The difference between on-page SEO and off-page SEO is that they aim at two different sets of SEO factors. The first one focuses on impacting SEO factors occurring on a page, while the latter focuses on factors outside of a page.

What is on-page SEO?

On-page SEO (also called on-site SEO) is the practice of optimizing webpages to rank higher on search engines. It includes optimizations to visible content and the HTML source code.

Example tactic – Finding relevant subtopics

If your page struggles to rank in the top 10, one of the reasons may be that it lacks the information that searchers are looking for. To find out if that is the case, you’ll need to compare topics covered by top-ranking pages against topics covered by you.

What is off-page SEO?

Off-page SEO embodies any efforts implemented outside of a website to improve its search engine rankings.

Example tactic – Finding link building prospects

Backlinks are one of the most important ranking factors (more on this later). You can earn them organically, and you can also “build” them.

There are many link building tactics out there. One of them is looking for linking patterns among your competition so that you can get links from the same websites. For that, you will need a backlink checking tool

Why are on-page SEO and off-page SEO important?

On-page SEO and off-page SEO are basically two sides of the same coin. SEO is most effective when practiced with both because Google uses ranking factors that occur on your pages and outside of them. 

Depending on your needs, you can sometimes focus more on one of those SEO types. But you probably shouldn’t focus on only one of them all of the time.