DefinitionEverything done outside your own website to improve its authority and rankings, mainly earning backlinks from other sites, plus brand mentions and reviews.
Off-page SEO is everything you do outside your own website to strengthen its authority and reputation in the eyes of search engines: mainly earning backlinks from other sites, but also brand mentions, customer reviews and local citations. Where on-page SEO is about what you control on your own pages, off-page SEO (also called off-site SEO or off-page optimisation) is about what the rest of the web says about you, and how much of that Google can see and trust.
The common misunderstanding is that off-page SEO equals buying links. Shop owners get an email offering “50 high-DA backlinks” for a few hundred euros and assume that is how it works. It is not: a backlink is a vote of confidence, and Google has spent two decades learning to tell real votes from bought ones. The opposite error is believing that authority is out of your hands entirely. It is slower than fixing a title tag, but a webshop has more levers here than most owners realise.
Why off-page SEO matters for a webshop
Backlinks remain the core of off-page SEO. When a relevant site links to yours, Google reads it as a signal that your pages are worth ranking. What counts is quality and relevance, not volume: one link from a respected Dutch gardening blog does more for a plant webshop than a hundred links from directories nobody visits. The anchor text matters too, and so does the link attribute. A normal (dofollow) link passes authority; links marked nofollow, sponsored or ugc tell Google to treat them as hints at best.
The commercial consequence is simple. For competitive product categories, the shops on page one often have comparable on-page work and comparable technical health. What separates them is authority. I regularly see a PrestaShop category page with better content than the competitor above it, sitting on position 6 because the competitor has three times as many referring domains. Position 6 versus position 2 can mean a few dozen clicks a month versus a few hundred, and at a typical conversion rate that is real revenue left on the table.
Off-page SEO is wider than links. Reviews on Google Business Profile and Trustpilot influence local rankings and conversion directly; for a Lightspeed shop with a physical store, a steady flow of recent reviews is one of the strongest local SEO signals available. Local citations (your business name, address and phone number on directories and platforms) need to be consistent, because conflicting NAP data undermines trust. Brand mentions without a link, including mentions in AI answers, increasingly count as reputation signals as well. Social signals are not a direct ranking factor; a viral post can earn links and mentions, but the likes themselves do nothing.
How to measure off-page SEO
Ahrefs is my main tool for this. I look at the number of referring domains rather than total backlinks (one site linking 500 times from its footer is one vote, not 500), the Domain Rating trend over time, and the new and lost links report to see what changed month on month. The most useful view for a webshop is the link gap: the sites that link to two or three competitors but not to you. Those are the realistic targets, because they have already shown they link to shops in your niche. An unnatural share of exact-match commercial anchors is a warning sign I check too.
Google Search Console has its own Links report, which shows which external sites and pages Google itself has found linking to you, and which of your pages receive the most links. It is less complete than Ahrefs but it is Google’s own view. For brand mentions beyond classic links I use Ahrefs Brand Radar to track how often a shop is named in AI responses, and a simple Google search for the brand name minus the domain to find unlinked mentions. Reviews and citations I check by hand in Google Business Profile, Trustpilot and the main directories for the sector.
Common off-page SEO mistakes
Buying bulk links from marketplaces. Cheap link packages violate Google’s spam policies, and the link spam update means such links are more likely to be ignored than to help. In the worst case they trigger a manual action that takes months to recover from.
Chasing authority scores instead of relevance. A DR 70 link from an unrelated finance blog is worth less than a DR 30 link from a site your customers actually read. Relevance to your product and audience is the first filter; the metric comes second.
Ignoring reviews and citations. Many webshops with a showroom or pickup point never ask for Google reviews and have a different phone number on three directories. For local queries like “fietsenwinkel Zwolle” that costs visibility that no amount of blog links will buy back.
Treating off-page SEO as a one-off campaign. Links get lost when sites close or redesign, competitors keep building, and a burst of 40 links in one month followed by nothing looks artificial. Steady, modest activity every quarter beats a single push.
How I handle off-page SEO for clients
I start with a baseline: referring domains, DR trend, anchor profile, toxic or irrelevant links, and a competitor link gap for the three or four shops that outrank the client in their main categories. That tells us whether authority is actually the bottleneck; sometimes the money is better spent on content or technical fixes first. When it is, I draw up a quarterly plan with a fixed budget and clear relevance criteria for every placement: the site must be about the client’s niche or region, have real organic traffic, and link from within the content.
In the Dutch market, link marketplaces and paid guest articles are a fact of life. I do use paid placements, but I treat them as what they are: sponsored. That means transparent agreements, the right attributes where the publisher requires them, and budgeting them per quarter alongside the earned work rather than pretending they are organic. The earned side is where webshops have a genuine advantage. Suppliers and brands usually have a dealer or stockist page and are happy to link to retailers who ask. Niche blogs will review a product if you send one. Data from your own shop, such as which colours sell best per province, makes content that bloggers cite. Unlinked brand mentions can often be turned into links with a short email.
The deliverable is a running link and mention log in a shared sheet, with the quarterly baseline numbers repeated so the client sees the trend, plus a short list of actions that need their input (products to send out, suppliers to contact). For shops with a physical location the review and citation work goes into the same plan. A link is only worth as much as the page it points to, so I build authority to category and guide pages that are already well optimised. My linkbuilding service and local SEO service cover this work end to end.
Frequently asked questions
Is off-page SEO just link building?
No. Link building is the largest part of off-page SEO, but reviews, local citations, digital PR and unlinked brand mentions all contribute to how search engines judge your authority and reputation.
Is buying links allowed?
Buying links to manipulate rankings is against Google’s spam policies. Paying for a sponsored article or placement is fine as long as it is marked as such (rel=”sponsored” or nofollow) and the publisher is transparent about it. I keep paid placements clearly separated from earned links and judge them on relevance and referral value.
Do social media posts help my rankings?
Not directly. Google has said repeatedly that likes and shares are not a ranking factor. Social media helps indirectly: a post that reaches the right people can lead to links, mentions and reviews, and those do count. Treat it as a distribution channel for content worth linking to, not as a ranking tactic in itself.
How long before off-page SEO shows results?
Slower than on-page or technical work. New links need to be crawled and weighed, and the effect builds up over months. In my experience a consistent quarterly programme shows a visible shift in referring domains within one quarter and in rankings within two to three, though it varies by niche and starting point.