Introduction
Link building is an essential part of SEO and online marketing in 2023. Search engines use backlinks as a critical ranking factor. When you have a solid backlink profile, you improve the authority and trustworthiness of your website.
This enhances its ranking on Google. A rank among the top search results of SERPs will lead to increased traffic, sales, and revenue.
While link building can be complex for e-commerce sites, a few sure-shot tactics can help in the process.
Importance of Link Building in eCommerce SEO
Link building is essential to e-commerce sites. It plays a significant role in search engine optimization. It involves the process of obtaining hyperlinks to your own website from other websites to improve your website’s ranking in search engine result pages. These hyperlinks are also referred to as “backlinks” or “inbound links.”
A powerful link-building strategy is essential for every e-commerce website because Google considers the quality and quantity of backlinks to a website when determining its authority and relevance in search results.
Multiple studies have backed that link building is very important for your website’s success. Looking at any statistic, you will find that links contribute 50% towards a website’s SEO success. It boosts organic traffic and trust for your website, primarily if the niche your business specializes in is very competitive.
Here are some reasons why link building is essential for your e-commerce website:
It boosts organic traffic growth:
When users search for a specific keyword on Google, they have a particular search intent in mind. Research suggests that users click the first three links that show up in their search engine results pages. That is why link building is so crucial for your e-commerce website.
You can expect high organic traffic to your website when you have a strong backlink profile. Links are the most efficient and cost-effective way to drive traffic.
Further, you also benefit from referral links for your website. Imagine a highly authoritative website has a referral link to your website. Can you imagine the number of leads you can generate from these types of links? Link building helps obtain referral traffic.
Referral traffic refers to organic traffic that you obtain when a user comes to your website without searching for your brand on search engines.
A good link from a highly authoritative website can help obtain website traffic.
Boosting authority:
Factors such as backlinks and content quality are vital in boosting authority. Boosting your website’s authority is essential to gain the trust of your target audience.
Your target audience will not buy your products if they don’t trust your brand. So, when you have highly authoritative backlinks pointing to your website, they associate your website with trust and authority, too. Therefore, an e-commerce link-building strategy is very important for boosting authority.
There are software developed by software companies such as Moz that have developed tools to check the site authority.
Improved ranking:
Google can’t rank your website if you don’t have a robust linking profile. A good linking profile helps Google to crawl through your website, enabling indexing.
In this competitive time, your competitors will target the same keywords as you. So, what will differentiate your website from others?
No matter how great your content or product is, it is useless if your target audience can’t find your website. Hence, links play a crucial role, helping search engines to crawl through your website and index it.
This leads to improved ranking.
Better Site metric: The health of your website depends on the domain authority (DA), domain ranking (DR), and page ranking (PR).
So, do you improve these factors? The answer is by links.
With the help of links, you impact these metrics positively, which helps improve your website’s overall health.
Here, it is crucial to note that not all links are good. Backlinks from spammy and low-authority websites may also negatively impact your website ranking. In such circumstances, you can contact the webmaster of these websites to remove the tool. Or use the Google Disavow tool as the last resort to unlink your website.
Increased visibility:
More backlinks mean more website visibility. And increased website visibility is very important for your e-commerce website. This means that your website will appear more frequently on search engine result pages.
When high-ranking sites link to your website, they also transfer some “website juice” to your website, leading to a high ranking.
Building links for your website will expose your products and services to a wide range of people, improving the exposure of your business.
If your target audience comes across your website frequently, they will have the impression that your products are very popular. This will help create buzz for your business.
Reduces bounce rate:
Attracting organic traffic is one part of a good e-commerce website. The other part is retaining the website traffic and ensuring they explore your website.
Bounce rate is the percentage of people who visit your website but exist without exploring it. There is no use of organic traffic if you have a high bounce rate on your e-commerce website.
To improve this, you must have an excellent internal linking profile. Internal linking is another significant factor that improves Google’s ranking.
Internal linking is crucial for your website visitors and Google crawlers to navigate your website and find out what they want.
Establishes your website’s authority in your niche:
Link building helps build relationships and enhances your website’s authority and trustworthiness. No matter your niche, a solid link structure is crucial for every website. If you want to establish your e-commerce site’s authority in your industry, you need to have a linking structure with highly authoritative backlinks.
The Basic eCommerce Link Building Strategies
Now that you know why link-building strategies are essential for your website, the question is how to build these links. Here are some ways in which you can build a powerful linking profile.
Guest Posting:
Guest posting is a practice where a third party writes content for your website and posts it on their website.
Guest posting provides valuable links for your website to improve your e-commerce site’s credibility. It also helps in enhancing the awareness of the website among potential customers.
A good guest post with high-quality content can dramatically improve the SEO of your e-commerce site. If you can get guest posts from high-authority websites, your e-commerce website ranking will improve drastically.
But you must guest post the right way.
Firstly, you must find a guest posting website that is of high quality. Remember that you shouldn’t guest post on spammy websites that look suspicious. Spammy sites will publish low-quality blog content and have low reader engagement.
Moreover, you need to see that the niche of your e-commerce site overlaps with the guest posting website. If the website is irrelevant to your brand, obtaining backlinks from these guest posts will be useless.
Skyscraper Technique:
The skyscraper technique is an SEO link-building tactic. In this technique, you find competitor websites that publish content to which reputable websites link. After which, you create similar but better content, encouraging the sites to link to you instead.
When you improve the content on your website, you steal potential customers from your competitors.
Skyscraper content is generally more comprehensive, informative, up-to-date, and created by more credible experts.
This very competitive tactic is based on you doing what your competitors do, but you do it better.
Unlike other link-building techniques, skyscraper helps you obtain links previously pointed toward competitor websites. It also helps you to obtain links from websites that are already well-established and have substantial traffic.
The skyscraper technique encourages you to create high-quality, valuable content that helps with your SEO tactic in various ways.
To implement the skyscraper technique correctly, you first need to find competitive content that you can improve.
Moreover, you have to conduct a proper competitor’s content analysis to create competitive content that is better than theirs. You must review your competitors’ backlinks and determine whether inheriting them will be worthwhile.
After all this research, you must create better content than your competitor and optimize it for search engines.
Broken Link Building:
Broken link building is an SEO tactic where you find dead links on other’s websites and convince them to replace the link with a working link pointing towards your website.
Broken link-building is an excellent link-building strategy in e-commerce. This tactic helps you to earn links from external domains (backlinks).
It is excellent for SEO because Google treats specific backlinks with a vote of confidence. Your website will likely be on top of the Google search results page when you have high-quality and quantity links.
Broken link-building is more effective than any other link-building strategy because you are helping the web admins of other websites solve their problems.
Broken link building is an excellent strategy because you can earn links that were previously being pointed toward competitors and generate link-worthy content ideas.
To properly build broken links, you must:
- Find broken links relevant to your website. You can use backlink-checking software to identify the links.
- Your competitors will also have pages with broken links. Check those links and find opportunities to “steal them.”
- Evaluate the opportunities and prioritize them depending on the relevancy.
Advanced eCommerce Link Building Tactics:
For advanced link building, you need to:
- Publish high-quality content with specific keywords: Well-written content with proper external links has been proven to improve your website’s SEO ranking and conversion rate. Blogging is a great way to obtain valuable backlinks over time. You must create a blog page for your e-commerce site. After that, you must write valuable and informative content with keywords that your targeted consumers will type when searching for products related to your business.
- Organize a product PR campaign: Product PR can help obtain a lot of backlinks. The catch is that the PR campaign is catchy enough so that it grabs the attention.
- Create attractive infographics:Attractive infographics can create valuable backlinks because these types of content are easy to see and share.
- Ask partners to link your site: You need to build strong relationships with your distributors and ask them to link to your website. This will also create valuable links to your website.
Influencer Collaborations:
When you search for something on Google, you may often find blogs of famous influencers promoting the products. This is known as influencer collaboration.
This is a very effective process of getting valuable links for your e-commerce site.
For an effective influencer collaboration, you must first find people with the same niche and interest as your business. For instance, if your e-commerce business specializes in beauty products, it makes no sense to collaborate with an influencer from the travel industry. You have to find someone who is from the beauty industry.
This type of marketing enhances your brand awareness and boosts your search ranking by placing your link in their content.
Influencer collaboration also helps enhance your brand awareness and visibility. And exposes your brand to a new set of audience.
How do influencers create links?
Influences have a strong presence across all platforms and can help create valuable backlinks. They can help promote your brand based on new launches, sales season, the nature of the product, and various other factors.
Product Review Outreach:
Every business gives utmost importance to product reviews and testimonials to gain the trust of their customers.
Testimonials and reviews can help identify your lacking product and develop better products.
However, one more advantage of testimonials and reviews that is often overlooked is that it is an excellent link-building strategy.
Testimonials and reviews help your potential customers make an informed decision and enhance the trust and credibility of your website.
Every review signals the search engines that your website has been updated with new and relevant content. This enables new crawling opportunities and increases your chance to be on the top search results.
Testimonials and reviews from third parties also help earn valuable backlinks. These third parties can be professional reviewers, consumers, or businesses that are not competitors but are related to your niche.
To benefit from reviews and testimonials, you have to:
- Find websites that are relevant to your products but are not direct competitors. Moreover, you have to check the domain authority and relevancy of these websites. For instance, if you are a business that sells sports shoes, a review posted on a page related to sports and fitness will be more relevant.
- Check if these websites are willing to publish your product review. You can also use websites like Yelp and Foursquare for review opportunities.
- Reach out to the website that will publish your review. This will create backlink opportunities for your website, enabling you to improve your ranking.
Monitoring and Evaluating Your Link-Building Campaign
Monitoring and evaluating the success of your link-building campaign is crucial because you must know whether your efforts are bearing any fruit.
Essential metrics to monitor and evaluate your link-building strategy are:
- Quality of backlinks: When measuring the success of your link-building strategy, you must look beyond the number of backlinks your website has obtained. You must look at the quality of these links. Three factors determine the quality of backlinks: relevancy, trustworthiness, and diversity. You must check the quality of links and ensure that they are coming from reputable websites. Quality links indicate that even your website is trustworthy and reputable. You must also check that the website linking to you is related to your content. Moreover, having diverse links from blog posts, news sites, and forums will help create a diverse linking profile.
- Domain authority: Some websites are better than others online. The factor that determines which website is better than others is domain authority or page authority. The domain authority scores give us an idea about the website’s authority in the eyes of search engines. A website with a high domain authority naturally attracts more backlinks than others. You need to check that you are obtaining links from high-domain authority sites.
- Anchor text optimization: This metric is often overlooked while implementing a link-building strategy. An anchor text is a clickable text that has a hyperlink. A well-optimized, exact-match anchor text will help search engines know about the content topic and enhance the user experience. You must check that the anchor text in your content is not placed abruptly and is easy for the reader to navigate.
- Return on Investment: Return on investment or ROI is a crucial metric to estimate the success of a link-building campaign. One of the crucial aspects of ROI is monetary gains. Link-building success must be translated into sales and profit. Moreover, you must see whether the strategy improves your brand visibility and recognition. Even though this metric is not quantifiable, it always results in significant ROI. A successful link-building campaign will elevate your digital presence in the online sphere. Another advantage of a link-building campaign is the sustained referral traffic. To check whether your link-building campaign is successful, you need to monitor these metrics.
Overcoming Challenges in eCommerce Link-Building
In your journey towards becoming a successful e-commerce business, you will encounter many challenges. But these can be overcome with some steps and measures. The following are some ways you can overcome the challenges in your link-building process:
- Create high-quality content: The foundation of any successful link-building strategy is high-quality, link-worthy content. Even after you have tried all the link-building strategies mentioned above, if you don’t have high-quality content on your website, you won’t be able to retain any of the website visitors. To create high-quality content, you need to create blog posts, infographics, and videos that are informative and engaging.
- Research your niche: Research your niche and determine who are your top competitor and why their websites are ranking on the top of SERPs. Your top competitors are doing something differently, which is why their websites appear at the top. See what they are doing, check which backlinks they are targeting, analyze their moves, and do everything better than them.
- Identify websites for guest posting: Understand your industry and find guest posting websites that are most authoritative and relevant to your niches. Moreover, check the backlink profile of your competitors. These are the potential link-building targets that you need to focus on.
- Find influencers in your niche: You can’t just pay random influencers to promote your products. Firstly, you need to see that they have a good reputation, and secondly, you must check whether they are from a relevant industry. For instance, a tech influencer’s review on a mobile app will be more valuable than a beauty influencer with nothing to do with the app.
- Relationship building: Developing a personalized relationship with website owners will help you build your link. This will help create more backlink opportunities and improve your reputation among the people in your niche.
- Join HARO: HARO is a platform where journalists and bloggers seek expert opinions on particular topics. If you provide your valuable insights, you may get cited and linked to their articles.
- Link reclamation: If you see websites or content with unlinked brand mentions, you can contact them, requesting the webmaster turn them into proper backlinks.
- Avoid low-quality spammy links: Avoid spammy links at any cost; these will do little to your website in the long run.
Conclusion
Linking is an ongoing process in SEO. As Google’s algorithm changes, you must also change your linking strategy. You can’t just implement the linking strategies once and then rest.
You have to research what your competitors are doing continuously, find new linking opportunities, and continuously identify backlinks. Therefore, the above-mentioned link-building strategies have been curated to help you.
Remember that link building is an important part of SEO and the success of your e-commerce website. Therefore, you have to take it very seriously. Only then can you generate substantial ROI for your business.
