Both on-page and off-page SEO are important, but from experience, on-page should always come first. If the site isn’t technically sound, well-structured, and optimized, you won’t get the full benefit from any off-page work you do.
When your on-page SEO is strong, clean HTML, proper headings, fast loading speed, optimized content, schema markup, and good internal linking, every backlink you build works 10x better. Google and AI tools can understand your pages more easily, which helps you rank faster with less effort.
So yes, off-page is powerful, but a perfectly optimized on-page foundation makes your off-page investments far more effective and sustainable.