How can we build more links to our ecommerce store?
It’s one of the most common questions I get as an SEO consultant.
Link building has been made deliberately difficult by Google as it is their main ranking factor.
To help, I’ve curated 15 link building tactics that are working in 2023 for ecommerce stores.
Read on to discover the ecommerce link building tactics used by the experts to growth their business…
Leverage your images with Press Loft
If you have product photography then you can build links. Welcome to the world of Pressloft.
The site is an up to date image archive that PR’s and journalists will scour when looking for products to include in upcoming features.
You add your images, a few details and then sit back and wait to be found. The service isn’t free but the pricing is fair and is tiered offering a wide range of add-ons. Those looking for products (ie your products) are working for some of the biggest top-tier publications – and off the back of this you may win a link, win a feature, or both.
Top tip: ‘evergreen’ photography works really well, however, if you also have seasonal shots of your products (in snow for winter, at the beach for summer etc) then that can really help your images appear for less obvious queries in the Pressloft search results.
Dan White, SEO Consultant
Sponsored Content
Link building is an effective way to promote an e-commerce store and increase its visibility. My favorite link-building tip is to try sponsored content.
Sponsored content involves reaching out to bloggers or influencers in relevant markets and paying them to write a post featuring your brand, products, or services. This type of outreach not only increases brand awareness but can also lead to valuable backlinks that improve search engine rankings.
Some lesser-known options for sponsored content include podcasts or syndicated radio programs; paid authorship links on quality websites; guest speaking opportunities; sponsorship of seminars, webinars, conferences, and events; and creating custom infographics targeted towards the right industry publications. Sometimes the best results come from thinking outside the box!
Michael Alexis, CEO, swag.org
Make Sharing Easy
One of my favorite link-building tips for e-commerce stores is to make sure that your products are easily shareable.
This could mean creating discount codes that can be shared on social media, or providing easy ways for customers to share reviews of their experiences with the product. Make it as simple as possible for your customers to let others know about their positive experience with your products and allow them to do so in a few clicks—this makes it easier for people to spread the word about your store, helping you build links and promoting customer loyalty over time.
Lorien Strydom, Executive Country Manager, Financer.com
Don’t Forget to Look at Your Competitors’ Backlinks
Every e-commerce marketer knows that high-quality content marketing is the best way to build quality links—but, for a more efficient, timesaving tip, we recommend analyzing your competitors’ backlinks through a tool like Semrush or Ahrefs.
By looking at your competitor’s backlinks, you’ll get a better understanding of what opportunities are available for your own site, as well as specific sites and publishers to reach out to through cold outreach.
In addition to a specific list of opportunities to follow up on, you can also extrapolate more opportunities from your competitors’ links. Say, for example, your competitor in the running shoe space has links from local marathons and running clubs; you can find similar organizations in your area to sponsor and/or request links from.
Mike Belasco, CEO and Founder, Inflow
Free Products to Micro-bloggers for a Backlink
I highly recommend partnering with micro-bloggers (in your niche) to build high-quality backlinks to your e-commerce store. Reach out to them and offer a free product or sample for a backlink from their store to your e-commerce site.
This applies to both digital and physical products. For example, lifetime course access for a backlink. Or a FREE coffee sampler for a backlink. It’s worked well for me, and in most cases, the unit economics makes sense!
Madhav Bhandari, Head of Marketing, Early Stage Marketing
Write Terkel Answers
Link building is vital to attract new traffic to an e-commerce website. Writing Terkel answers is a prevalent way and my favorite way for link building these days.
Answers on Terkel are relatively short, so you can write many answers in a day. However, keep the quality up to the mark so that websites include your answers in their blogs and articles and link your website there. I believe it is the fastest and most effective way for link building for e-commerce stores.
You can get links from the top websites if they like your answers. You get questions from different sectors like science, technology, healthcare, HR, real estate, health and wellness, and travel, and the list is long.
Focus on the following points while writing Terkel answers so that you can easily start link-building for your e-commerce store:
- select questions wisely
- start with a heading, get innovative, and provide your personal touch
- write creatively
- keep the answer to the point
- avoid redundancy
- avoid grammar mistakes
Yogesh Kumar, Digital Marketing Manager, Technource
Create Images and Infographics
For e-commerce stores, creating images and infographics can be an effective link-building strategy. Infographics, in particular, are a powerful way to present data and statistics, making it easier for readers to understand the information.
Using visuals is an excellent approach for increasing traffic and building links for your e-commerce store. By incorporating visuals like these, you can make your content more engaging, encouraging readers to share it and potentially leading to more backlinks. You can also create images that display your products or services visually compellingly, generating further interest. In addition, you may submit your infographics to various infographic directories for even more exposure.
Burak Özdemir, Founder, Online Alarm Kur
Video Marketing
Video marketing is one of the most effective ways for an e-commerce store to gain links that are high in authority. It’s important to keep your target audience in mind when creating video content.
Make sure your content is engaging and interesting by creating humorous stories, how-to videos, or even slapstick comedy depending on your store’s niche. Video content ranks well on Google, so once you’ve garnered a bit of traffic and views to your videos, be sure to check the analytics to see who embeds them on their site. This can lead to valuable opportunities for outreach to link back to your e-commerce store.
Dakota McDaniels, Chief Product Officer, Pluto
Drive Traffic to Your E-commerce Store With Affiliates
My favorite link-building tip for e-commerce stores is to leverage affiliates. Leveraging affiliates involves partnering with industry influencers, popular bloggers, and businesses in related fields and having them send referral links to your online store.
Not only will this drive traffic toward your store, but it serves to increase your website’s authority, one of the most important factors for performing well in search rankings. Affiliates are a dominant method for building many high-quality backlinks as natural referrals from sites that have already gained the trust of their audience. Leveraging affiliates is an effective way to boost the visibility of your e-commerce store and attract more customers.
Jamie Irwin, Marketing Executive, Service Club Delivery
Don’t Just Focus on Product Pages
When building links to e-commerce stores, many web managers feel the pressure to build links to product pages to boost the authority and rankings of those individual products. I would recommend selecting some blogs and other resource pages that have strong internal links to product pages and building links to those pages with the view of passing link equity through to product pages.
Some people call this a hub-and-spoke strategy—where you have a hub page that is a core information page and which has internal links to lots of other relevant pages.
Tilly Haines, SEO Executive, Infinity Nation
Category Page Directed Unlinked Mentions
Unlinked mentions I find to be some of the easiest “quick win” links you can get with an e-commerce campaign. However, I like to angle the link request towards a collection page rather than the homepage.
To do this, start by using tools like Google Alerts, BuzzSumo, or Ahrefs to find unlinked mentions of your brand or products. These tools will send you alerts when someone mentions your brand or product but doesn’t link back to your site. Review the context of the mention to ensure it applies to your campaign. Then identify a collection page on your e-commerce site that applies to the mention.
For example, if someone mentions your brand and the blog post is about wintertime, you could link to a collection page featuring winter boots. Reach out to the author or website owner with a personalized email. Start by thanking them for the mention and mentioning why you think their audience would find the relevant collection page interesting (and saves them a Google search).
Harry Boxhall, SEO, Boxhall Marketing
Leveraging Product Reviews to Generate Links
Identify bloggers and influencers in your industry who write product reviews and offer to send them products for a review. Be sure to ask for a link back to your product page in the review.
You could also look out for relevant resource pages that list products or offer recommendations for your target audience. Reach out to the website owner and ask if they would consider including your product on their page with a link back to your site.
Lilia Koss, Community Manager, Facialteam
Leverage Trending Topics in Your Industry
My favorite link-building tip for e-commerce stores is creating content related to trending topics in the industry. By doing this, you’re able to build brand awareness by tapping into existing conversations.
Not only can it help increase search engine visibility, but it also acts as a great opportunity for others to link back to your website from their own content pieces-especially if you provide unique and valuable information on the topic at hand.
Make sure that all content created dives deep into the subject matter so readers get detailed information (which helps with SEO). Additionally, make sure that when other websites reference your content, they directly tag or credit your store’s website, as it will have greater value than just linking out without mentioning where they got their research from. This practice boosts trust with readers while simultaneously providing “link juice” back to your website!
Jo Larsen, Growth Blogger, Jo Larsen
Practice Link Diversity
Google wants to see a natural link profile, and having all of the same links is a tell that you are link-building.
Mix things up by acquiring do-follow and no-follow links, using long-tail anchor text and LSI keywords for anchor text; acquire links from different domain extensions (.edu, .com, .net, etc.). Having fewer, diverse backlinks is better than having a large quantity that looks the same to Google.
Mike Wood, Digital Marketer, Legalmorning
Collaborative Content Marketing
Partner with complementary businesses or e-commerce stores in your niche to create collaborative content. This could include co-authored blog posts, joint webinars, or even creating a standard product or service. When you collaborate, both parties can promote the content to their respective audiences, increasing exposure and backlinks from the partner’s website.
Usman Ul Haq, SEO Strategist at WPExperts.io
Found it useful? Sign up below for more helpful ecommerce SEO posts just like this.