7 Must-Have Off-Page SEO Tools for Your Ranking Success!

The term off-page optimization refers to all measures that can be taken outside your own website to improve its position in search engine results. Our guest authors Angela Andreano and Magdalena Mues reveal in this article what these measures are and which 7 tools can support you in the optimization.

What measures can you use for your off-page optimization?

Within the scope of Off-page optimization, there are various measures that help to generate as many high-quality backlinks (incoming links) as possible. This is particularly relevant for search engine optimization, as search engines consider these links direct indicators of the authority of your website.

With the help of a backlink analysis, you get an initial overview of the status quo of a website. This gives you a better understanding of its ability to rank well in the SERPs.

The backlink analysis helps you, for example, to identify bad links and uncover potentials. This brings advantages for you, especially compared to your competitors. But also the identification and removal of unnatural links or links from spam websites is made easier for you, ensuring that you avoid a possible penalty from Google.

But how do you best approach off-page optimization? In addition to the best SEO tools, you will find below a list of the 7 best tools that can be useful in the field of off-page optimization, both for backlink analysis and for the implementation of your chosen strategy.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs  has - apart from Google - undoubtedly the best backlink database in the industry. All data is always up to date, as the index is updated every 15 minutes.

Figure 1: Overview of Metrics - ahrefs.com

One of the 5 core tools in the Ahrefs set, the Site Explorer feature is particularly useful for regularly checking and keeping track of your backlink profile. With Ahrefs you can check any URL as well as subdomain to get actionable and informative SEO metrics.

Among others, these include:

• Number of referring domains
• Backlinks count
• Domain Rating (as an indication to assess the backlink popularity/strength of a target)
• Organic Traffic

You can also get a first overview of the development of the backlink profile regarding the number of referring domains and the domain rating in a limited time:

Figure 2: Development of the number of referring domains - ahrefs.com

Figure 3: Development of the Domain Ratings - ahrefs.com

You can also export the referring domains as a report in the form of an Excel table to get initial insights about the quality of the referring domains: How many domains link with Dofollow and Nofollow links to my page? How many new referring domains have been added in the last 6 months? Can obvious spam domains be identified?

Figure 4: Overview of the referring domains - ahrefs.com

In Ahrefs you can also get an overview of your competition: It is possible to look at your referring domains and identify publishers who do not yet link to your website.

This strategy is particularly helpful in the context of domain research. Interesting is also that you can analyze the anchor texts with Ahrefs very easily and possible negative SEO attacks on your website timely detect and circumvent. All data and reports can also be downloaded as PDF or CSV files for further analysis.

The Site Explorer from Ahrefs is therefore a real powerhouse that can handle just about any backlink research task. Besides Ahrefs, you can find more tools for link building and backlinks on OMR Reviews.

Semrush

Semrush

The Backlink Audit Tool

The Backlink Audit Tool is worth it for several reasons: With the tool, for example, you can ensure that the links you receive are the right kind of links and are not harmful.

This is especially helpful in the context of a toxicity analysis. Once you have conducted a backlink audit, you can then also export an extensive report with all the information as a PDF.

The dashboard also gives you an immediate clear overview of various aspects of the backlink profile thanks to various graphics:

• The distribution of the anchor texts
• The percentage of the dofollow and nofollow incoming links
• Authority score (a proprietary metric from Semrush, whose evaluation is based on the number of backlinks, the referring domains, the organic search traffic and other data)
• Toxicity score (toxic, potentially toxic and non-toxic referring domains)
  

Backlink Gap Analysis

With the Backlink Gap tool, you can compare the backlink profiles of up to five competing websites at once. Once you have entered the domains, Semrush lists all the referring domains that are sending links to these websites. The filters make it easy to identify exactly the websites that link to your competition but not to you. This helps SEOs to identify gaps between the link building strategies of competition and to approach new strategies.

In this way, you also get a complete list of domains that you can evaluate based on metrics and accordingly contact for your content pitches.

Figure 5: Backlink Gap Analysis - semrush.com

SEO Tools for Excel

SEOTools for Excel is a plug-in that is integrated into Excel and simplifies the analysis of raw data by extending SEO functions. This way you can import a wealth of data into your tables - for both on-page and off-page SEO purposes.

In addition, you not only have access to metrics such as Page Rank and Social Shares, but can also use the API of important tools such as Ahrefs, Sistrix, Majestic and ScreamingFrog. This allows you to easily pull useful off-page KPIs, such as visibility, domain rating, number of backlinks and referring domains as well as traffic.

Figure 6: Overview of available tools

Google Disavow Tool

After analyzing the domains that link to your website, it might turn out that the quality of many domains does not meet your KPIs. In this case, the creation of a so-called disavow list in the Google Disavow Tool, is suitable to devalue these pages.

In this way, Google will not consider these pages in the future for the calculation of rankings and will treat them like No-Follow links. The complete list is finally created as a .txt file, with each domain to be listed with the additional “domain:” so, for example, “domain: example.de.” Before all other information there should be a “#.” These are ignored by Google for devaluation.

You can then upload this list to the Disavow Tool. However, it may take several months for the results in the ranking to actually become visible.

When regularly checking the referring domains, also make sure that you include the domains from the old uploaded list in the new list before you upload the disavow list.

Here you will find some practical tips from Google.

Figure 7: Extract from a Disavow list in .txt file

Watch out! This tool should only be used by experienced webmasters and SEO specialists, as incorrect use of this function can affect rankings. So you better get a second opinion from an SEO agency beforehand.

LinkParser

LinkParser is an add-on that analyzes the links of the current page. It differentiates between 9 link types, which can be marked individually.

LinkParser can differentiate the following types of links to count or label on the website: internal links, internal dofollow links, internal nofollow links, subdomain links, subdomain dofollow links, subdomain nofollow links, external links, external dofollow links, external nofollow links.

How LinkParser displays the collected information to you is up to you, as the tool is very customizable in its presentation.

SimilarSites

SimilarSites is an extension of SimilarWeb that can be integrated as an add-on in Chrome. If you are on any website, click on the SimilarSites icon next to the address bar and you immediately get results of websites that are similar to the visited website.

For each recommended website, a thumbnail of the homepage, a brief description and title of the website are displayed. If you want to see more results, just click on the title and you get a complete similarity report displayed on the SimilarSites website.

This feature is particularly useful when you are in the research and outreach phase of your off-page strategy. You want to advertise your content on other pages and help your overall site to gain more visibility.

Google

Google Search Console, Alerts, News - it seems obvious, but Google is expanding daily with new pages and thus new potential contacts who could be interested in our content.

It might seem too obvious to list Google here, but you should never underestimate the influence of this search engine. Google indexes the entire web and thus has a list of all pages that could link to your website. With the help of Google, you therefore have a perfect collection of all pages to whom you can pitch your content!

Driving off-page optimization forward with SEO tools

From analyzing your backlink profile to checking the quality of referring domains - since off-page is an important part of SEO, the selection of SEO tools also plays a key role. They provide you with access to important information about your site.

There are many different areas of application, particularly for research and outreach, to continuously and organically gain new backlinks. Ahrefs, Semrush, Google and other add-ons and plugins will help you identify previously undiscovered potentials and work out and implement your off-page strategy.