What’s the Difference Between On-page and Off-Page SEO?

On-page and off-page: SEO in two halves. But what are they? Well, they both do different jobs, but you need both working together to get results.

On-page SEO is everything you can edit and control on your own website.

Off-page SEO is all about how other people, the rest of the internet,  talk about you on their own sites and link back to your URL.

The easiest way to picture it is on-page as you, tidying up your house so it looks good and everything’s in the right place.

Off-page is your family talking about how clean your house is, to other friends and family. You want both: a nice house and a good word-of-mouth.

Google checks both on-page and off-page SEO when it decides where to rank your pages. If your content is perfect but no one’s linking to it, then you’re going to struggle.

And if you’ve got loads of links pointing to a page that’s poorly written or confusing, it won’t hold its spot for long.

On-Page Elements You Control

This is all the stuff on your own website - titles, headings, images, URLs. The actual words on the page. The goal? Clear, helpful, and easy to read content - not only for Google, but for real people too.

It’s not about cramming in as many keywords as you can anymore. Google’s smarter than that. It’s looking at how useful your content is, and things like how long someone sticks around, whether they read and scroll or click straight off.

Internal links matter here too. The way you link between your own pages helps Google understand what your site’s about and which pages are most important.

And don’t forget to optimize your site for mobile too. Your site’s got to work smoothly on phones and tablets,  not just on a desktop. If it doesn’t, that’s a major red flag for Google.

Off-Page Signals of Trust

Now let’s talk about off-page. This is mostly about links from other websites pointing back to yours. If credible sites are linking to you, that tells Google that your website is credible and trustworthy.

But it’s not just about links. Reviews, mentions, citations, they all factor in too. If people are talking about you in a good way online, it builds up your authority.