Onsite Vs Offsite SEO: What’s The Difference?

Know the difference and importance between Off-site and On-site SEO and the main techniques used to help you drive more traffic to your website.

There are different ways to gain more organic traffic in search engine result pages (SERP’s) via search engine optimization (SEO). SEO can be divided into two categories – On-site and Off-site SEO.

In this article, we will cover the following definitions:

On-site vs Off-site SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) itself is the effort in which website owners use various techniques, including keywords and organic images, to push their content to the top of search engine results and drive more traffic to their website.

If used coinciding with valuable content, you can gather more conversions while building better relationships with your target audiences.

Related: How to display review stars on the search results

The algorithm and AI “crawlers” Google uses to index websites is strongly influenced by both on-site and off-site SEO. To optimize your website even further, you need to understand the difference between on-site and off-site SEO and how each can factor better results to reach your goals.


What is On-Site SEO?

Every method you solely use on your owned website and have full control over is considered on-site SEO. Examples of on-site optimization include optimization of the meta tags, content optimization, image title, and alt tag optimization, internal linking, schema markup, and so on.

Everything you do on your website to help drive more organic traffic to your website from search engines is On-site SEO.

What’s the difference between Onsite SEO and Onpage SEO?

On-site refers to the optimization of the overall structure of your website, whereas on-page refers to optimization on specific pages.

What’s excellent about on-site SEO is that you can test your website, either through an automated program or via an experienced agency, and then utilize various techniques to build a stronger website that is more likely to be picked up by Google’s “crawlers.”

On-site SEO Techniques

To better understand onsite SEO, here you have a list of the most essential on-site SEO techniques:

  • Meta tag optimization (Title, description, keywords, and robots tags.)
  • Optimize text content with relevant keywords and terms
  • Use proper text to code ratio
  • Use different heading tags for your titles (h1, h2, h3, etc)
  • Optimize images (proper image naming and include alt-text)
  • Use the strong and em tag to important content
  • Add Schema markup whenever possible (structured data)
  • Link to relevant pages within your website
  • Optimize anchor text and URLs
  • Improve page load speed (less than 3 seconds is good)
  • Make sure your site is 100% mobile responsive

What is Off-Site SEO?

Off-site SEO refers to optimization techniques you use outside your website to improve organic rankings in the search engine result pages. At its core, Off-site SEO’s primary purpose is to increase the number of high-quality links back to your website.

One of the factors Google’s “crawlers” measure your website’s worth and domain authority is based on the number of backlinks from high authoritative sites.

Off-site SEO Techniques

We have compiled a list of the most important off-site/ off-page SEO techniques:

  • Make your articles and blog post shareable
  • Promote or advertise your content on social media
  • Write an article for a high authoritative website
  • Reach out to social media influencers in your industry
  • Participate in forums and question-and-answer websites
  • Upload videos related to your industry to Youtube, Vimeo, etc.
  • Share Infographics or images on popular platforms like Pinterest
  • Submit your business listing to Goole, Bing, and Yahoo
  • Create optimized profiles on business directories

What’s The Difference between On-site and Off-site SEO?

Onsite SEO refers to all optimization techniques you use on your owned website and server. In contrast, Offsite SEO takes care of everything outside your site like social media posts, online directories, backlinks, and so on.


There are multiple techniques and factors, both on-site and off-site, that can help grow your website’s ranking on social media and ultimately lead to more traffic and conversions to your site.

You can develop your strongest chance of being picked up by Google’s “crawlers” with a well thought out and SEO planned web design that starts working from the start. Reach out to a member of Inova Web Design today for a free consultation.