There are 26.5 million ecommerce websites in the world today and new ones are going to be launched by the time you finish reading this article. No matter what you sell on your ecommerce site, the competition is fierce and standing out is very difficult.
When paid ads seem like an idea that’s too expensive and social media might take months to pay off, the best tactic for ecommerce – SEO. To bring in consistent sales to your ecommerce website, you need to rank well, and for that, you need backlinks.
Today, we’re going to show you a few ways you can build high-quality backlinks for your ecommerce site, from backlink exchanges to running affiliate programs.
Let’s get to it.
Product feedback outreach
No matter what you sell, there are probably numerous websites and bloggers out there talking about your industry and product. If you’re just starting out in the world of SEO, ranking #1 for your most desired search terms will be painstakingly hard. Getting backlinks? Even more so.
One of the top techniques for building backlinks in this industry is piggybacking. Simply find websites that already have product reviews in your industry and rank well in search engines.
Here’s an example:
If you sell Apple watch bands, an easy trick for getting backlinks is to reach out to websites at the top of the search results and ask those bloggers or retailers to review your product too. Hopefully, they’ll like it enough to include it in their roundup list. This nets you a new backlink and a spot on a page that has a good search engine ranking.
How to do it properly
There are some rules for getting quality links with this method.
First, you want to make sure your product is good quality and that the blogger would consider adding it to their webpage.
Second, it’s a good idea to offer website owners your product for free in exchange for an honest review and a place in their posts. Make sure you’re not implying that it’s a trade – where you give someone a free item in exchange for a backlink. Not only is this a shady business practice, but it’s also against Google’s guidelines.
Third, you don’t want to be featured in just ANY website product roundup. Use a tool such as Ahrefs to look up the page where you want to be featured.
- How much organic traffic does it get?
- What is the domain rating and domain authority of the page?
- What is the backlink profile for this page? Does it have many backlinks pointing to it?
- Does the page have high-quality content or is it just product descriptions copy-pasted from the manufacturer’s website that look spammy?
- Can I buy backlinks from this website?
If a website passes all of these tests with flying colors, you can reach out to them and ask if they would feature your product too.
This is one of the most effective link building strategies for ecommerce SEO, but it requires some experience to do it well. Also, some bloggers will ask you to pay for a placement or to participate in your affiliate marketing program, but more on that in a second.
Grab branded and unlinked brand mentions
This is for products and ecommerce brands that are a bit more seasoned. Assuming your ecommerce business has been around for a while, people have talked about you before. Journalists, influencers, bloggers, all types of content creators. Many times, they’ll just use your ecommerce store or product name without giving you a link.
An example of a brand mention without a link. Source
This is an easy opportunity to get high-quality links as half of the work is already done. You just need to launch a link building campaign, asking those same people to add a link (to your homepage or product page) to every mention of your brand.
How to do it properly
Getting started with inbound links with this method is pretty easy:
- Do a Google search for your product/brand name
- Find instances of websites mentioning you without adding a link
- Find the right contact at the company by using blogger outreach services
- Ask them to add a link to your home page or product page
- Skip forums and other places that provide nofollow links
Since the person already talked about you, asking for a link is easier as you have one foot through the door.
You can use the same approach as with other link building efforts for ecommerce and entice them with a free product or a discount to consider adding your link to a page. Sure, this marketing strategy won’t be free, but given that the average backlink costs upwards of $300, it will probably be cheaper than paying for a link.
Broken link building is a similar tactic to this one, but more on that some other time.
Create helpful content as link bait
When potential customers search for a product they want to purchase, they don’t immediately go to a product page and purchase. Depending on what you’re selling, there could be quite a few steps in the sales funnel. From the moment of the initial idea, through the research, all the way to the conversion, it can take days or months.
Loop Earplugs create helpful content for all demographics. Source
To get relevant links and build brand awareness for your ecommerce website, create the kind of content that people want to link to. Guides, instructions, walkthroughs, detailed reviews, infographics – things that both your target audience and other bloggers would want to read about.
How to do it properly
Go to a competitor website and analyze it with a tool such as Ahrefs or SEMRush. You want to look at all the pages and sort them according to the number of inbound links. Typically, these are not product pages – they are blogs, case studies, reviews and other types of content.
You can then investigate those pages and the backlinks they have to them. More backlinks does not always correlate with better content, but it’s a great starting point.
Do some keyword research and you’ll find the topics your target audience wants to read about. Then comes the hard part – sitting down and writing the most valuable piece of content on this topic that you can.
You can do this by:
- Doing original research (what are the most sold Apple Watch bands in 2023?)
- Adding user insights and social proof (capturing customer reviews, adding testimonials and quotes)
- Taking an interesting angle (what is the most durable type of Apple watch band?)
- Adding lots of interesting and relevant statistics (what type of Apple watch band does Gen Z prefer over Millennials?)
Your in-depth content will set you apart and help you capture new link building opportunities. In essence, you created link bait – the type of content that makes writers and digital PR experts link to you.
Of course, you will still need to do some promotion and outreach to get those content pieces noticed. This is where our next tactic comes into place.
Niche edits
This is one of the most effective link building tactics when done right. It entails finding relevant websites that cover your industry and niche and already cover content similar to yours. Ideally, they rank well with that content in the SERPs too. You then ask the website in that niche to edit an existing page and insert your link.
This is one of the best ecommerce link building tactics if you know which websites to reach out to and what kind of links to request.
How to do it properly
First, get a list of competitor websites and run them through tools such as Ahrefs or SEMRush. Then look at their link profile to find pages that have the most links. Then, look into those individual links to find out which ones were built through niche edits. It won’t be hard to find these external links because:
- They have optimized anchor text
- They lead to relevant landing pages or an ecommerce store home page
- They have a good placement on the target website
- The page has good traffic coming to it, promising referral traffic for the linked partners
Since the website is already linked to a competitor, there is a high likelihood that they would link to you too, provided you ask the right question. If you’re not sure how to do this step without offering money or something else for compensation, it makes sense to get link building services from reputable agencies such as ReportCard.
Once you have a list of competitor backlinks and websites where you can ask for niche edits, it’s time to find the right person to reach out to. You can find the contacts on their website, LinkedIn profiles or use tools such as Hunter.io to find the email. You then have to build relationships instead of just asking for a link – which is easier said than done.
Create an affiliate program
The last one is the most advanced to pull off, but the benefits go far beyond link building. Setting up an affiliate program for your online business means opening up your store to partners. You allow them to resell items from an online store for a percentage of the profit. They sell more products and make you more money, but at the same time, they link to your website.
CarVertical has a powerful affiliate program that gets plenty of attention from content creators. Source
Affiliate partners can have incredibly powerful websites and there are people who don’t have a physical product they sell – just promote others’ products through their websites. Getting a link from these websites can be highly valuable, especially if it’s someone who deals exclusively in your niche.
How to do it properly
Ask around for the best affiliate software, such as Tapfilliate, PostAffiliatePro or something similar. Then reach out to people who would be great affiliate partners and wait for the program to kick off.
If you want to drive traffic to your website and have an affiliate marketing program, remember that you have to do a lot of the heavy lifting yourself. This means creating link-worthy content and making sure your content marketing game is flawless. Otherwise, you risk your affiliate partners outranking you for your own keywords and stealing your organic traffic.
But as mentioned, this technique deserves its own space and it’s too complex to be covered in this article.
Which ecommerce link building tactic will you choose?
Growing your digital marketing metrics through link building can be incredibly tough for site owners. Thanks to platforms like Shopify, building an ecommerce store is something that can be done in one day. Meanwhile, driving traffic and revenue from that website can take months for the first results to show up.
The good news is, you don’t have to worry about link building. At ReportCard, we have experience building links for ecommerce stores locally and internationally. We know just the right tactics to use to get you links that earn revenue.
Book your free call today to learn more!
