Introduction
Link building is an important part of SEO and online marketing in 2024. Backlinks are a very important part of how search engines rank websites. The more backlinks your website has, the more authoritative and trustworthy it is seen to be.
This makes it rank higher on Google. If your site ranks in the top few SERPs, you will get more visitors, sales, and money.
There are a few surefire ways that e-commerce sites can improve their link building, even though it can be hard to do.
Importance of Link Building in eCommerce SEO
Link building is very important for e-commerce sites. It’s an important part of search engine optimization. Link building is the process of getting other websites to link to yours in order to improve your site’s ranking in search engine results. You may also hear these links called “backlinks” or “inbound links.”
Every e-commerce site needs a strong link-building plan because Google uses the number and quality of backlinks to a site to decide how authoritative and relevant it is in search results.
A lot of research has shown that building links is very important for the success of your website. Any statistic you look at will show you that links are 50% of a website’s SEO success. It brings more people to your website naturally and builds trust, especially if your business is in a very competitive niche.
Building links is important for your e-commerce site for the following reasons:
Boosts organic traffic:
When someone searches for a certain keyword on Google, they are trying to find something specific. According to research, people click on the first three links that come up in search engine results. This is the reason why building links is so important for your e-commerce website.
A strong backlink profile will bring a lot of free traffic to your website. With links, you can get more visitors quickly and cheaply.
Referral links to your website are also helpful. You could have a website that is very trustworthy linking to yours. Imagine how many leads these kinds of links could bring you. Gaining referral traffic is easier when you build links.
Naturally occurring visitors to your website who don’t look for your brand on search engines are called “referral traffic.”
An excellent link from a website with a lot of authority can help your site get more visitors.
Boost website authority:
Backlinks and the quality of the content are two very important things that can help build authority. If you want to gain the trust of your target audience, you need to raise the authority of your website.
People who are supposed to buy your products won’t if they don’t trust your brand. This means that when other websites have backlinks to yours that come from other trustworthy websites, those websites also trust and authority your website. So, an e-commerce link-building plan is very important for increasing authority.
Software companies like Moz have made tools that can be used to check the authority of a site.
Improved rankings:
If you don’t have a strong linking profile, Google won’t be able to rank your site. A good profile of links makes it easier for Google to crawl your site, which lets them index it.
These days, it’s very competitive, so your rivals will go after the same keywords that you do. What will make your website different from others?
It doesn’t matter how good your product or content is if people who are supposed to see it can’t find your website. So, links are very important because they let search engines crawl your site and index it.
This makes the ranking better.
Better Site metric:
Your site’s domain authority (DA), domain ranking (DR), and page ranking (PR) all show how healthy it is.
So, do you make these things better? By links is the answer.
You can improve these metrics with the help of links, which is good for the health of your website as a whole.
It’s important to remember that not all links are good. Your website’s ranking may also be hurt by backlinks from spammy or low-authority sites. In this case, you can ask the webmaster of these sites to take down the tool. Or, if all else fails, use the Google Disavow tool to get rid of the link to your site.
Increased visibility:
More backlinks mean that people can find your website. Also, getting more people to see your website is very important for your e-commerce site. In other words, your website will show up more often on search engine results pages.
They give your site some “website juice” when they link to it, which helps it get a high ranking.
Getting links to your website will help a lot of people find your products and services, which will make your business more visible.
If people in your target market visit your website a lot, they’ll think that your products are very popular. People will talk about your business because of this.
Reduces bounce rate:
One part of a good e-commerce site is getting free traffic. Part two is keeping website visitors and making sure they look around your site.
The bounce rate tells you how many people visit your website but don’t look around. It doesn’t help to have organic traffic to your e-commerce site if a lot of people leave right away.
You need to have a great internal linking profile to make this better. One more important thing that helps Google’s ranking is internal linking.
Google crawlers and people who visit your website need internal links to find what they’re looking for.
Builds website’s authority:
Link building helps people get to know each other and boosts the authority and trustworthiness of your website. Every website needs a strong link structure, no matter what niche it’s in. You need a linking structure with highly authoritative backlinks if you want your e-commerce site to become an authority in its field.
You now understand why link-building strategies are important for your website. The next question is how to build these links. Here are some great ways to build a strong library of links.
Guest Posting:
A guest poster is someone who writes content for your website and then posts it on their own website.
Guest posting gives your website useful links that boost the credibility of your e-commerce site. Besides that, it helps potential customers learn more about the website.
You can make your e-commerce site’s SEO much better with a good guest post that has good content. Your e-commerce site’s ranking will go up a lot if you can get guest posts from websites with a lot of authority.
But you need to do it right when you guest post.
First, you need to find a good website where you can post as a guest. Don’t forget that you shouldn’t post as a guest on spammy or sketchy websites. Spammy sites will post low-quality blog posts that don’t get people to interact with them.
You should also check to see if the niche of your e-commerce site and the niche of the guest posting site are the same. Getting backlinks from these guest posts won’t help if the website has nothing to do with your brand.
Skyscraper Technique:
The skyscraper technique is a way to build links for SEO. You use this method to find competing websites that post content that other trustworthy websites link to. Then you make content that is similar but better, which makes the sites want to link to you instead.
When you make changes to the content on your website, you take customers away from your competitors.
Skyscraper content is usually more complete, up-to-date, informative, and written by experts that people trust more.
You do what your competitors do, but you do it better. This is a very competitive strategy.
Skyscraper is different from other link-building methods because it helps you get links that were previously pointing to competitor websites. Getting links from websites that are already well-known and get a lot of visitors is also helpful.
The skyscraper technique pushes you to make high-quality, useful content that helps your SEO strategy in a number of ways.
Before you can use the skyscraper technique correctly, you need to find content that is already out there that you can make better.
You also need to do a proper analysis of your competitors’ content if you want to make content that is better than theirs. You need to look at the backlinks that your competitors have and decide if it’s worth it to take them over.
You need to make better content than your competitor and make it search engine friendly after all this research.
Broken Link Building:
As part of broken link building, you find dead links on other websites and try to get them to replace them with live links that point to yours.
Broken link-building is a great way to get links in e-commerce. This strategy helps you get backlinks from other websites.
It is great for SEO because Google gives certain backlinks a lot of weight. If your website has a lot of good links, it will probably be at the top of Google’s search results.
If you build broken links, you help the webmasters of other websites fix their problems, which makes it the best way to build links.
Building broken links is a great strategy because you can get links that were previously pointing to your competitors and come up with content ideas that people will want to link to.
To build broken links the right way, you need to:
1. Find links that are broken that are related to your site. Backlink-checking software can help you find the links.
2. There will be broken links on the pages of your competitors as well. Look at those links to see if there are ways to “steal them.”
3. Look at the opportunities and put them in order of importance based on how useful they are.
Advanced eCommerce Link Building Tactics:
To get better at link building, you need to:
1. Publish high-quality content with specific keywords: The SEO ranking and conversion rate of your website will both go up if you have well-written content and good external links. Over time, blogging is a great way to get useful backlinks.
For your e-commerce site, you need to add a blog page. After that, you need to write useful and informative content using keywords that the people you want to buy from you will type into search engines when they are looking for products like yours.
2. Organize a product PR campaign: Getting a lot of backlinks can be helped by product PR. The catch is that the PR campaign needs to be interesting enough to get people’s attention.
3. Create attractive infographics: Backlinks to useful content like infographics can be made because they are easy to see and share.
4. Ask partners to link your site: It’s important to have good relationships with your distributors and ask them to link to your site. This will also help build links to your website, which is a good thing.
Influencer Collaborations:
When you search for something on Google, you may often find blogs written by well-known people who have a lot of followers promoting the products. This is called working together with an influencer.
Getting useful links for your e-commerce site is very easy with this method.
Find people who are interested in the same things as your business before you work with them as an influencer. For example, if your online store sells beauty products, working with a travel influencer wouldn’t make sense. You need to find someone who works in the beauty business.
By putting your link in their content, this type of marketing makes more people aware of your brand and improves your search ranking.
Working with influencers can also help spread the word about your brand and make it more visible. And lets a new group of people know about your brand.
How do influential people make links?
Influences are strong on all platforms and can help you build backlinks that are worth your time. They can help promote your brand based on things like new products, sales times, the type of product, and more.
Product Review Outreach:
To get customers to trust them, every business puts a lot of weight on product reviews and testimonials.
Testimonials and reviews can help you figure out what your product is missing and make it better.
One more benefit of testimonials and reviews that is often forgotten is that they are a great way to build links.
Reviews and testimonials help potential customers make smart choices, and they also make people more likely to trust and believe in your website.
The search engines know that your website has new, relevant content when it gets a review. This gives crawlers new places to look and raises your chances of being at the top of search results.
Third-party reviews and testimonials are also good ways to get useful backlinks. This third party could be a professional reviewer, a customer, or a business in the same niche as you but not competing with you.
To get the most out of reviews and testimonials, you need to:
1. You should look for websites that are related to yours but not direct competitors. You should also look at these websites’ domain authority and see if they are relevant. A review posted on a page about sports and fitness, for example, will be more useful for a business that sells sports shoes.
2. Check to see if these sites will publish your review of the product. You can also find review opportunities on sites like Yelp and Foursquare.
3. Get in touch with the site that will be publishing your review. This will help your website get backlinks, which will help you move up in the rankings.
Monitoring and Evaluating Your Link-Building Campaign
It’s important to keep an eye on and evaluate the progress of your link-building campaign so you know if your work is paying off.
Important metrics to keep an eye on and evaluate your link-building strategy are:
1. Quality of backlinks: You should look at more than just the number of backlinks your website has to see how well your link-building strategy is working. You need to check out how good these links are. Backlinks’ quality is based on three things: how relevant they are, how trustworthy they are, and how diverse they are.
You need to check the quality of the links and make sure they come from sites that you can trust. Good links show that even your website is reliable and trustworthy. Also, make sure that the website that links to you has something to do with the content of your site. Having different kinds of links from blog posts, news sites, and forums will also help you build a diverse linking profile.
2. Domain authority: There are better and worse websites on the internet. Domain authority, also called page authority, tells you which website is better than the others. The domain authority scores tell us how trustworthy search engines think the website is. It makes sense that a website with a high domain authority would get more backlinks than others. You should make sure that the sites that link to you have a high domain authority.
3. Anchor text optimization: This metric is often forgotten when a link-building plan is put into action. Anchor text is text that has a hyperlink and can be clicked on. An exact-match anchor text that is well-optimized will help search engines understand what the content is about and make the experience better for users. You need to make sure that the anchor text in your content doesn’t jump around and is easy for the reader to find their way around.
4. Return on Investment: ROI, or return on investment, is a key way to measure how well a link-building campaign is doing. One of the most important parts of ROI is making money. Link-building success needs to be turned into sales and money. You should also check to see if the strategy makes your brand more visible and recognizable.This metric can’t be measured, but it always leads to a big return on investment (ROI).
Your online presence will improve if you run a successful link-building campaign. Referral traffic that comes from other sites is another benefit of a link-building campaign. You need to keep an eye on these metrics to see how well your link-building campaign is going.
Overcoming Challenges in eCommerce Link-Building
There are many things that will get in the way of your e-commerce business becoming successful. But these problems can be fixed by taking some steps. Here are some things you can do to get around the problems you’re having with building links:
1. Create high-quality content: High-quality content that is worth linking to is the basis of any link-building strategy that works. If your website doesn’t have good content, you won’t be able to keep any of the visitors you get, even if you try all of the above link-building strategies. To make good content, you need to write blog posts, make infographics, and make videos that are both useful and interesting.
2. Research your niche: Find out more about your niche and your main competitors. Find out why their websites are ranking so high in search engine results pages (SERPs). The websites of your top competitors are at the top because they do something different from you. Check out what they’re doing, the backlinks they’re going after, and how they’re moving. Then do everything better than them.
3. Identify websites for guest posting: Learn about your niche and find guest posting sites that are the most trustworthy and related to it. Also, look at the backlink profile of the sites that compete with you. These are the possible link-building targets you should pay attention to.
4. Find influencers in your niche: You can’t just pay anyone to talk about your products. First, you should make sure they have a good reputation. Next, you should see if they work in the right industry. It’s better for a tech influencer to review a mobile app than for a beauty influencer who has nothing to do with the app.
5. Relationship building: Forgetting to know the owners of other websites will help you build your link. More backlinks will be made possible, and your reputation will get better among people in your niche.
6. Join HARO: Journalists and bloggers can use HARO to find expert opinions on a wide range of topics. You might get cited and linked to in their articles if you share your useful information.
7. Link reclamation: You can contact websites or content that mention your brand without a link and ask the webmaster to change them to proper backlinks.
8. Avoid low-quality spammy links: If you can help it, stay away from spammy links. They won’t help your site in the long run.
Conclusion
Link building is an ongoing part of SEO. You need to change how you link to sites as Google’s algorithm changes. The linking strategies can’t be used just once and then left alone.
You have to constantly look into what your competitors are doing, find new ways to link to your site, and find backlinks. Because of this, the link-building strategies listed above were chosen to assist you.
Also, don’t forget that building links is a big part of SEO and the success of your e-commerce site. Because of this, you need to take it very seriously. That’s the only way to get a good return on investment for your business.