Offpage SEO

Onpage SEO covers everything that happens on your own site: page titles, headings, text structure, internal links, loading time and technical cleanliness. That's entirely in your hands and works comparatively fast. Offpage SEO describes how your site is perceived from outside – above all who links to you and in what context. Google treats a link as a recommendation: when a topically related, trustworthy site points to you, some of that trust transfers. The everyday difference: onpage you can control, offpage you have to earn. Together they form the picture Google has of your site.

A new backlink usually shows first effects after two to three months. Google first has to recrawl the linking page, evaluate the link and calculate the impact on your ranking – that doesn't happen overnight. With strong, topically relevant sites it goes faster; with rarely visited ones it can take longer. What matters isn't the individual link but the development over time: steady growth over six to twelve months has far more effect than twenty links in one week. The latter actually stands out and can hurt, because a sudden jump looks unnatural.

The most valuable links come from sites that are topically related to you and enjoy trust themselves. For a Swiss SME that means industry associations, regional portals, trade media and partner companies. An editorial mention in a trade article weighs more than an entry in a link directory, because it sits in a meaningful context. Also valuable and often overlooked: local listings such as local.ch, search.ch and regional directories. They bring less ranking power but strengthen local visibility and ensure consistent contact details – which Google evaluates for map results.

Fewer than most people assume. For a local SME in central Switzerland, twenty to fifty good references are often enough to keep up with regional competition. What matters isn't the number but where they come from: a single link from a respected industry site weighs more than a hundred from automatically generated directories. A useful yardstick is a direct comparison with the three sites ranking above you for your most important search terms. If you're in a similar position, you have enough. If you're clearly behind, you know what's missing – and if you're clearly ahead, put the time into content instead.

Yes, if done carelessly. Purchased links, large-scale link exchanges and automatically generated entries are reliably detected by Google, and the consequence ranges from having no effect to a penalty. Particularly risky are providers promising a fixed number of links per month at a fixed price – proper link building can't be ordered like a product. We therefore work only with references that have a recognisable reason: a trade article, a partnership, a directory your company belongs in anyway. That takes longer but can't harm you.