Unlike in the past, when link building was all about quantity, today’s marketers have to pay special attention to quality if they want to make the most of their ecommerce link building strategies.
Whether you’re an owner or a marketer working on a link building strategy, it’s critical to know that you can’t generate incoming links instantly. Remember, it’s a gradual process that requires a thorough understanding of the quality and authority of the pages where you build links.
The key to successful ecommerce link building is to develop the right content strategy. According to research, you’ll get up to 434% more indexed pages with 97% more inbound links when you blog consistently.
But blogging isn’t the only factor that spices up your link building techniques. There are other tried-and-tested link building ways to help you rank your e-commerce store well on SERPs.
In this article, we’re not going to highlight hundreds of e-commerce link building strategies. Instead, we’re going to shed light on just a few easy-breezy techniques that any e-commerce marketer can follow and implement without any difficulty.
Table of Contents
If you’re a seasoned e-commerce store owner, you must already be familiar with the concept of link building. But if you have just started, “link building is the process of getting other websites to link back to your e-store”.
Link building is critical for the success of any online business as it helps drive referral traffic and also increases the website’s authority.
Building links is one of the strategies used in SEO that gives search engines a signal that your website is worthy of citation and higher rankings.
According to Google, “In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.”
There are two types of links you see on a website, including internal links and outbound links.
Internal links, as their name suggests, are links you see on a web page that navigates you to the other pages of the same website.
The purpose of these links is to allow visitors to spend more time on your website. As a result, it improves your site’s authority and helps your store rank better on search engines.
Outbound links, popularly known as external links, are links that take your visitors to other websites. The purpose of these links is to help your visitors get further explanations on the topic.
Now that you know links are an integral part of your SEO strategy, it’s time to see how we can use them for our benefit.
Guest blogging is an old school yet highly result-driven link building strategy that can help generate plenty of authority links in the process.
The sad reality is not many companies are taking due advantage of this amazing technique. Here, the key is to be strategic. Being strategic means you should have a distinct goal in mind before you implement this strategy to your link building framework.
Guest blogging is a process wherein you write a unique article for another website and place your link contextually somewhere within your article (preferably in the author bio)
You can use Google search operators to find good prospects. Apart from that, you can also look for relevant websites and pitch them randomly.
Bonus tip: Find out blogs that are also willing to share your content on their social media pages.
Now the question is how do you determine what those websites/blogs are?
Simply write the title of your guest post in Google’s search box. Consider pitching your headline to the top-rated blogs for that specific keyword.
While guest blogging is an effective link building strategy, if done wrong, it may result in hefty penalties.
Here are a few things you should consider to avoid penalties:
Besides guest blogging, having a dedicated blog section on your website is another proven link building strategy that can help you rank higher on Google.
Create a comprehensive content marketing strategy and equip your blog with high-quality and share-worthy content assets. You can then outreach websites to link to your articles.
Make sure you create content that is likely to attract high-quality links. For this, you can use Ahrefs’s ‘Top Pages by Links’ category to check which specific pages have many referrals.
Now your job is to create content that is better than that of your competitors. By doing so will increase your chances of people connecting to your articles over ones curated by your competitors.
Bonus tip: If you’re not sure about your content/copywriting skills, make sure you hire a pro to do this job for you. Do in-depth research, add media and infographics, and optimize your content for better results.
You may need to reconsider your approach if you think that infographics are dead. They’re an integral element of an inclusive link building strategy.
The good thing about infographics is that they enable you to attract organic traffic to your website and get links consistently.
Research indicates that infographics generate up to 37.5% more backlinks than a post that doesn’t include infographics.
If you already have a graphic designer on board, you can simply tap them to create high-quality and unique infographics for your posts. Alternatively, you can also take help from free-to-use resources like Canva to design basic yet interesting infographics within your budget.
Infographics can go viral instantly. They serve as a useful resource for communicating research, ideas, or statistics.
Bonus tip: Create a gifographic that is a type of infographic that also includes animated GIFs.
Including resource links from high DA, websites is another proven link building strategy you must try in 2021.
A resource is an informative guide that websites create for their target audience. Notably, it is one of the most popular content types that help e-commerce store owners generate quality links.
Many high DA websites, such as Forbes, Mashable, Business Insider, and Huffington Post, create and publish resource pages that you can link to your articles for effective link building.
If you have resources to create a better resource page than these websites, you’ll have more backlinks.
Digital PR is another effective technique that allows e-commerce store owners to get links from trustworthy websites.
However, it is a lot more challenging than creating a resource page. Why? For digital PR, you’ll need to have a compelling story that can quickly capture attention from the press.
How E-Commerce Stores Can Build Backlinks through the Best Digital PR Strategies?
Introducing products that are not commonly available on the market is one of the ways you can grab the press’s attention. Garbage Watch is one of the biggest examples, which is a product crafted from material rescued from junkyards and landfills.
Their website received backlinks from many prominent and high DA websites, including Gizmodo, new atlas, etc.
Advertising your charity or donation program on relevant platforms and websites could fetch in plenty of backlinks as well.
Many charities and community websites got immense coverage on high DA websites during the Covid-19 crisis when they contributed a part of their earnings to the social cause.
One of the ways you can have backlinks for your website is by getting your best products featured on website roundups.
Here, the key is to find websites that are related to your area of expertise. You may, however, have to pay some money for placement. Also, you can send your products to the bloggers who’ll offer exposure and backlinks in return.
If you’re willing to offer good deals and discounts, then you can expect backlinks coming your way from different sources.
If you don’t have time to research and create high-quality content for your website, you can leverage the broken link strategy to rank your e-commerce store.
The broken link strategy is pretty simple. All you need to do is identify blog pages that include broken/dead links. Ask a blogger to replace the dead link with a link same as the content on your website.
To create a broken link strategy, you’ll have to follow three steps:
You can easily find broken link opportunities by using the Best by links feature report available in Ahrefs Site Explorer.
This report displays the number of available domains that have broken links.
Research reveals that 46.2% of websites rank higher on search engines because of links. In other words, the more links you get from the high DA websites, the better your store will rank on SERPs.
While every online seller’s ultimate goal is to get their store rank higher on Google, make sure you stick to natural link building strategies.
Even if you find that your competitors are ranking better on Google, instead of using unethical practices try to stick to the options that can help you grow naturally.
Remember, not all link building strategies revolve around outreaching.
Many times, you need to repurpose your content to have a wider audience. Let’s suppose you have created a value-driven infographic. You have invested your resources, time, and energy into creating this resource.
You can repurpose your infographic now in a video format to widen your reach.
Apart from that, you can also syndicate your content to other independent websites. This means other websites can pick your content and post it with a link back to the source when you publish a blog post.
Different websites follow different formats for that. Some websites publish the whole post, while others just publish a summary and a link back to your full post.
When it comes to SEO, link reclamation is certainly the most critical factor.
The bitter truth is you also lose backlinks on the go. Sounds strange, isn’t it?
But the good news is that you can reclaim broken links and counteract this process by simply fixing your 404 pages.
There are two reasons why you lose backlinks in the first place. First, the link has been excluded from the page. Second, the linking page no longer exists.
Sometimes pages are also excluded by mistake. In that case, you should get in touch with the website owner so that they can reinstate the page and your link.
Developing affiliate partnerships is another way you can rank your e-commerce store well on SERPs.
Just ensure you create an affiliate program and choose the right collaborators to become your affiliate partners.
If you can prove that you have a profitable program, then the chances are your partners will link your website.
That’s fine if you’re focusing on high-quality links only. But if you want to rank your e-commerce store higher on search engines, you must not overlook the usefulness of other sources too.
There are many online forums, including Quora, Reddit, etc that you can use to market your ecommerce store. Doing so will help you diversify your link profile and you’ll be able to build a few additional links.
Just like everything else in the world, many people try to buy links as well. But, this practice is not recommended at all. Google clearly states that “Buying links or participating in link schemes to manipulate PageRank is a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.”
So, if you want to benefit from a link building strategy, make sure you keep your focus on building (read: earning) high-quality links that can increase the overall worth of your website in front of the search engines.
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