Easy Off-Page SEO Checklist For Noobs (5 Steps)

Follow the quick and easy checklist below to get started.

Use the three Rs technique for this:

• Replicate the same links
• Reproduce the kinds of links they have
• Replace their dead links

Replicate

Most of your competitors’ backlinks won’t be replicable lile for like, but some of them will.

Replicate their directory links

These links aren’t usually very powerful, but they’re easy to find and replicate so they’re worth having. Here’s the process:

1. Go to Ahrefs’ Competitive Analysis tool
2. Switch the toggle to “referring domains”
3. Enter your domain in the “Not linking to this target” section, then a few of your competitors below
4. Hit “show link opportunities”

In the report, you’ll see sites linking to one or more of your competitors but not you. Just look through the list for directories (they’re usually easy to spot) then sign up and add your site.

Replicate their listicle links

If multiple competitors are featured in a listicle but you aren’t, it probably won’t be that hard to get added. You can also find these with Ahrefs’ Competitive Analysis tool.

1. Go to Ahrefs’ Competitive Analysis tool
2. Switch the toggle to “referring pages”
3. Enter your domain in the “Not linking to this target” section, then a few of your competitors’ domains below
4. Switch the mode to “Exact URL” for all domains
5. Hit “show link opportunities”

In the report, look for referring pages listing competing businesses like yours:

If you feel your business should be included on any of the lists, reach out and start a conversation with their authors. Don’t go straight in with the pitch; just get on their radar and ask why they didn’t feature you to start a conversation.

Reproduce

Reproducing is all about identifying the link building strategies that are working for your competitors, then using them yourself to get more links like the ones they have. Let’s look at a few ways to do it.

Look for journalist request links, then reproduce that tactic if they exist

Journalists often use services like SourceBottle to source expert quotes for their posts. Because this usually results in a link back to the site alongside the quote, it’s become a popular link building tactic in recent years. Here’s how to see if your competitors are building links this way:

1. Enter a competitors homepage into Site Explorer
2. Go to the Backlinks report
3. Look for quotes in the “Anchor and target URL” column

For example, this site has many links attributed to quotes from “Benjamin Ross”:

Once you spot a name like this, filter for it in the Anchor and surrounding text. If there are many results, you can bet your bottom dollar that the competitor is actively using this tactic to build backlinks. This is a sign it’s working well in your industry and would likely work well for you as well.

Look for digital PR links, then run similar campaigns of your own

Digital PR can mean many things, but it’s often just a fancy way of describing when you create and market a piece of content designed to attract attention and links.

For example, a vape superstore in the UK put together a list of illegal vape hotspots then reached out to local newspapers who then covered it in droves. This earned them backlinks from 110 referring domains:

To see if your competitors are building links this way, plug their domain into Site Explorer and go to the Best by Links report. Eyeball the list for content campaigns, then use them as inspiration for your own campaigns.

For example, if you’re in the vaping industry, you might create a similar campaign focused on cities with the highest vape sales instead—then reach out to all the same journalists to get coverage.

Replace

This one is all about finding dead pages on your competitors’ websites that have lots of backlinks, recreating the content (or something similar), then reaching out to everyone linking to the dead page and asking them to replace their link with yours.

Here’s how to find your competitors’ dead pages:

1. Enter their domain into Site Explorer
2. Go to the best by Links report
3. Add a HTTP code filter for “404 not found”
4. Look for content with lots of links that you can replicate

For example, you can see above that one of our competitors has a dead page about SEO tips with links from 124 referring domains. If we inspect that page in Ahrefs, we can see that it used to be a list of 19 SEO tips:

This would be pretty easy to replicate (and even improve upon), so we could do that then reach out and ask everyone linking to the dead page to link to us instead. In fact, we already have a very similar post with 15 SEO tips that we could use for the campaign.

People often search Google for reviews of a brand before pulling the trigger and buying. This means that reviews can make or break online sales.

For example, I recently wanted to buy a shirt from a brand I’d never heard of before. The site looked trustworthy enough and they seemed to have what I wanted, but I wasn’t totally sure so I went to Google and searched for reviews:

Honestly, I didn’t even click any of the links. The four stars in the SERP from TrustPilot was enough to give me the confidence to buy.

Looks like I’m not the only one doing this either…

Reviews are even more important if your business services a local area because they’re a ranking factor for your Google Business Profile in the “map pack” results:

So how do you get more reviews? Put systems in place to encourage them.

For example, if you run a restaurant then you can put QR codes on your tables with a review link for your Business Profile (or on the receipt for delivery orders):

If you don’t have control over these things, email customers a review link a few days after they receive their orders.

If you’re a local business, you should also optimize your Google Business Profile as much as you can. Check out my guide on how to do this in 30 minutes.

Google isn’t everyone’s first port of call when searching for a business. Depending on what you do, there are likely other well-known websites in your industry where plenty of potential customers start their search—and you need to be listed in these places.

For example, I always use this website to find cat sitters—not Google:

Similarly, I use a site called trustatrader.com to find tradespeople here in the UK because, well, I want people I can trust!

Here’s how to use Ahrefs to find important places to get listed in your industry:

1. Go to the Competitive Analytics tool
2. Switch the toggle to “referring domains”
3. Enter your domain in the “Not linking to this target” section, then a few of your competitors below
4. Switch the mode to “Exact URL” for all domains
5. Hit “show link opportunities”
6. Look for sites that are likely directories or industry search engines with lots of traffic

For example, when I plug a few lawyers into the tool, I see justia.com popping up with an estimated 2.8M monthly organic search visits:

If I visit the website, I see that’s it’s literally a search engine for lawyers:

This is definitely somewhere you’d want to get listed if you’re in this industry.

If this feels a bit like finding a needle in a haystack, an alternative method is to plug a handful of terms like “lawyer in NY”, “lawyer nyc”, and “personal lawyer new york” into Keywords Explorer, then go to the Traffic Share by Domains report.

This shows you which sites are getting the most traffic from those terms, many of which are often local or niche directories and search engines where it pays to get listed.

Another benefit of getting listed in these places is that they often show up in Google.

For example, if you search for “lawyer NYC,” the niche directory Justia is the first result:

Big brands often have hundreds of thousands of people they can promote content to via owned channels like their newsletters and social media. If this isn’t you, you’ll need to do some extra work to promote your content. After all, more eyeballs = more backlinks = higher rankings.

There are lots of ways to do this. It doesn’t have to be a scary thing…

For example, if you mention or quote people in your content, reach out and let them know. Or, if there are popular newsletters or resources in your industry, pitch your resource for inclusion.

My colleague Andrei got one of our recent posts featured in a popular industry glossary just by commenting on a post on LinkedIn.

If you’re not sure what newsletters to pitch in your industry, just search Google for the best ones.

You can find resources to pitch with Ahrefs’ Web Explorer. Just enter a keyword related to your industry like “marketing,” click the Examples tab, then choose the “Resource pages in the […] niche” option.

Look through the results and reach out to the authors of any pages where it might make sense to feature your content.

For example, this page lists digital marketing resources:

It would probably only take a few minutes to find the author of this page and reach out to pitch a resource for inclusion.

Another easy way to promote content is to post a stripped down version of it on Reddit…

For example, when Tim published his keyword research guide, he posted a TLDR version to the /bigSEO subreddit:

It’s important to remove anything promotional when doing this as Redditors rarely take kindly to that, but it’s a great way to get some extra eyeballs on your content (as hopefully earn a few extra links!)

If you want to beat the competition in the long run, you’re going to need more links, reviews and other off-page signals than them. Consistently doing interesting things in the real world is arguably the best way to get these.

For example, Ash Young, Founder of CarMats.co.uk, recently sponsored a local football team:

Although his motivation for this wasn’t primarily to get backlinks, it did earn him a link from the club’s homepage:

Now, obviously, not everyone can afford to sponsor a local football team. But there are still plenty of interesting things you can do if you’re willing to use your imagination and get creative…

For example, a bakery near me recently launched a doughnut for just 10 pence to honour a popular British candy bar. This got them a feature and mention in a local online newspaper:

I doubt this campaign cost them a lot of money. They probably just had to sell a couple of hundred donuts at a small loss for a day or two.

It’s the businesses who consistently push the boat like this in the real world that will have the best off-page SEO, as it’s hard to replicate these backlinks and other positive off-page signals through “conventional” SEO campaigns.

Is there anything else I should do?

Not really. If you’re a big brand then you can also do things like creating or optimizing your Wikipedia, but I wouldn’t worry about these things unless you truly are a big brand. Even we had trouble getting Wikipedia to keep our page live, so it’s virtually impossible for small brands.

As for things like “be active on social media” that you often see on similar checklists, well, this probably isn’t going to have a huge impact on SEO. It’s also something that you should be doing anyway as part of your marketing efforts, so I wouldn’t file it as an off-page SEO tactic.

Got questions? Ping me on LinkedIn or X.