Ecommerce Link Building Strategies – Proven to Boost Rankings

Keep Track of Competition

By keeping track of your competition, you’ll be able to borrow strategy relating to which sites are linking back to them. Use tools like Moz’s Open Site Explorer to browse the catalog of backlinks for your competition, as well as your own ecommerce website.

Add a Blog

A simple strategy for driving traffic (and backlinks) to your ecommerce website is by adding a blog component. Companies that blog receive 97% more links to their website, and 13x more ROI than those that don’t. Use these pages to create content related to your niche. Make sure that it is so good that people can’t ignore you (high quality), or focus on sharing content that is very clickable/click bait. A few types of content to consider with backlinks in mind:

Evergreen Content

Content that remains relevant regardless of the situation or time of year. Infographic, How-to guide, Buying guide

Viral Content

You can put this on your blog, but it is better shared on social media. Consider this as more of a social media promotions strategy. Memes, Consider creating “Ego-bait,” which is a listicle that links to popular sites (example: Best Fashion Bloggers of 2017) to your blog post. These influencers will share the post to their audiences, which will, in turn, bring more clicks to your site. Don’t forget to inform those you featured about it! Videos The blog content you create should depend on your brand personality. If you’re targeting beginner surfers, they would probably want more informative content about how to start surfing, so don’t post memes they wouldn’t be able to relate to. If done well, adding a blog to your ecommerce website will also open you up to guest posting opportunities.

Guest Posting

Although former Google spam team head Matt Cutts publicly been quoted saying that guest blogging is dead, there have been case studies that have sworn by its effectiveness, like this one for Ninja Outreach, which claims that 10 guest posts brought in 5% of their 2-year overall referral traffic. There are many benefits of guest posting, like the fact that the practice: Builds authority and establishes credibility, Reaches a wider audience, Expands online circle and enhances social media presence on top of strengthening SEO Unfortunately, there are a lot of people that do guest blogging for all the wrong reasons and go about guest blogging the wrong way.

Here’s how you can fight the spam: As the receiver of guest blog posts: scrutinize each submission you receive. Make sure you only accept from reputable links that are related to your business. As the writer of guest blog posts: pitch stories to higher authority sites related to your niche Neil Patel is a blogger that was able to use guest blogging to build good backlinks and makes for an excellent case study in the right way to go about this ecommerce backlink strategy.

Giving away products for review to influential bloggers and publications is another a good way to get backlinks. Specifically, getting press features can also get you a high credibility backlink (versus blogs). Start with small publications, then work your way up. Having a PR person on your site can help, but consider pitching yourself using a service like Cision’s Help A Reporter Out (also known as HARO).

Social Promotion

Though hard to measure specifically, there’s a distinct social component to off-page SEO. Urge people to follow your social media pages like Facebook and Twitter, possibly incorporating some of the contest tactics mentioned earlier. Encouraging people to like or follow a page without a compelling reason or incentive won’t work, so craft messaging or promotions around this knowledge.

Don’t forget to cross-promote your blog posts on social media. According to Awareness Inc,  96% of marketers keep track of how many followers their companies have, 84% keep track of their mentions, and 89% keep track of traffic. By tracking mentions, you can message those that mentioned you to change their link to the most relevant one.

Having share buttons on your ecommerce page can be useful, so people that like your products can easily share them to their Facebook walls, Twitter timelines, or Pinterest boards.

Ecommerce Link Building Strategies Proven to Boost Rankings

Link building an important SEO strategy you should be using to help rank your ecommerce site. It will certainly make all the difference in ranking between your website and a competitor’s.

Link building is hard work, and the results won’t pay off til months later, but keep pushing, and you’ll get there. Adapt the link building strategy best suited to your brand, and adapt more if you can. Shane Barker, a digital marketing consultant, recommends using multiple strategies so as to not keep all your eggs in one basket. Most importantly, don’t try to do everything at the same time if it does not work personally for your brand.

Need some help with ecommerce link building? Having no luck with your outreach tactics? Consider working with backlink/SEO experts at Over the Top SEO. Everyone we work with gets a free 30 minute SEO diagnostic review, and from there, we’ll work together to create a winning backlink strategy. Get in touch to learn more!