SEO glossary · Updated October 21, 2026

On-page vs off-page SEO: what's the difference?

On-page SEO is what you optimize on your own pages; off-page SEO is what happens on other sites, such as links, mentions and reviews.

Aalhad

Founder, SEO·AEO·GEO

Builds SEO·AEO·GEO and writes the crawler, schema, and citation research published here.

On-page SEO is everything you change on your own pages: content, titles, headings, links and HTML. Off-page SEO is everything that happens elsewhere on the web that affects your site's reputation: links, mentions, reviews and listings. Technical SEO, making sure pages can be crawled and indexed, is usually counted as a third area.

	On-page SEO	Off-page SEO
Where	Your own pages	Other websites and platforms
You control it	Fully	Partly: you can earn it, not order it
Examples	Title tags, headings, content, internal links, alt text, schema	Backlinks, brand mentions, reviews, Business Profile, directories
Speed	Changes show once Google recrawls	Builds over months
Risk	Low	High if you buy links or reviews

Which comes first

Technical: make sure your pages can be crawled and indexed.
On-page: make each important page the clearest answer to its search.
Off-page: earn links and mentions to the pages worth linking to.

Doing them in that order means every link you earn points at a page that can rank.

Detail on each: on-page SEO, off-page SEO and technical SEO.

FAQ

Is technical SEO on-page or off-page?+

It's usually treated as its own area. It happens on your site, so some people group it with on-page SEO.

Can I do off-page SEO without on-page SEO?+

You can, but links to weak or uncrawlable pages achieve little. Fix the pages first.

Sources

SEO Starter Guide — Google Search Central (2025-12-10)
Spam policies for Google web search — Google Search Central (2026-08-28)

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