Tips for link building for eCommerce websites
Link building is an important element of eCommerce SEO content strategy because of how it positions your website in relation to other online content.
When it comes to reaching the top rankings on SERPs, it’s not enough to rely on word-of-mouth alone to increase awareness of your brand; you must make sure you are effectively optimising your site and a key component of successful SEO is building an effective link-building strategy.
Through effective external backlinks, you can better position yourself amongst your competitors and increase your ranking for target keywords, as well as gain audience visibility through third-party mentions.
Connecting through content
The most obvious way to attract attention to your website is to give both third-party sites and internet users a compelling reason to interact with your business through creative and compelling content.
This is what’s known as “Natural Linking”: The creation of content that serves as an authoritative or informative source for other websites to link back to your relevant web pages.
Here’s our Organic Lead, Amy Leach, explaining the basics of link building:
What Is Link Building?This sort of content can either be evergreen or topical
Evergreen content is continually relevant and not subject to changes in internet trends or time-conditional. This might include things like well-written, comprehensive guides (like this one), listicles, resource lists, and information pages about your company’s products and services.
An example of consistently relevant Embryo content could be What are ‘Impressions’ on Pinterest? The key metrics explained, or Six reasons for cart abandonment and how to reduce it. In two weeks, months, or even years, the information in these articles will be as relevant and factually accurate as the day it was written.
Topical content, by contrast, is timely, relevant, and regularly updates information about specific events or trends that tends to be specifically targeted to a certain audience. For example, this blog post called Looking to the Future: Members of Team Embryo Give Their 2024 Marketing Predictions, would be time-sensitive because at the end of 2024, it will no longer be temporally accurate.
Although it can be extremely rewarding to earn conversions based on the merit of your content alone, it certainly helps if you share your content on social media platforms, or get third-parties sites to mention you as well. Establishing yourself amongst other brands in the same industry is a good way to begin your ascent to the top of the rankings.
Crucial competitor backlink analysis
As well as building up your own backlink profile in order to gain insights into the most relevant or popular keywords in the eCommerce industry, carrying out a competitor backlink analysis is imperative to identifying which websites might be willing to link to you too. Once you know where your competitors have been featured, you can seek out relevant backlink opportunities for your own company website.
A backlink profile is made up of the quantity, anchors and quality of links pointing to a website. By auditing a competitor’s backlink profile, you can collect data around the patterns and strategies they use to build up their brand identity through third-party platforms.
However, there is such a thing as good and bad links, and when it comes to quality link building you definitely want to try and avoid the latter.
So what is a bad back link?
A bad back link is basically a link to something irrelevant that adds no additional value to the content, or a link from a spammy website, usually characterised by excessive ads and pop-ups or suspicious domain names. This could negatively impact your site traffic and have a knock on effect on your revenue and visibility in search results as Google will likely pick up on the low-quality link during its indexing.
You can check for bad back links either by using a bad backlink checker or manually. To remove these links, you can either contact the referring domain to request that they remove it, or by disavowing the link (asking search engines to ignore this link in their indexing so that it doesn’t affect your ranking).
Be our guest! (for industry-related websites)
Another great way to encourage backlinks from third party sites without sacrificing control of your content completely is by guest posting on other company’s websites. This is an opportunity for you to produce engaging and compelling content in your brand’s tone of voice but on a platform which will reach a wider audience than your usual visitors.
Amy added:
“The goal with the guest post approach is to generate referral traffic back to your site so that your products and services are exposed to fresh eyes.
Many publications that offer guest posting opportunities often include do-follow backlinks in the guest articles because of the value it brings to the contributor.”
In general, do-follow links tend to be the most rewarding for creating your website’s strong backlink profile as these links allow Google and other search engines to point back to your website or blog and to pass on the authority.
In order to identify whether or not a website hosts do-follow links, you can check the source code. If it does, it will show you href=[URL] and the rest of the html.”
However, that doesn’t mean there is no value in linking to pages that contain no-follow links. These links are treated more as a hint rather than a directive for crawling and indexing purposes, due to their “in general” semantic qualifier. This means that the origin website doesn’t recommend the destination website. While at first glance this might seem counterproductive for building up a backlink profile, no follow links can actually help you enhance your search engine optimisation.
A ‘crawl’ of the Embryo website
By not leading to any other promotional material, but still making reference to your content through general semantics, this creates a direct link to your product or service and can help boost your page’s ranking score.
Reliability, relevance, and reciprocity
Ultimately, link building is an incredibly effective way of increasing your eCommerce brand’s organic visibility and positioning yourself well within SERP rankings as a reliable source. People trust people, and if other websites are linking to you this will automatically have a positive impact on your reliability. You’ll be even more successful if you return the favour through reciprocal link building.
From crafting high quality content, to conducting competitor backlink analysis and guest posting on third-party websites, these are just a few of the strategies you can use to build better links to boost your organic traffic.
Want to learn more?
Our team of SEO experts can help you with all aspects of your SEO, including link building. To learn more and see how we can support you, get in touch today. We look forward to improving your rankings in the SERPs.
