Link building refers to building hyperlinks to relevant websites to improve the search engine’s ranking and visibility.
Backlinks are precious for eCommerce SEO, as they signify a ‘vote of confidence from one website to another.
If your websites have backlinks, it means people have linked your web page on their website because of the quality and relevancy of your content. It will signal the search engine that your content is valuable and vouched by many websites. Consequently, the search engine will rank the pages or the website that many people have linked higher on the result pages.
To put it simply, earning backlinks can influence your ranking on the search engine result pages.
But there is a twist…
Search engine giant Google doesn’t only consider the quantity of the backlinks but also their quality. Hence, backlinks from spammy or low authority sites aren’t counted as quality links, no matter how many of them you earn. On the other hand, if a high-authority, trustworthy, popular website links to your webpage, it will be very favorable for boosting your eCommerce SEO.
If you want to earn quality backlinks from high-authority sites, seek no more!
Today’s article presents you with 12 powerful link-building strategies to make your eCommerce store rank higher and welcome more traffic.
12 Powerful Link Building Strategies To Make Your Ecommerce Store Rank Higher
1. Blog Consistently
People will link your website when you have something informative, interesting, or creative on your website. A person will not link your website if you have nothing engaging to offer.
To earn backlinks, you must provide people with a good reason to link to your site. This is where blogging will help you as one of the Link Building Strategies.
Did you know that consistently blogging can help your backlinks grow by 97%?
Now, if you are wondering what kind of blogs an eCommerce website can publish, relax! You don’t have to conduct massive research, collect data and statistics to create a blog post.
Blogging doesn’t have to be difficult or complicated. You can create content by keeping in mind your niche, industry, and targeted audiences’ interests.
For instance, an eCommerce website sells cell phones and professional cameras. It can create content about the lenses used for wildlife photography, compare the two models of the cell phones, or which cellphones are best for gaming. When people come across an interesting article, they would love to share it with others; hence, they will link to your web page, and you earn backlinks.
2. Use Strategic Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is a powerful and highly effective strategy to earn more backlinks and improve your SEO. Guest blogging is when a website creates an article to publish it on the other relevant website of its niche. It allows the users of the host website to get an insight into the guest website’s knowledge and learn more about it.
Some numerous websites and blogs accept and publish guest articles. Look out for the websites in your niche that accept guest’s writing and have a good ranking on search engine result pages.
Make sure that your content must be pleasing and interesting for the audience of the host website. Your article must be creative. It should contain new information for the readers and not the same repetitive details they must have read at least 100 times before.
Insert pictures, short videos, and infographics to make it more engaging. Keep a friendly tone and focus on the information you want to share instead of bragging about your eCommerce store. Don’t forget to proofread your article before turning it in to rectify all the errors.
3. Create Infographics
Graphical information is more potent than a textual one. People are more attracted to creative images, videos, or infographics instead of text information. A properly designed infographic will convey the information or message much more quickly than a paragraph containing the same information.
If you want people to share your content on their social media profiles or websites, get creative with visual assets and design outstanding infographics. Interesting and unique infographics catch users’ attention and encourage them to share them in their social circle.
You can also create gifographics. They are similar to an infographic with the only difference of using animated GIFs instead of static images. In the era of social media websites, infographics and gifographics can quickly go viral than an article or a blog post.
4. Get Active On Social Media
Presence on social media has become a must for businesses who want to reign in the market and target their prospective audience. Social media can increase brand awareness, attract more customers, and direct selling on a few social media websites such as Facebook and Instagram can even boost sales.
Social media is an excellent tool for both marketing and getting inbound links. All you have to do is create engaging and exciting content that will be useful and informative for your audience. The more creative your posts and content are, the more you will expose your brand and website’s URL to a large audience who can then further share it on their profiles.
5. Use Resource Links From Trusted Websites
A resource guide is a list that you can create or compile for your prospective audience to help them find what they are looking for in one place.
For instance, a resource guide can be like ‘12 best blogs for book reviews’ or ‘15 copywriting blogs that will make you more cash’, etc.
Many high authority websites such as Social Media Examiner, Forbes, and many others have resource pages on their websites. You can take help from those pages to create your resource list for the website.
Once you have written and published the content, you can reach out to websites you have included on your lists. You will have to provide them with a link to your resource page and request them to share it on their websites and social profiles.
If the websites you mentioned on your list link back to you, you will receive lots of social love and increased inbound links.
6. Broken Link Strategy
Link building strategy refers to fixing the dead or broken links on another website of your niche or industry and replacing it with the link of your web page with the same content.
Broken links increase the bounce rate of a website and affect its SEO. Fixing broken links is a win-win situation both for your website and the other website with a broken link.
Check the websites of your niche or industry for any broken links. Next, you can look up the content on your website similar to the content on the broken link. Reach out to the webmaster and inform him about the broken link and provide the URL of your website’s content. It will help the website to fix its broken link and you will earn a quality backlink.
7. Competitive Analysis
If your competitors are ranking higher than you, they have earned more qualitative backlinks than you. Instead of feeling upset or accepting the status quo, you can spy on them and learn their techniques and link building strategies to build inbound links.
Spying on your competitor to understand the best practices and strategies is termed competitive analysis. It can help your business to implement the same approach to achieve your objectives.
All you have to do is log on to a good link tool that lets you check the domain authority or backlinks profiles of any website on the internet. Enter your competitors’ URL and check from where your competitors are earning their links. Understand how it has earned the link. Did it fix the broken link, used guest blogging, or created resource lists? You can implement the same strategy to increase your backlinks.
8. Create Link Roundups
A link roundup is a list of the featured blog posts links of a particular niche or industry. A website can create a list of blog posts and link them to its website. For instance, an eCommerce store that deals with men’s apparel can make a roundup post ‘Top 10 Fashion Blogs’ and mention the links of the ten blog posts in his post.
Link roundups work on the principle of reciprocity. When you give attention to other bloggers and link to their blogs, the bloggers reward your website by sharing the links of your roundup post on their website and social profiles. It again earns you backlinks.
9. Reclaim Links Through Social Mention
Suppose a website has uploaded an infographic, image, video, or any other content created by you without providing the proper credit or link to your website. In that case, you can reach out to it and request it to recognize your content.
Google.com can help you to find out the pages that are using your infographic without linking to you. Simply log on to Google.com and type the title of your image or infographics. Check the image result to find your infographic. Once you find it, check the website, visit the webpage, and check if the website has linked to your website; if not, then ask the website to give proper credit and link to your webpage.
10. Testimonials
Providing testimonials is another simple way to earn backlinks and strengthen the SEO strategy of your eCommerce.
Your positive review will help the brand attract more customers and win their trust, and on the other hand, it will provide you with a fantastic opportunity to get an inbound backlink and traffic from the brand’s website.
11. Build Relationships
To build more links, you have to develop good relationships with the other websites of your niche or industry. Thanks to the online groups, communities, and forums, you can quickly build good relationships and contacts and earn backlinks for your website.
Be an active and contributing member of the online communities and groups of your niche. Take an active part in discussions and provide your resourceful insight. Besides, you can also appreciate other websites on the content they have created. Connecting and appreciating other websites helps you gain links and keeps you updated with the latest news and trends of the industry.
12. Turn Your Mentions Into Backlinks
It is probably the most uncomplicated link-building strategy on the list. You don’t have to write a guest post, create a blog post, resource links, or infographics, etc. If somebody has written something about you or your product and not mentioned the link of your website, all you have to do is reach out to the webmaster and request him to provide the link to your website where your website or products are mentioned.
However, you will only be able to use this strategy if you are notified when someone mentions your business or products. Setting up Google Alerts will immensely help you track and trace if your business or products are being discussed online.
In A Nutshell…
One thing is essential to understand when it comes to link building. Earning quality links from a high-authority website is a gradual process. Even if you implement every single strategy mentioned in this post to earn links, you can’t create inbound links instantly.
Link building is a gradual process, do not rush it. Stay consistent, keep an eye on your competitor, build relationships, and you will soon receive lots of quality links and social love.
Author Bio:
Ricky Hayes is the Co-Founder and Head of Marketing at Debutify – free Shopify theme, helping dropshippers build high-converting stores in minutes. He is a passionate entrepreneur running multiple businesses, marketing agencies, and mentoring programs.