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Want to rank for more competitive, high-value keywords?
Every ecommerce store wants to rank for the highest traffic and most valuable search terms on Google.
After all, quality keywords lead to:
Here’s the problem:
Ranking for those terms is hard work. To rank well for competitive and highly profitable keywords you need to be investing in ecommerce link building.
Without links, you just won’t rank.
In this blog, I have written down the top 6 ecommerce link-building strategies that my team uses to build hundreds of high-quality ecommerce links every month.
Let’s jump in!
What Will I Learn?
Ecommerce link building provides a ton of benefits for your store. If you haven’t already started building links to your store, here are three reasons you should.
Link building is one of the best ways to increase your organic traffic.
Why?
Because external links are one of the most important ranking factors for search engines like Google. When you build more high authority links from websites that Google already trusts – your rankings increase.
And as you know…
Let’s look at a ecommerce client that my team was working with. The client’s goal was to increase organic traffic to their store and also grow organic sales.
We built high-authority links each month to the client’s site. Over time Google saw that the client’s store was trustworthy because tons of high authority sites were now linking to it.
As more links were added, two things happened:
It makes sense, right?
High-quality link building is one of the best ways to increase your:
Think of links like endorsements from other sites.
Google wants to know that they can trust you and your store before they start showing you to their users in the SERPs.
How can Google be sure that you are legit?
By seeing how other sites and users respond to your store. Building links is the ultimate way to increase domain authority and trust with Google.
Think about it:
If your ecommerce store is relatively new and you get a link from an established website that Google already trusts – this will increase your store’s authority and trust.
Google already trusts the established site. The link from that site to your store tells Google you can be trusted too.
Note:
Gov backlinks and edu backlinks are some of the most authoritative links you can build.
Google tends to trust .gov and .edu sites more than others. Building these links can help grow your own store’s authority even faster.
One of the most underrated benefits of ecommerce link building is brand awareness.
Link building increases brand awareness twofold.
Firstly your rankings increase, which means you get more visibility in the search results.
You get a big boost to your brand awareness amongst your ideal customers because you are ranking for the right keywords.
And because people are more likely to trust ecommerce sites they find “organically” in the Google SERPs, it leads to more:
But there is another way that links help you increase brand awareness…
When a link gets placed on a page, everyone who visits that page sees that link. Lots of links to your store on other popular websites means you naturally increase your brand awareness (and visibility).
Consider the types of websites you are building links on.
You should build links on sites with a similar target audience and a good amount of traffic. That way you will be putting your brand in front of the right audience.
As an added benefit, your referral traffic will also increase, which can help increase sales.
Ecommerce link building is different.
Indeed, ecommerce sites need links pointing to every different section of the site.
That includes:
Link building is hard work on its own…
But it goes up a notch when you have to build links to very specific pages like categories and products.
The key to being successful with ecommerce link building is ensuring that you have an even balance of links pointing to your store’s important pages.
This is different from a regular site, where you focus on building the site’s overall authority before building links to specific content pages that you want to rank in the SERPs.
Ecommerce sites need to be treated differently.
Now to the ecommerce link-building strategies.
My link-building team uses these exact strategies to generate results like this:
If they can do it…
You can too. Read through all the strategies, pick a couple you like and implement them until you get results.
Ecommerce link-building success is as simple as that!
When it comes to ecommerce link building…
Content is still king.
Here’s why:
The best way to get more links to your ecommerce store is to build them naturally.
Naturally means that other sites choose to link to your store because you have great content and products.
Creating linkable content means you essentially pick up high-quality backlinks at no extra cost or effort. People like your content, so you get the link.
For example, I recently published a 45-point SEO checklist that shows people exactly what they need to do to rank.
This is a super in-depth post that provides a ton of value with examples of only what you need to do to improve your SEO results.
So how do you create linkable content for yourself?
Start by producing content regularly that your audience will love. You should post valuable long-form content that:
Digital marketing statistics show that long-form content gets 77.2% more links than shorter content.
One of the biggest mistakes that lots of content creators make is having big chunks of text. Ensure that you add relevant images to the content to make it:
Leave plenty of “white space” in your content so it is easy to skim and flows nicely.
You should avoid long paragraphs and generally keep each paragraph to a maximum of 3 sentences.
Lastly, make sure your content is optimised…
Your content needs to be optimised so that it ranks and people can find it. If they can’t find it, they won’t be able to link to it.
Check out this on-page SEO checklist to learn how to optimise your blog posts and articles properly.
This is my favourite ecommerce link building strategy…
Here’s how it works:
Start by doing a Google search for your top 5 competitors with the target keyword you want to rank for.
You want to replicate the backlinks pointing at these 5 ranking URLs.
Why?
The reason that your competitors are ranking in the top positions is because Google loves their backlink profile. If you can replicate their backlinks, Google will likely rank you as well.
Once you have your top 5 ranking competitors, it’s time to find the links pointing at those URLs. To make the next step even easier, I have built a backlink analysis tool that my team uses in our agency.
It does most of the heavy lifting by showing you which links you should be replicating.
Click here to download my competitor backlink analysis spreadsheet for free.
Now paste the exact URLs of your top competitors into the spreadsheet.
Next, click the “Click Here” link to access all the backlink data.
Export all of this data as a .CSV file.
Make sure you export as much data as you possibly can. The more backlinks the tool can find, the more opportunities you will have.
Now the last part…
Follow each of these steps to ensure you get the right data:
Loaded all of the data? You are ready to go. Click on “Tab #3 – Plan Of Attack”.
You now have a complete list of the best backlinks to replicate from your competitors. Work down the list doing outreach to each website.
This should help you snag some high-authority links for your ecommerce site.
Follow my complete competitor backlink analysis link building tutorial to get a more detailed breakdown of each step.
Want an easier way to build links?
Niche edits (also called link inserts) might be your ideal ecommerce link-building strategy.
Most links are built through guest posts. The value proposition here is obvious – you write a great piece of content for another website and in return, the website owner places a backlink back to your site.
Niche edits are different because you are asking the website owner to place a link to your ecommerce site without you providing any content.
So how do you get the niche edit links placed?
My two favourite ways to build powerful niche edit links are-
Here’s how to do both.
Broken link niche edits are when you find broken links on other websites and notify the website owner about them.
You can then suggest your own content or website as a replacement for that broken link.
Simple right?
It works because you are helping the site owner clean up their website and getting a link in exchange. And the best part?
It’s completely scalable. Look at my broken link building guide to learn how to build these niche edit links at scale.
Online mentions might be the easiest (and most passive) way to build high-quality niche edit links.
It’s common for people to mention your business online but forget to link to you. It’s also a pretty easy fix if you just reach out to them and ask them to place the link!
The key to making this work is setting up automated alerts whenever you are mentioned online. My favourite free tool for this job is Google Alerts.
Login to your Google account and set up an alert for your:
Every time you are mentioned online, Google will send you an email alert with the site that mentioned you. All you need to do is contact the site and get the link placed.
Cool right?
If you want to step this up a notch, you can set up an alert for your top target keywords and reach out to sites that mention them in your content.
This way, you can build links to your important site pages.
Want to learn more about niche edits? Follow my complete niche edit link building tutorial.
Do you use tools and software to run your business?
With just a few emails, you could create strong homepage links that boost your store’s authority. And the best part is you likely already have everything you need.
Let me explain what I mean:
You can offer reviews for those products and tools that you already use. When they publish the review, they place a link back to your store.
Win-win, right?
I used this exact strategy to get a link from my SurferSEO review.
Start by writing down a list of every kind of service/product you use:
Now use a tool like Hunter.io to find the email address of the right person to contact.
Now it’s time for outreach.
Send an email and pitch your review. There are some specific things that you need to include in your pitch:
The secret to this kind of link building is ensuring that you provide value to the business you are reviewing. It will make it much easier to get the link later.
(Write your product reviews faster with my product review template).
HARO stands for – Help A Reporter Out.
This cool little platform could be your secret weapon for getting powerful links from high domain authority sites.
What sites almost always have a huge domain authority?
News sites.
Getting a link from a prominent news website can do wonders for your store’s organic rankings and reputation. HARO is a platform that connects news sites to sources.
Here’s how it works:
A journalist will create a source request on the HARO platform. This means they are looking for a relevant and reputable source that they can use to quote in their article.
Then a relevant source (i.e. YOU) answers the source request with a quote.
If the journalist uses your quote in their article, they will reference you as the source and give you a link. Sometimes journalists will follow up for more information and even recommend you to other journalists.
Tons of our clients have noticed huge rankings and traffic increases after getting a single link from sites like Business Insider or Entrepreneur.
What kinds of journalists use HARO?
There are lots of different news sites that use HARO including:
And so many more. Getting a link from a site like this is every SEOs dream.
HARO makes that dream possible!
In ecommerce link building strategy #3, you saw how to monitor any “new” mentions you didn’t get linked for.
But did you know that you can find old mentions that are unlinked for free?
Let me show you how:
For this, you will use search operators on Google to make very specific searches for your brand and website mentions.
Head over to Google and search:
This brings up a ton of results that could potentially have unlinked mentions of your brand/store. This strategy won’t cost you any money, but it does take time and patience.
You have to sift through all the search results to find actual mentions of your brand.
After you have found a mention, just reach out to the site owner, thank them for the mention and ask them if they would put a link to your store.
Most site owners in my experience are more than happy to do it!
Now you have 6 powerful ecommerce link building strategies to help you build more high-authority links.
The truth is that ecommerce link building is hard work. You need to commit the time and energy to your favourite strategy to really start seeing results.
Don’t have the time?
Lots of ecommerce store owners don’t have the time to build high-quality links. That’s why they outsource their link-building needs to professional link building services.
If you’re looking to buy backlinks, I recommend Ecommerce Link Builders.
They specialise in building high-quality links for ecommerce stores and have a reputation for delivering outstanding results for their clients.
They’ll take care of the links while you focus on growing your store!
But remember… Before starting building links, make sure you have read the full link building checklist that explains all the link building process.
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