Off-page SEO checklist

An off-page SEO checklist should cover seven areas, in this order: your existing link profile, links you can claim for free, new link acquisition, brand mentions and reputation, local citations and reviews, visibility in AI answers, and ongoing monitoring. The order matters because the early items are cheap and shape the later ones.

Off-page SEO means signals created outside your own pages. You influence them. You do not control them. What is off-page SEO explains the scope.

The seven areas at a glance

Area	What you are checking	How often
1. Link profile baseline	Who links to you, to which pages, with what anchors	Once, then quarterly
2. Free links	Lost links, broken targets, unlinked mentions, partners	Monthly
3. New links	Target pages, prospects, vetting, live checks	Per campaign
4. Brand and reputation	Mentions, press coverage, author and company profiles	Monthly
5. Local	Citations, business profile, reviews	Quarterly
6. AI visibility	Whether AI answers name and cite you	Monthly
7. Monitoring and risk	New and lost links, anchors, manual actions	Weekly to monthly

1. Baseline your link profile

• Export referring domains from Search Console and one backlink tool.
• Count referring domains, not total links. An Ahrefs study of one million keywords, published in January 2025, found referring domains correlate with rankings at 0.255, slightly more than raw backlink counts.
• List which pages receive links. Most sites find nearly all of them point to the homepage.
• Review the anchor text mix. Brand and URL anchors should make up the largest share.
• Note the share of followed links and any links marked sponsored.
• Compare with three competitors that rank for your main terms.

Link gap analysis covers the comparison.

2. Claim what is already yours

These tasks need no new content and little outreach.

• Find links pointing to pages on your site that return an error. Redirect or restore them.
• Find links you have lost in the past year and ask for them back where the page still exists.
• Search for mentions of your brand, products and people that carry no link.
• List customers, suppliers, partners, associations and events that could link to you.
• Check that links to old domains or old URLs are redirected properly.

The link reclamation tactic page gives the steps.

3. Plan and build new links

• Choose the pages that need links, and a reason someone would link to each.
• Choose tactics that fit your budget and risk tolerance.
• Build a prospect list and vet every site before contact.
• Set an anchor text rule: mostly brand, limited exact match.
• Decide in writing whether the business will pay for placements, and who approves.
• Keep a steady pace that matches your site’s size and news flow.

For each live link:

• The link is in the rendered page with the agreed attribute.
• The page is indexable and reachable from the site’s navigation.
• Indexing checked at day 7, 14 and 30.
• The link is logged with date, target, anchor and cost.

Vetting deserves real time. BuzzStream’s June 2026 study rated 96.2% of roughly 257,000 guest post sellers as low quality. Your first 100 links suggests an order for a new site.

4. Brand mentions and reputation

• Set up monitoring for your brand name, product names and key people.
• Check what the first page of results says when someone searches your brand plus “reviews”.
• Make sure company and author profiles on third-party sites are accurate and consistent.
• Pitch expert comment or data to publications your customers read.
• Respond to reviews on the platforms that matter in your sector.

Mentions count even without a link. Brand mentions and citations explains why.

5. Local citations and reviews

Skip this section if you have no physical location or service area.

• Claim and complete your Google Business Profile.
• Make name, address and phone number identical everywhere they appear.
• List the business in the main directories and data aggregators for your country.
• Add industry and local listings, such as trade bodies and chambers of commerce.
• Ask customers for reviews as a routine, and reply to them.

Citations are cheap. BrightLocal’s citation builder listed prices of $2.00 to $3.20 per citation in October 2026. See local citations.

6. Visibility in AI answers

• Ask the main AI search products the questions your customers ask. Note whether you are named and which sources are cited.
• List the sources that appear repeatedly. Those are the publications and lists to be included in.
• Check that descriptions of your brand on third-party sites are accurate.
• Track the results monthly.

This area is now measured by practitioners as standard: in BuzzStream’s State of Digital PR 2026 survey, 55.4% of respondents reported tracking AI citation mentions. How AI search chooses sources explains the mechanics.

7. Monitoring and risk

• Review new and lost referring domains weekly or monthly.
• Watch for changes to existing links: removed, switched to nofollow, or page set to noindex.
• Watch the anchor mix for a rising share of exact-match commercial anchors.
• Check the Manual Actions report in Search Console.
• Investigate sudden spikes of unknown links before acting on them.
• Review the whole checklist after each Google spam or core update.

Do not add “disavow bad links” as a routine item. Google’s guidance is to use the tool only when you have a manual action for unnatural links, or a considerable number of links you built or paid for that are likely to cause one. Backlink audit and toxic links explains when a clean-up is justified.

What to leave off the list

Some items appear on many checklists and do little:

• Mass directory and bookmark submissions. Google’s spam policies list low-quality directory links as link spam.
• Forum signatures and blog comments with keyword anchors, which the same policies name.
• Chasing an authority score for its own sake.
• Automated link creation of any kind.

Where to go next

If you are working alone, do areas 1 and 2 this week and area 3 next month. For software that covers the exports and monitoring, see the backlink tools comparison. Terms such as referring domain, citation and anchor text are defined in the glossary.