Three eCommerce link building strategies that really work in 2021
Business owners and SEO experts can’t ignore the importance of backlinks in ranking a website on search. But how can you build links to your eCommerce site?
Building links to your most important online store pages (for example, product and category pages) can help to increase the chances of dominating product keywords. However, the challenge lies with identifying eCommerce link building strategies that work in 2021 and beyond.
Many SEO experts and marketers working in online startup stores or established eCommerce websites are having a difficult time securing backlink opportunities in their respective industries (and even facing challenges with finding potential linkers who can directly link to their site’s product and category pages).
That’s why many believe that it is critically important to have a link building agency like SharpRocket to deliver the best link building services for eCommerce websites.
Why is it difficult to build links for eCommerce sites?
There are many reasons why building backlinks to product and category pages of eCommerce sites can be challenging for SEO experts and business owners.
Firstly, most product pages in online stores aren’t linkable in nature. These pages are not referential, meaning that a typical content creator won’t link to a product page not unless it’s incentivized in one way or another.
The second reason is SEO experts’ inability to find backlink opportunities their competitors haven’t acquired yet for their sites.
It is a mediocre strategy when the objective of a link building campaign is to catch up on competitors’ links. If you’re in an industry where competitors ramp up their websites with high-quality links, you will always get behind.
Three eCommerce link building strategies that really work
There must be another way to build backlinks to your eCommerce store. So here are some actionable tips to help you out dominate your niche with high-quality links.
1) Get quick wins for links from your store partners
To start with your eCommerce link building campaign, you can initially approach your store partners. These include your business’ retailers, manufacturers, resellers, and affiliate partners. They are the people involved in the production and distribution of your products.
Given that they’ve known your brand, either they’ve interacted with you physically or had a direct connection with any of your staff in your organization, you’re likely to get backlinks from one of their pages.
The only question here is which of their pages are fit contextually to link to your eCommerce page. One page where these partners may have is the “where to buy” page or the “find our product” page. This type of page is purely a website dedicated to getting customers (and potential ones) to find the suitable sources (stores) of the products they’re selling in the market.
So if you’re a retailer selling a physical product, it is feasible to get a backlink from your manufacturers’ “Find Our Products” page.
One tip to begin with this link building strategy is to inventory all of your store partners. Then, have them organized in a spreadsheet or in an outreach platform like Buzzstream (to keep contacts managed). Then write an email template to scale your outreach campaign.
With email copies, make sure you disclose who you are and why these store partners link to your website. The value proposition is straightforward: to help customers find their products easily. Communicate it well in your email pitch to increase your chances of getting link placements.
2) Invite industry bloggers to write for your blog
One of the best ways to get more natural links to your retail store is to solidify your blog assets. These include having a set of industry practitioners with expertise and experience to share their insights and best practices about topics you’re looking to rank for on search.
And by doing so, you increase the perceived value of your brand, as you’re standing out among the rest of the other blogs in your industry.
To get more natural backlinks to your eCommerce blog, you want to invite industry practitioners who are capable of creating content to write for your blog.
It’s a form of linkbait, wherein these experts can also share their works (published on your blog) on other industry publications — which would then allow you to earn new backlinks from their distribution efforts.
To start with, you first have to discover these industry writers. You can go directly to Google and search for any existing industry writers (inurl:”blogger” OR “writer” “topic”).
Another way is to find a highly authoritative and popular publication in your industry and reverse engineer authors who regularly contribute content for the website. You can use Ahrefs to plug in these publications and find pages that are linked to them.
Most of the time, authors who have their own websites would link to their pages from the guest posts they’ve written on publications. So when you reverse engineer the high-end site on Ahrefs, you’ll see backlinks directly pointing to their websites — that’s another way to source out new authors in your industry.
The next part is crucial here — reaching out to them and incentivizing them for their work.
There are many ways you can do this. Still, an effective one is emphasizing the value of your followers’ count and establishing your website’s authority as a means to help these authors get more exposure for their personal brand.
As they write for your blog, they get more visibility for potential clients or customers for their own businesses. So state any numbers about your website, including your email subscribers, social media follower count, monthly traffic, etc. The more significant these numbers are, the more persuasive your email pitch would be for these potential guest authors.
Another way to incentivize potential authors is to send the products for free. You may opt to let them choose any of the available products (set up the offer program beforehand for this campaign).
By giving away products for free, you increase the value of your offer.
3) Discover backlink opportunities from going green market
There is one market most online stores don’t take advantage of when it comes to link building — that is the ‘going green’ market.
‘Going green’ or recycling market in the online space is a type of linkable audience. It means they have more receptive to any kind of linking behavior, as they tend to link to other informational and referential content.
And in fact, these going green linkers are receptive to any email pitches linking to product and category pages — plus factor if you’re trying to rank heavily for your target mid to bottom of the funnel keywords. If you have products that can be recycled, you can get backlinks from the going green market.
Now, going green market includes ‘recyclables’ or ‘recycling’ pages from university websites and colleges — these are solid edu backlinks your competitors may not think of.
Another linkable audience within the circles of the “going green” market is environmental bloggers. If you’ve got some topics related to what they research about and have some resources that these content creators will likely reference, you have more opportunities for this market.
You can also create comprehensive guides on your blog to target environment enthusiasts, recycling content creators, and the like. Just go over to your any keyword research web products or any tools available to discover topics. There, you search for any possible issues related to your brand and to going green market.
Once you publish guides like that, you can reach out to link curators of resource pages in the going green market. They’re likely to reference your guide (similar to other competing guides on the same topic) from one of their links pages.
As long as your guide is relevant to what they cite the most, you have chances of earning those deserved links.
Product page backlinks are possible for online stores
There are many possibilities in SEO. One activity, in particular, is getting product page backlinks. You can build backlinks to product and product category pages if you know and implement effective link building strategies for your online store.
Establish the proper process with your SEO team. Come up with a solution to any pressing problems you’ll encounter. At the same time, you discover backlink opportunities, qualify these opportunities based on metrics, create content assets on your blog, and pitching potential linkers for your website.
Product page backlinks are possible if you do the hard work and strategy for your eCommerce SEO campaign.
