Link building is one of the most challenging aspect for SEO strategies. It is also important when it comes to eCommerce store. Effective link building is responsible for more than 50 percent of SEO success.
Getting links from other websites not only helps improve your search engine rankings but also traffic. Link building not only increases traffic to your eCommerce website but also increases sales.
Google accounts 72.3 percent of all search engine inquiries and relies heavily on back-links in its PageRank algorithm. When other websites link to your content, it validates the quality of your eCommerce site and improve your SERP ranking.
How do you build back-links to your eCommerce store?
We’re going to show you some effective link building techniques that will have you shooting up the rankings in no time!
What is Link Building?
Link building is the practice of getting other websites link to your eCommerce site. Links from third parties into your product pages, blog, or other content is a virtual vote of support that Google and other search engines recognize as authority and trust.
The more websites that link to you, the higher chances of your SEO score. Naturally, the more trustworthy connecting sites, the greater the SEO boost. Effective link building for eCommerce positions your brand as one of authority, relevancy, and trust, which are the three pillars of SEO.
Link Building Creates Authority
There are three types of SEO authority available. They are – Domain, page, and link Authority.
Domain Authority is a score that correlates with how well a website is likely to perform in search engine results. Because Google ranks by pages, not by sites. Domain authority gives you insight into a website’s value as a link and SERP placement. All links to the domain are considered when the total domain authority score is calculated.
Page Authority is the links to a specific page that are considered with creating the page authority score, which reveals the likely SERP ranking of a page. The domain authority score is considered in the calculation of page authority score.
Link Authority is sometimes referred to as link equity. Link authority is the value that’s passed from one page to another. A number of variables considered into this value, like the linking website’s authority, HTTP status, and other factors.
Link Building Creates Relevancy
Relevant links connect topically to related pages. For example, if you sell a natural skincare face-wash on your eCommerce site, it’s ideal for an influential beauty blogger to link to your eCommerce site when talking about how to maintain healthy skin. The relevancy of the links plays a vital role in your site’s overall topic relevancy.
Link Building Creates Trust
When a search engine trusts your domain it directly impacts on your SERP ranking. Google quickly recognize websites that don’t pass the TrustRank test. TrustRank by Google is just like a virtual filter. Google algorithms determine whether your content and links are trustworthy or not. If so, they fall your site somewhere in search results for your keywords. The higher the TrustRank score, the better your SERP placement in search result.
Types of Website Links
Basically there are three types of website links available. You can create a stronger eCommerce site with different types of links. The web links are:
- Outbound links
- Internal links
- Back-links
Outbound Links
You create an outbound link to another website when you create a same content. There are two types of outbound links:
- Dofollow Links
- Nofollow Links
Dofollow Links – The majority of outbound links are dofollow links. Basically it connect to another website without changing the same settings. It helps search engine to understand about your website.
Nofollow Links – In nofollow outbound links Google won’t penalize you for linking to a questionable website. The links also isn’t picked up by the PageRank and it also gives no value to the site to which you’re connecting.
Internal Links
Internal links means interlinking one page to another page of your website. It allow you to keep visitors on your site longer, add authority to pages, and develop an easy-to-navigate eCommerce site.
Mentionable is a free WordPress plugin that helps you create relevant internal links.
Back-links
Back-links are links from other websites back to your site. The more links you have into your site from reputable sources, the higher your page ranks will be with search engines. When the back-link is connected to anchor text keywords for that particular page, your site will rank higher.
Link Building Techniques
There are various ways to build links, but how you will move about it depends partially on your industry and the resources you have available. Here are some techniques:
1. Create Shareable Content
One of the most effective link building campaigns of recent times is Getty Image’s Embed, which opened up around 50 million images for free use on blogs and social media websites. According to a stat Infograph receives 62 percent more backlinks than other types of content. Nevertheless, there are other types of content that also attract links. They are:
- List articles
- Whitepapers
- Videos
- Image galleries
- How-to tutorials
Once you build the assets, share it bloggers and potential customers. Send them a link of your new content or tag relevant websites in a social media post. Content-based link building not only gather more organic traffic to your site, but it also increase your sales.
2. Create a Compelling Blog
An eCommerce site shouldn’t just offer a product or service; it should exist to make your customers’ lives better. By starting a compelling blog on your particular niche, you have a new way to engage with your customers.
Blog not only engage customers and improve the quality of links, but posts that relate directly to products can also be used to direct readers to the commercial pages on your site.
With blog you will gain the following:
Adds Value – Your blog isn’t about you, it’s about your customers. Entertain them, educate them and share with them. Your blog should be filled with valuable content they’ll use and will bring them back.
Has a Plan – You should have a clear plan on how your blog will attract readers through SEO, social media, and increase revenue.
Develop Brand Choice – Blogging is a great way to develop brand voice. Carry the brand voice throughout your blog so that you can create an experience for your audience and turn occasional visitors into potential customers.
Some of the best eCommerce site blogs that you can follow:
3. Guest Posting
Don’t stop with blogging for your own eCommerce site. Try to reach out to authority voices in your niche and guest post on their sites. Most websites allow guest bloggers to link back to their own websites within the blog article. Not only this but readers are on the hunt for guest bloggers. According to a infographic, 62.96 percent of people perceive blogs with multiple authors to be more credible.
4. Broken Link Building
Broken links on high-quality websites opens up some great opportunities to build a good relationship with the site owner. It happen all the time for different reasons.
This strategy takes advantage of that fact as most site owners don’t realize their links have broken until it has damaged their SEO and in some cases the user experience and brand reputation.
Simply put… you have to find all your target websites, find out if they have any broken links and tell them about it.
5. Influencer Marketing
Research suggests that Millennials are increasingly cynical of big brands and sponsored messages, which makes the process of link building even more harder for eCommerce brands.
Write a post featuring the experts and get them interested in it before you publish. Then they will feel obliged to share.
Here are a few simple steps to follow with this technique.
Pick a headline having the following structure:
Number + (industry) blogs/experts + promise/keyword
Create a list of influential people. The number of people depends on how in depth you want your article to be.
You can find eCommerce influencers. Ensure that these people have high domain authority before adding them to your list.
Define the Question. You have the promise of the article. Now you need a definitive question to ask your influencers. Go for just one specific question.
Ensure that what you are asking is clearly defined as these are busy people who don’t have much time to spare.
Outreach. Get all the contact info and then email them exactly what you are doing and send them your question.
Be sure to send a follow up emails if you don’t get a response.
6. Data-Driven Content
Creating content that is full of facts and backed up by data is much more likely to get links to it.
You wouldn’t place a link on your site unless you are sure the content you are linking to is factually correct.
You can use this to your advantage by simply backing up your content by conducting in-depth research of the subject, finding or creating unique data and then putting that data in attractive graphs.
When the time comes to outreach you can then use this data to grab customer attention.
7. Leverage Extreme Products to Build Links
Another way to acquire links around your brand is to stock and promote extreme products.
This technique has the capacity to give up traditional demographics and appeal to a mass audience.
By building links around extreme products, you can drive huge volumes of traffic to your website while generation considerable interaction through social channels.
8. Newsjacking
This strategy is to find out what is in the news, what people are interested in, what are looking for and what everyone in your industry is talking about. Then create your content about those topics.
You can use Google trends to see what the main headlines are and then narrow down further to your business industry. Make a list of main topics.
Then use that list to brainstorm ideas for content.
Decide which idea you are going to use and then write the content and published fast.
Time is crucial for this case as today’s news is tomorrow’s trash.
Final Thoughts
While any people will tell you that link building is no longer an effective way to drive traffic to your website and engage customers, this depends entirely on the techniques that you are going to use or using to achieve these goals.
Hopefully these tips and practical examples will help to grow your link building techniques in the future that can drive long-term growth.
