Off-Page SEO Checklist: 9 Things to Do Outside Your Website

You can optimise your titles, improve your internal links and publish brilliant content, but not everything that affects your website’s visibility happens on your website.

That’s where off-page SEO comes in.

For bloggers and smaller websites, off-page SEO can sound more complicated than it needs to be. You don’t need a huge PR budget or hundreds of backlinks. Much of it comes down to building your website’s reputation, earning relevant mentions and making sure people can discover your content beyond your own pages.

We’ve put together a practical checklist you can actually work through.

What is off-page SEO?

Off-page SEO covers activity that happens away from your own website and can help improve its visibility, reputation or authority online.

Link building is the most obvious example, but it’s not the only one.

Off-page SEO can include:

• earning backlinks;
• guest posting;
• digital PR;
• brand mentions;
• relevant directory listings;
• reviews;
• participating in communities;
• building relationships with other publishers.

Think of on-page SEO as improving what you control directly. Off-page SEO is largely about how your website connects to the rest of the web.

And importantly, you don’t need to do everything at once.

1. Check your existing backlinks first

Before trying to build new links, find out what you already have.

Google Search Console provides a free Links report, which shows external websites linking to your site, your most-linked pages and commonly used link text.

Third-party tools such as Ahrefs and Semrush can provide considerably more detail, but you don’t necessarily need a paid SEO tool when you’re starting out.

Look at:

Which pages attract the most links?
This can tell you what other websites already consider worth referencing.

Where are those links coming from?
A handful of relevant websites can tell you more than the total number of backlinks.

Are links concentrated around one article?
You may have other strong pages that simply haven’t been discovered yet.

Don’t become obsessed with the total.

Having 247 backlinks instead of 192 doesn’t automatically mean your SEO is improving.

You’re trying to understand your starting point.

2. Identify your most linkable content

One of the biggest link-building mistakes is trying to build links to everything.

Some pages naturally give other publishers more reason to reference them.

Good candidates include:

• original research or statistics;
• detailed guides;
• useful free tools;
• comparison articles;
• original photographs or graphics;
• templates and checklists;
• content answering a question particularly well.

Ask yourself: If I owned another website, why would I link to this?

If you can’t answer that question, improving the content might be a better use of your time than starting outreach.

3. Find relevant link opportunities

This is where link building often becomes tedious.

The aim isn’t simply to find websites in your niche. You’re looking for specific pages where there’s a logical reason for someone to reference your content.

Imagine you’ve published: A Complete Beginner’s Guide to Composting at Home

An article called: ‘25 Easy Ways to Make Your Home More Sustainable‘ , mentions composting in two sentences but doesn’t explain how to start.

There’s a natural connection.

Compare that with finding an unrelated high-authority website and emailing them simply because you’d like a backlink.

The first opportunity has a reason to exist.

You can find these opportunities manually through Google, competitor research and websites you already know. This is also the problem we built LinkWise to help with: searching for relevant opportunities without spending hours opening pages individually.

Whichever method you use, prioritise relevance over volume.

4. Build relationships within your niche

Find bloggers, publishers and website owners covering subjects related to yours.

Read their work. Follow what they’re publishing. Share something when it’s genuinely useful. Have conversations.

This matters because link building ultimately involves other people deciding your content is worth referencing.

A relationship can also become much more valuable than a single backlink. It could eventually lead to collaborations, guest posts, recommendations and completely natural links.

We’ve covered this in more detail in our guide to how to build relationships with other bloggers.

5. Look for guest-post opportunities

Guest posting can introduce your work to an established audience while helping you build relationships with other publishers.

But don’t treat it as a backlink vending machine.

Find websites that:

• operate within or close to your niche;
• publish genuine editorial content;
• have an audience you’d actually like to reach;
• publish content you would be comfortable attaching your name to.

Then look at what’s already on the site.

Instead of:

Hi, can I write a guest post?

you can approach them with an actual idea that complements their existing content.

A smaller, genuinely relevant blog can be a much better opportunity than a seemingly powerful website publishing guest posts about every subject imaginable.

6. Reclaim links and unlinked mentions

Not all link building needs to start from zero.

Search for mentions of:

• your blog name;
• your business or brand;
• your name;
• original images you’ve created;
• statistics or research you’ve published.

You may find websites that have mentioned you without linking to the original source.

Where a link would genuinely help the reader find the source, you can politely ask whether they’d consider adding one.

You should also check for broken backlinks.

If another website links to one of your pages but you’ve since changed its URL, make sure the old URL redirects to the appropriate live page.

This is often much easier than trying to earn an entirely new backlink.

7. Create reasons for people to talk about your site

One of the most sustainable forms of off-page SEO is creating something people naturally want to discuss or reference.

That doesn’t necessarily mean spending thousands on a digital PR campaign.

A small website could publish:

Original data — survey your audience or analyse publicly available information.

A genuinely useful free tool — calculators, planners and interactive resources can naturally attract references.

An interesting experiment — test something people in your niche regularly debate.

Expert contributions — bring several knowledgeable people together around one useful question.

Original resources — maps, templates, datasets, charts or downloadable guides.

8.Participate in relevant communities

Reddit, forums, Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups and specialist communities can put you in front of people interested in your subject.

But joining ten communities and immediately dropping your URL everywhere isn’t off-page SEO. It’s spam.

Participate because you have something useful to contribute.

Answer questions. Share your experience. Get to know what people struggle with.

If you’ve written something that genuinely answers someone’s question and the community permits links, referencing it can sometimes make sense.

Even when you don’t get a backlink, communities can expose your content to people who may later search for your brand, share your work or reference it elsewhere.

9. Track what you’re actually doing

Off-page SEO gets messy quickly.

You might have:

• 15 potential link opportunities;
• three guest posts being discussed;
• six people you’ve contacted;
• two websites to follow up with;
• several successful links;
• opportunities you decided weren’t worthwhile.

Record at least:

Website → Page/opportunity → Contact → Date → Status → Result → Notes

A spreadsheet is absolutely fine when you’re starting.

The important thing is knowing who you’ve contacted and why. Don’t repeatedly approach the same person because you’ve forgotten about your previous email.

If you’re doing this regularly, LinkWise brings opportunity discovery and outreach tracking together so you can keep everything organised without maintaining a separate prospecting spreadsheet.

Final thoughts

Off-page SEO doesn’t need to mean sending hundreds of cold emails or trying to manipulate authority scores.

For bloggers and smaller websites, a much more practical strategy is to create useful things, find relevant places where those things could add value, build relationships with people in your niche and keep track of what you’re doing.

Start with your best content and a handful of genuinely relevant opportunities.

You can build from there.

Task	What to check
Review your backlinks	See which websites and pages already link to you.
Choose content worth promoting	Pick 3–5 genuinely useful pages that give people a reason to link.
Find relevant link opportunities	Look for articles where your content could naturally add value.
Build relationships	Connect with bloggers and publishers who genuinely overlap with your niche.
Find guest post opportunities	Target relevant sites where you can contribute something useful.
Find unlinked mentions	Check whether your name, brand or content has been mentioned without a link.
Fix broken backlinks	Redirect old URLs so existing links still reach the right content.
Check relevant listings	Look for legitimate niche, industry or local directories worth appearing on.
Create link-worthy resources	Give people something useful to reference: data, tools, guides, templates or research.
Join relevant communities	Contribute where people in your niche already spend their time.
Track your outreach	Record opportunities, conversations, follow-ups and results in one place.
Review what’s working	See which activities actually led to links, traffic or useful relationships.