Off-site SEO (or external SEO) refers to all optimizations performed outside of your own website that increase your site’s popularity, authority, and trustworthiness. It focuses on external signals, such as backlinks from other websites, social media mentions, and online reviews, to improve your online visibility and rankings.
Social Media
Want to achieve better results with social media marketing? A strong online presence is essential. With a well-thought-out social media strategy, you’ll not only increase your online visibility but also your brand awareness and customer loyalty. Together, we’ll assess whether your website is fully aligned with an effective social media strategy. Pay attention to the following optimization points:
- Shareability – Do all your web pages have clear social media share buttons, so visitors can easily share your content?
- Meta tags – Does your website use the correct Open Graph and Twitter Card tags, so shared links automatically display the correct image and description?
- Follow buttons – Can visitors follow your social media accounts directly from your website? Brand consistency – Do your social media profiles visually align with your yacht brand’s branding, creating a recognizable brand experience?
- Vanity URLs – Have you set up a recognizable, customized URL on all relevant social media channels?
- Active promotion – Do you encourage visitors to like, share, or tweet your posts?
- Content sharing – Do you regularly share valuable content on social media, such as new blog posts, yacht photos, or event news?
- Advertising – Do you use targeted social media ads to expand your reach and reach potential buyers or charter clients?
A well-optimized social media strategy strengthens your online visibility, increases brand awareness, and generates more traffic to your website. This way, you build an engaged community around your brand and attract the right target audience.
Reviews
It’s important to collect good reviews, especially on independent platforms like trustpilot.com and Google Reviews.
Link building
Earning links to your website is called link building. It’s a matter of offering engaging content. If websites and portals related to your field link to your website, Google will consider your website important and your PageRank will improve.
Portals
Advertising on portals can generate additional website visitors and therefore revenue because portals are often easy to find. The downside is that advertising on reputable portals is often expensive and your competitors are also listed. If you can earn a link on a portal, it’s often a “no-follow” link, which doesn’t positively impact your ranking. In the long run, it’s better to ensure your own website is the most relevant, so you don’t need the expensive portals.
Backlink Checker
Online tools allow you to see which sites are already linking to your website. Also use this tool to see backlinks to your competitors’ websites. You might also be able to earn a backlink on those same sites: Try semrush.com or ahrefs.com/backlink-checker
Disavow spammy links
Participating in link farms or paid links to improve page rank is penalized by Google. This also applies to excessive links in blogs, forums, etc. Never link back to other websites in exchange for a link to your website. However, it’s possible that competitors, for example, are placing spammy links on link farms to your website, causing Google to penalize you. In that case, you can report them.
Email marketing
Sending a successful email newsletter in times when people are already receiving too many emails is a complex undertaking. This article provides several recommendations to ensure that:
- As many people as possible actually open your email and click through to your website.
- As few people as possible unsubscribe from your mailing list or mark your email as spam.
If you want to send newsletters yourself instead of outsourcing it to an expert, we recommend taking a short (online) email marketing training course.
Design
- Make sure the email looks trustworthy before the images are downloaded after the reader has given permission. So use text, not an image (with text).
- Use a standard font.
- Place your address information and social media icons in the footer.
- Design primarily for mobile, not just desktop.
- Add an unsubscribe link and a link to the online version.
- Choose the right subject line and preview text.
- Provide clear call-to-action buttons to direct the reader to your website.
Testing
Making your newsletters look perfect on all different devices, operating systems, browsers, email clients, screen settings, etc., is an impossible task, although achieving optimal results is certainly challenging. For the best results, we recommend testing every new newsletter.
Before sending a newsletter, test it with an HTML Email Testing Service such as litmus.com or emailonacid.com and a test mailing list.
Email Verification
To ensure your email doesn’t end up in spam folders or get blocked entirely by spam filters, you need to ensure proper verification. To do this, you need to add rules to your domain’s DNS zone. You can test whether your email verification is working properly via the following link: mail-tester.com.
Domain Reputation
Internet service providers, such as Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, etc., determine your IP or domain reputation and filter all emails originating from your IP address based on that. By sending newsletters, you risk damaging your reputation and your IP address ending up on various blacklists. Even if you follow all the recommendations below and adhere strictly to the rules, it’s still not entirely possible to prevent recipients from (unjustly) filing a spam complaint and/or from marking your email address as spam or junk mail in their email program. This can cause your newsletter’s email address to automatically end up in spam folders or be blocked. The following is recommended to minimize the risk of damaging your IP or domain reputation:
- Choose a separate email address as the sender; don’t use your own.
Process bounce messages in your newsletter inboxes (automatically or manually). Subscribers can unsubscribe from the mailing list in several ways:
Subscribers click the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of the newsletter. Subscribers are then automatically unsubscribed and remain on the list as unsubscribed. Acymailing will send you a system message when people subscribe or unsubscribe. You don’t need to do anything with these messages.
Subscribers reply to the newsletter with a manually written message asking if you want to remove them from your list. These email addresses must also be manually unsubscribed from the list.
Subscribers change/cancel their own email address. In that case, you will receive an automated system message with the subject line something like “undelivered mail” or “email could not be delivered.” It is important that these email addresses are also manually unsubscribed from the list. Sometimes people also set an “autoreply” message. You should also monitor this closely, as it often indicates that someone has a new email address.
Subscribers click a “This is spam/junk mail” button in their email client or report the email as spam. In that case, you will at most receive a message from the ISP or an “anti-spam organization,” often to postmaster@yourdomain or abuse@yourdomain. Should this ever happen, it’s important to manually unsubscribe those email addresses from the list. You should also respond to (un)justified spam complaints to prevent further reputational damage to your domain. - If you use an external mail server, you can also export bounced addresses, which you can use to clean up your list. Note: Never remove unsubscribed subscribers from the list; instead, set them to “unsubscribed” and leave them in the list. If a new file of email addresses is imported in the future, and those previously unsubscribed addresses are also included in that new file, you must prevent them from being imported back into your mailing list. This can be done by leaving the unsubscribed addresses in the list as unsubscribed and selecting “Do not overwrite existing data” when importing. This prevents duplicate email addresses from ending up in the mailing list. Only include email addresses in your mailing list for which the subscriber has given permission through the double-opt-in registration system on your website. Before sending each newsletter, check that all new subscriptions have been confirmed by clicking the link in the verification email and contact any subscriptions that have not yet been confirmed.
Register a valid email address for receiving spam complaints with abuse.net and take action if a spam complaint is received. - Ensure that the “WHOIS Contact Information” for your domain is correct and complete. You can ask your hosting provider to check and correct this.
- Do not use spammy language in your newsletter or subject line.
- Instruct newsletter subscribers to add your newsletter email address to their contact list in their email program.
- Make it very easy and clear for subscribers to unsubscribe. It’s much better if subscribers unsubscribe via the link in your newsletter than if they click a “This is spam” button. One (or two) clear unsubscribe buttons or links are therefore recommended.
Have an “external” delivery service” to your email system for sending your newsletters.
