went to Google and searched for running shoes. Right away, Google will display a variety of positions for Nike’s running shoes. See why building a brand creates results?
Keyword Research & Targeting
Choosing keywords is based on a few metrics:
- KD: Keyword Difficulty
- Search Volume
- Click Thru Rate
- Cost Per Click
- Global Volume
- Parent Topic
Industry Competitor Analysis
The faster you understand what works and doesn’t work for your competitors the faster you can rank for the same keywords and take on the customers they’ve been generating using SEO.
That’s what we did. Looking into competitors’ backlinks, target keywords, and content you can cut your SEO efforts by over half. We ranked HeadStart Digital in the top 3 positions for Texas SEO in under 3 months. Understanding these metrics will allow you to rank ahead of competitors that have been in business for decades.
All it takes is a month for a competitor to set aside their SEO efforts or website maintenance and that is your perfect opportunity to improve your website authority.
Guest Posting – Write For Us
Guest posting has been a great strategy for getting exposure and links and has worked for a long time. Any good guest posting outreach strategy can be contained into 5 steps:
- Webmaster Prospecting
- Research & Development
- Webmaster & Audience Connection
Outreach Strategy
- Relationship Building
From this list of strategies, number 1 is the most important key. That is because the effectiveness of your guest post webmaster prospecting determines your success in guest posting.
There are many strategies for you to find guest post opportunities.
- Competitor guest post research
- Author biography research
- SEO guest post prospecting
A quick Google search reveals many of the SEO guest posts you can use and improve when it comes to finding guest posting prospects. This will help make a list of prospects and start outreaching them. Here’s a sample guest post template that you can build an idea. Make sure you don’t use the exact below template! Being unique is very important.
I recently came across your {{site}}, and wow it’s such an awesome site! I know that you are accepting guest contributions on your site. I would like to contribute a great article on your article that’ll be in-depth and is of at least 1000 words. I saw you have a similar post on your blog. So I created a piece of content that has more information than the article you have posted and linked. I think it will benefit your website more. Let me know what you think! Thanks,
To be accepted onto big blogs and authoritative websites, it’s crucial for you to develop a close and personal relationship with other bloggers and webmasters then pitch them for guest posts. You’ll also get lots of referral traffic and potential customers, which has a positive correlation with increased rankings. Big brands and branded websites tend to get lots of direct and referral traffic, so it makes sense for Google to see non-SEO traffic as a ranking factor.
Evergreen Link Building Strategy
What if you could build amazing content that will literally generate backlinks for your website? That would be amazing wouldn’t it? Well.. you can, but it’s a little more strategy than that. See in the online world. The link is all about these 3 key points:
- Authority Building: Getting backlinks from high authority sites with a lot of traffic and authority will carry more weight in your ranking.
- High Relevancy: If you can get a single backlink from a niche-relevant website it will help with improving your rank juice than dozens of backlinks from unrelated sites. Plus more unrelated backlinks can drag your authority down.
- Interactive Traffic: If the page from which you got the backlink gets great traffic then that means you’re more likely to get referral traffic to your blog, then it boosts your rankings. Leveraging interested traffic will also decrease your bounce rate.
Now that you know this, it’s time to take care of your Dofollow and Nofollow from your website.
- Dofollow: These backlinks are most valuable to you as they do pass link juice to your site.
- Nofollow: Google and other search engines won’t really count the Nofollow backlinks to rank your site.
That is a Do-Follow link. When you click on it, the Dofollow attribute will allow you to follow thru the linking website. These are the kinds of links that increase your authority & rankings. There has to be a healthy ratio between Dofollow and Nofollow backlinks. I would try to not have 100% Dofollow backlinks as it won’t appear natural and can give you a Google penalty. You can build quality backlinks using blogger outreach strategies like the ones I posted.
Here are some of the strategies to implement:
- Guest blogging
- Webmaster Outreach
- Broken link building
- Skyscraper outreach
- Resource page link building
- Reverse guest posting
- Info-graphics
- Interviews
- Private link networks
A huge goal with local citation building is to build links that your competitors can’t copy.
Video It’s the future
Want to know the BIGGEST SEO SECRET in the modern digital age? You guessed it! VIDEO SEO! The future of digital marketing and SEO is with creating video content for your band. We use Youtube, but there are many channels that you can choose from. Facebook has been promoting its video platform heavily. Even Instagram. What matters here is to get comfortable talking in front of the camera. Recent studies show that people don’t like to read anymore. (Millenials..) If you want your brand’s videos to go viral and retain an audience they have to be awesome. But really what does “awesome” even mean?
An awesome video will make you get hyped about whatever the content is with the goal of wanting more!
Here are some key points that we like to use to value an awesome video.
- Total Watch Time
- Audience Retention
- Audience Engagement
- Click Thru Rate
By focusing time on these video platforms & YouTube ranking factors, you’ll start to see results.
The goal here is to build an audience that wants to build a relationship with your brand.
One more thing, when you create videos it will almost immediately rank you to the top of search engines. See our brand for example.
Social Media give it a try
Here are some of the tips for you to make the most of your social media marketing efforts:
- Focus on the creation of visual content instead of only textual content
- Do Facebook Live frequently (it has got more reach)
- Ask comment-provoking questions in your posts
- Do some giveaways to raise your social media boost
- Include more stories in your social media content. Storytelling creates rapport with the people and they emotionally connect with your brand.
Getting more social shares on your content is very important. Because social signals are one of the crucial SEO ranking factors as far as Google is concerned.
Getting more social shares is one of the best Off-Page SEO techniques you can implement today.
Backlink Analysis
It is absolutely important for you to have a backlink analysis strategy not just for your own business, but for your competitors. Understanding what links are damaging and which ones are beneficial can mean the difference in your SEO success. Below I included a screenshot of our Ahref report as seen when immediately opened. You can see a list of different data points that will set the future of your link-building research and strategy.
Here is the point you NEED to pay close attention to:
- DR: Domain Rating – shows the “backlink popularity” generated from the review of the total number of backlinks linking to the target page.
- UR: URL Rating – the strength of the backlink power, composed of both “internal” and “external” links. Typically higher UR = higher SERP ranks.
- Anchor: The anchor text that was used to create a link to the target page.
There are also options based on what software you use to see when the links appeared (or disappeared). Although for purposes of this blog, I used Ahrefs as the software to see what our link profile is. There are many platforms out there that you can use. Most of them are paid and can run anywhere from $100-$300 a month. If you want a free tool I suggest you connect your website with Google Search Console.
Google Search Console will show you an easy-to-understand setup of all the external and internal links you have to your website. It is also important to know that no one tool is 100% accurate when doing link analysis. There will always be backlinks that might take a little longer to index (possibly months).
Patience is the key to SEO success.
Google My Business GMB
If you have a local business, then you must use local SEO through Google My Business (GMB). It can be a brick-and-mortar, clinic, restaurant, office, etc. The goal for you should be to at least have a position on Google Maps when someone is searching for your business. To do so is fairly simple. What you want to do is go to Google My Business using your business email. Fill out the requirements and be as accurate as you can possibly be.
Submit you’re correct
- address
- phone number
- photos
- services
- Business name
Most importantly you want to build positive reviews and client testimonies. This will help build your credibility and Google Map Pack rank.
Online Directories
Very similar to Google My Business. Online directories are used by thousands of people to find a niche or geo-targeted services. Some online directories are made for specific industries such as contractors, doctors, and freelancers. The benefit of using online directories is that you can easily add more exposure to your brand while getting (most of the time) a backlink from the directory. We suggest you try to add your business to 60-90 directories pointing back to your website. Significantly increasing your exposure.
Remember again to add your NAP.
- NAME
- ADDRESS
- PHONE NUMBER
Gim Song Zhao
I am a local and National SEO Manager - Analyst, strategist, specialist and implementing effective SEO. Coordinating, On-page, Off-page, design, social media, PPC.
As you may or may not know yet, SEO can make a huge difference. You’ll wonder to know that SEO can bring hundreds of thousands of visitors per month, mostly from Google and major media sites, including all other popular search engines.
In this blog post, I’m going to show you my complete SEO checklist for 2025. This is the same checklist that Brian Dean (Entrepreneurs call Brian Dean, SEO Genius) has used to get first page Google rankings for competitive keywords like ‘keyword research tools’ and ‘SEO campaign’.
I’m going to walk you through the entire SEO checklist step by step. Keep reading…
When I first got started with SEO, I had no idea what I was doing, so I started to search for things like ‘How to get higher Google rankings’ and ‘How to SEO my site‘ and despite following all the advice that I read my traffic didn’t budge. It was frustrating!
I developed a repeatable step-by-step SEO process, and that’s exactly what I’m going to share with you right now. So, let’s kick things off with step number one of this SEO checklist.
Step 1: Set up Essential SEO Tools and Plugins
Your first step is to make sure that you have three important SEO tools set up and ready to go.
The first tool that every site needs to have is:
#1 The free Google Search Console tools
This tool makes it super easy to track your site’s performance in Google. It can also help you find technical SEO problems that are holding you back.
Most important of all, the Google Search Console shows you the exact keywords that you rank for and where you rank for them. And unlike third-party tools, this data comes straight from Google. So, you know it’s legit.
The next tool you want to set up is:
#2 How to use Google Analytics for WordPress
Google Analytics is the best way to see how people find and use your website, but that’s just scratching the surface.
With Google Analytics, you can do all sorts of cool stuff like
- 5 pages on your site that bring traffic
- Identifying the exact website that sends the traffic
- Your site bounce rate
- Pageviews
- Time on site, and lots more
Finally, if your site runs on WordPress, you need to install the:
#3 Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress CMS
Yoast is by far the most popular SEO plugin on the planet. And for a good reason, Yoast makes it super easy to make your WordPress site SEO friendly, right out of the box.
Now it’s time for the second step in this checklist
Step 2: Find Keywords that Customers Search for
It’s no secret that keyword research is super important.
The question is, how do you find keywords that your customers search for?
Here are 3 simple techniques:
#1 Find long-tail keywords with Google Suggest
To use this technique, type a keyword into Google, but don’t press enter or the search button. Instead, take a look at the keywords that Google shows you. Google only suggests keywords that people are actually searching for.
So, when you see a Google search suggestion, you know that lots of people are searching for that term.
Next,
#2 Find keywords with the Google Keyword Planner
Google Keywords planner is Google’s official keyword research tool.
This tool is technically designed for Google ads, but it’s still super useful for SEO keyword research. To use it, just enter a seed keyword and check out the suggestions that the tool spits out, that’s all. Finally,
#3 Spy on online communities – Reddit Quora
Fortunately, this isn’t as creepy as it sounds! I’m talking about reading threads on sites like Reddit, Quora, and online forms.
All you need to do is head over to the community and find questions that crop up again and again.
For example, I noticed that a big chunk of the threads on the paleo sub Reddit or all about paleo keto desserts.
So, if you rent a site in the paleo niche terms like, ‘best paleo desserts’ and keto friendly desserts’ would be great keywords to target.
With that let’s jump into step number 3
Step 3: Keyboard Optimize Your Content
You’ve installed all the important SEO tools, and you’ve found a handful of keywords. Now it’s time to optimize your site.
Here’s how.
#1 Use your keyword(s) in the first 100 words of your page. Google puts more weight on terms that show up at the top of your page. So, make sure you use your keyword once in the first part.
For example, in this post, too, I’ve used the keyword ‘Complete SEO Checklist for 2025 in the second part.
Next,
#2 Use your keyword(s) at the beginning of every title tag
Just like with the content of your pages, Google puts a little bit of extra weight on terms that show up early in your title tag.
For example, my main keyword for this post is ‘Complete SEO Checklist,’ and as you can see, my title tag starts with that keyword.
Third
#3 Use short URLs that include your target keyword
You might have a question, why is this important?
Well, a recent SEO industry study found a correlation between short URLs and higher Google rankings. You have to keep your URLs short and sweet.
The Short URL is one of the main reasons that this page is doing so well and driving us the most traffic.
Last,
#4 Use keyword(s) in an H1, H2 or H3 tag
To be honest, H tags are important. But every little bit helps, especially for trying to target competitive keywords.
For example, as mentioned, my main keyword for this page is the ‘Complete SEO Checklist’. So, I have used the exact keyword in h2 tags.
Simple moving right along let’s quickly blast through the fourth step in the complete SEO checklist
Step 4: Find and Fix Technical SEO Issues and Errors
The truth is technical SEO problems can track your rankings. So, if your site has technical SEO problems, you want to find and fix them right away.
Here’s how
#1 Make sure that your website is mobile-friendly
As you might hear, Google now runs on a mobile-first index. This means if your website is not optimized for mobile devices, it won’t rank.
Fortunately, you can easily see your site’s mobile-friendliness with the Google mobile-friendly test. Just pop in a page from your site, and Google will tell you whether or not your page is mobile-friendly.
Next,
#2 ID crawl errors
Crawl errors just mean that Google is having trouble indexing all the content on your site. And if they can’t index your page, it’s not going to rank.
You can easily find crawl errors in the Google search console using the coverage report.
Finally,
#3 Improve your website’s page speed
Your site loading speed is a confirmed ranking factor.
Now to be clear, in my experience, page loading speed isn’t going to make or break your rankings. But, in general, the fast your site loads the better.
To evaluate your site loading speed, check out Google’s page speed insights and webpagetest.org. Both tools give you a benchmark for how quickly your site loads. They also hook you up with recommendations to help you speed things up.
And now it’s time for the next step:
Step 5: Create Content Designed to Rank in Google
There’s no denying, if you want to rank in Google, you need to publish great content.
But what is great content exactly?
Its great content! In my mind, great content is content that ranks in Google. And now, I’m going to show you exactly how to create the type of content that ranks on the first page of Google.
#1 Create awesome content with the skyscraper technique
The Skyscraper technique is a 3-step formula for creating amazing content. Many bloggers have used this technique to double their search engine traffic in almost no time.
Here’s the 3-step process:
- Find a piece of content in your industry that’s popular
- Create something even better
- Finally, promote that content
For example, if people are searching for ‘SEO for ecommerce’, then you have to type in the keyword on Google, pick up the top 10 blog posts that appear in the search results, and using these ten posts create your own super thorough and detailed content.
After you’re done with creating the content, promote the post on social media and use email as our reach.
#2 Break your content down into chunks
Here’s the truth, no one and I mean no one likes reading giant walls of text. That’s why I always break things down into chunks because it makes my content super easy to read.
And because my content is easy to read my bounce rate, a key Google Ranking factor is super low.
Next,
#3 Make sure to cover everything there is to know about your topic
As per the analysis of over 1000000 Google searches, it has been found that content that covers an entire topic in depth ranks above content that only covers part of a topic.
For example, remember that the ‘ultimate guide on backlinks (above)’, I mentioned earlier, did so well it covered everything there is to know about backlinks.
Besides making your content in-depth you also want to use lots of multimedia on your page. I’m talking about stuff like images polls visual content video charts in infographics.
For example, I use to like the screenshots visuals, and videos in pretty much every post.
Finally, if you want to double down on content formats that are working best right. A recent study from Brain Dean with Buzzsumo says that they analyzed almost 1 Billion blog posts, so what did we find:
Well, there was some good news and some bad news.
Let’s get the bad news out of the way the bad news is that, most content is completely ignored. We found that 94 percent of all published content gets 0 external links that’s right 0.
Now for the good news, certain content formats attract more backlinks than others. We found that ‘why post’, ‘what post’, and ‘infographics’ get significantly more backlinks than other content formats.
Speaking of links, it’s time for the last step in this checklist:
Step 6: Build Links to Your Website
Do backlinks are still important for SEO?
Yeah! A recent study by stone temple consulting found that backlinks are still one of Google’s most important ranking factors. The bottom line if you’re serious about ranking and Google, you need backlinks.
Let me walk you through a handful of like-building strategies that are working great right now.
#1 Build backlinks using link roundups
Link roundups are one of my all-time favorite ways to get backlinks. Why? Because the entire point of the round-up is to link to amazing content.
If you publish something amazing on your website there’s a good chance that you could get a link from a round-up.
#2 Build backlinks using strategic guest posting
With this method, you can create backlinks easily at almost no price. By registering a comment that contains a link to your website on another website, you create a backlink from that website to your website. If you register comments on many different websites, you can easily create many backlinks to your site for free and improve your website’s SEO and ranking.
However, if you want to have a large number of these types of backlinks, we recommend that you use a tool that can do this automatically without the need for human handling; It means a tool that can automatically enter the sites and comment on the desired comment on these websites.
One software product using which you can get different comments and backlinks is the v-User Auto Commenter bot that can leave comments on different sites such as Google Blog, YouTube, etc. For more information, search v-User on Google.
How do you do guest posting the right way?
The right way is to publish your guest post on a respected site and your niche.
The wrong way is to publish a guest post on any website that has a ‘write for us‘ page even if the site has nothing to do with yours.
A good rule of thumb that I follow is to only guest posts on sites that are going to send me targeted traffic and related to our website.
For example, this is also a guest post that I’ve published on this website because this blog focuses on digital marketing or related space. My website belongs to digital marketing too. This way, I can bring in a decent chunk of targeted traffic to my website.
The next strategy I want to show you is to:
#3 Go on a podcast as a guest
This is one of the most underrated link Building techniques on the planet. Just like with a guest post, you get a nice contextual link from your podcast appearance, but unlike a guest post, there is much less legwork.
You don’t need to set pitch topics or work with an editor; just schedule your interview and show up and provide value That’s it.
Last, we have the age-old strategy of mentioning influencers in your content; this process can be any simpler.
#4 Mention influential bloggers in your post and then let them know about it
Seriously that’s it!
For example, whenever I publish a blog post, I use it to reach out to the people that I’ve mentioned in my blog post. And they share my post.
Final Words to Conclude:
SEO is important for a website for rankings on Google. It is equally important to keep in mind what comes under SEO. This is why I’ve gathered information from the web and created this blog post.
This blog post covers all you need to consider while doing SEO for your website.
Do you have a question about Local SEO, We’d love to talk to you in person by email or phone. Contact us today!
Gim Song Zhao
I am a local and National SEO Manager - Analyst, strategist, specialist and implementing effective SEO. Coordinating, On-page, Off-page, design, social media, PPC.
