In ecommerce, link building is an important strategy aimed at enhancing your store’s online presence. Link building involves building connections with other websites.
These connections are known as backlinks, the backbone of your website’s visibility and authority. The authenticity of your backlink profile greatly influences your store’s rating and brand awareness in search engines. In 2024, 69% of marketers say that link building has a positive impact on their businesses.
In this comprehensive guide, you will come to know the strategies that are required for ecommerce link building in 2024. Before delving into ecommerce link building strategies, let’s have a look at backlinks and how to craft a natural link profile for your online store.
Why Ecommerce link building is crucial
Ecommerce link building is a strategy to get website backlinks to your ecommerce store. These backlinks are votes of confidence for Google to your website. Votes from highly authoritative sites build the authority of your store.
The answer to why ecommerce sites need links is elaborated by understanding the following points:
- Building a strong backlink profile for your ecommerce store helps you stay competitive in the market of your niche. Online stores that do successful link building position themselves as industry leaders by retaining a competitive edge in the market.
- Well-placed backlinks from reliable sources improve conversion rates. When users arrive through a trusted referral link, they purchase, contributing to higher conversion rates.
- Links from reputable websites are pathways for direct traffic to ecommerce stores.
- Acquiring quality links pointing back to your website enhances the credibility, authority, and brand awareness of your ecommerce store.
- Collaborating with other websites for link building fosters mutually beneficial relationships within the ecommerce field. Whether through guest blogging, content partnerships, or sponsored collaborations, forging connections with relevant industry players can open doors to new opportunities and avenues for growth.
Niche Edits
Utilizing niche edits can prove beneficial for ecommerce link building. The process involves searching Google for content relevant to your product line and subsequently reaching out to website owners to include links to your site within their content.
Getting these backlinks often involves paying for them. But even though it costs money, it provides you with effective feedback according to your investment.
You can get as many links as you want, depending on how much you spend and how many websites are open to working with you. Be careful in reaching websites to ensure they are trustworthy and don’t affect your Google ranking.
Digital Public Relations
Write stories that attract journalists and bloggers. This helps to drive attention and valuable backlinks to your site that build publics relations.
Here’s an overview of digital PR as a link building strategy in e-commerce, along with steps on how to do it effectively:
- Identify Newsworthy Angles: Start by identifying newsworthy angles related to your e-commerce brand, products, or industry. This could include product launches, unique initiatives, charity partnerships, or industry insights.
- Craft Compelling Press Releases: Develop well-crafted press releases highlighting the newsworthy aspect of your story or event. Ensure that the content is concise, engaging, and tailored to resonate with your target audience and media outlets.
- Build Relationships with Journalists and Bloggers: Cultivate relationships with journalists, bloggers, and influencers in your industry. Engage with them on social media, attend relevant industry events, and offer them exclusive insights or access to your brand.
- Pitch Your Story to Media Outlets: Pitch your press releases and story ideas to relevant media outlets, journalists, and bloggers. Personalize your pitches to each recipient and emphasize the unique value proposition of your story.
- Engage in Follow-up and Outreach: Follow up with journalists and bloggers after pitching your story to gauge their interest and provide additional information if needed. Maintain open communication and nurture relationships with media contacts for future opportunities.
Making Linkable Assets
A tried and tested strategy for acquiring backlinks is to make linkable assets within your website.
Consider adding a dedicated blog section featuring compelling content that entices readers to link back to your articles. To maximize the impact, ensure your content seamlessly links to high-converting pages within your site.
Start by recognizing different types of content that attract links by using tools like Ahrefs.
Analyze top-performing pages of competitors to gain insights into the type of content garnering significant referrals.
With this knowledge, start writing good content that surpasses your competitors in quality, by different tactics such as adding photo or video elements or doing original research.
Once your content is live, embark on a targeted outreach campaign to encourage other websites to link back to your page. Utilize tools like Ahrefs to identify potential linking partners and craft personalized outreach emails highlighting the value of your resource.
Types of Linkable Assets
Increase your linkable assets to a large audience and increase your chances of acquiring backlinks:
- Tools & Widgets: Develop interactive tools or widgets that offer value to your audience, such as calculators or generators. Reach out to websites featuring outdated or broken tools, suggesting yours as a superior alternative.
- In-Depth Guides: Create comprehensive guides addressing topics relevant to your niche. Quality guides can attract backlinks and drive organic traffic to your site.
- Reports and Original Research: Conduct research or compile data-driven reports that provide valuable insights into industry trends or consumer behaviors.
- Top Lists Awards: Curate lists recognizing top performers or resources within your industry. Transform your list into an award, encouraging recipients to showcase and link back to your site.
Influencers product reviews
This strategy involves reaching influencers to showcase products to their audience and drive traffic and drive traffic to ecommerce stores.
These reviews involve collaborating with influencers who have a significant following and influence in a particular niche or industry, tasking them with creating authentic and engaging content that highlights the features, benefits, and user experience of the products being promoted. To execute successful influencers product reviews follow these steps:
- Recognize relevant influencers: Search for influencers, bloggers, and writers whose audience and interests are according to your niche or company.
- Build relation: Build relationships with these influencers by telling them the benefits of collaborating with your online store.
- Give product sample: Give them a free sample of your product to allow them to experience it. Tell them all the information about your products including product features and instructions to use.
- Encourage authentic reviews: Empower them to give honest reviews and opinions about the products in the form of a video or a story. Avoid scripted reviews as this feels unusual to the audience.
- Promote the reviews: Promote the published reviews of your products on your ecommerce store and your social media platforms. Write emails and blogs about the reviews.
The following example is from the website Wirecutter which reviews different products. In their reviews about The Best Jogging Strollers, they mention the Thule Urban Glide 3 at the top of their reviews adding a backlink to the product.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) Pages
FAQ pages serve as valuable resources offering solutions to common problems within your industry. While they are a form of linkable asset, they tend to attract links through a different approach.
Instead of actively reaching out for backlinks, the primary goal with FAQ pages is to achieve high rankings on search engines for numerous long-tail keywords related to a particular topic. This strategy ensures that when users search for specific queries, your FAQ page appears prominently in the search results.
You can see the Luca+Danni FAQs page in the upper example. Luca+Danni-an ecommerce store provides jewelry items. On its FAQ page, it provides various answers to the top queries asked by its customers that are related to payment methods, shipping, top products, etc. They did so for the ease of upcoming new customers and the ranking in SERPs.
Utilize HARO(help a reporter out)
HARO is an effective technique to acquire backlinks that are high in quality and authority.
HARO serves as a bridge between journalists, and bloggers, in various niches. By registering for a HARO account, you can offer your expertise to writers covering topics within your field. If they choose to include your insights in their articles, they are likely to link back to your e-commerce website.
Here’s how to get started:
- Visit the HARO website and select “I’m a source” to review the platform’s guidelines and regulations.
- After familiarizing yourself with the terms, proceed to sign up by clicking “Sign up.”
- Complete the basic subscription form with your details and submit your registration.
- Once registered, HARO will send you emails containing pitch requests from journalists and bloggers three times a day. When you come across a relevant query, you can respond with your answers.
It’s important to note that multiple individuals with similar expertise may receive the same query. Therefore, ensure that your response provides valuable information to increase the likelihood of being selected. While not every pitch will be successful, each HARO email presents a valuable opportunity for link building efforts.
Unlinked Brand Mentions
Monitor online mentions of your brand and capitalize on unlinked mentions to secure valuable backlinks. Utilize tools like Google Alerts to track brand mentions and reach out to website owners to request link additions.
Stay vigilant for opportunities to earn backlinks through brand mentions, leveraging your brand’s visibility and reputation. To gain success in unliked brand mentions, try the following points:
- Monitor brand mentions: Use tools such as ahrefs or Google alerts to recognize unlike mentions of your brand across different platforms.
- Make personalized outreach: Reach the website owners of the platforms, write emails or messages, and tell them to add backlink to your store.
- Provide value: Tell them the benefits of adding backlink to your store such as increasing the credibility of their content and making a mutually beneficial relationship.
- Follow up: If you don’t receive a response after contacting them, follow up in a way that must not be aggressive.
- Monitor and track progress: Keep track of your outreach efforts and monitor responses and actions taken by the website owners.
Round-up posts
Round-up posts are a way of acquiring backlinks to your store from highly authoritative sites. These posts are the articles that show the best of products, services, businesses, and more, often these posts rank them based on specific criteria.
Conduct online searches for round-ups that are according to your product or store. Make a list of these websites and reach out to them. Introduce your store and product to them and inquire about the chance of being featured in their upcoming round-up posts.
In this example, you can see that the Glamour website ranked Teva Midform Universal Sandals As the best walking sandals overall. You will notice that this post links back to the Amazon and Zappos product pages.
Infographics
Making visual assets like infographics and other graphical content according to your niche is a great technique of ecommerce link-building to acquire backlinks. In simple words, infographics represent the data and information in the form of graphics, charts, or diagrams.
Why we have to make infographics:
Visual content possesses unparalleled shareability and readability, amplifying your chances of acquiring valuable backlinks.
You can hire a graphic designer or use the Canva platform as a beginner, a tool for making infographics at no cost. In Canva you can design your infographics by making changes in different templates shown. The authentication and effectiveness of this strategy depend on how valuable your infographic is.
“The life of a visual communicator should be one of systematic and exciting intellectual chaos.” Alberto Cairo
Conclusion
Building high authority white hat links to an ecommerce store will be easier if you follow the strategies mentioned in this blog. These backlinks build online visibility, and sales, and generate traffic to your store.
Don’t hesitate to apply these strategies to your ecommmerce link building campaign. Contact us freely and know our link building services and how we help you to be successful in this digital world.
