Building links for an ecommerce site can be challenging. The two most important pages on an ecommerce site are the product and category pages. Yet, these pages offer the fewest opportunities for creative backlinking. This doesn’t mean you should avoid building links though. It just means you need to be more creative about the links you build. To help you create a winning strategy we’ve put together this guide on link building for ecommerce.
What are the Best Strategies for Link Building for Ecommerce?
Create Linkable Assets
Considering the main product and category pages on ecommcerce sites are not link-friendly, it’s important to build content and pages to fill that need. These linkable assets can include blogs, infographics, guides, original research, listicles, or FAQ pages. All of these assets can be easily used by other sites to link back to your page. Here are a couple of steps you can take to start creating these assets:
- Determine what type of content you want to create.
- Build the page where the content will live.
- Create the content
- Push it live
When determining what kind of content you want to create you want to make sure it matches the needs of your audience. If your main product is biking gear, it wouldn’t make sense to make blog articles or infographics about the intricacies of televisions. Additionally, it’s important to know you aren’t forced to make only one kind of content after committing to it. Start with blogs, then try some infographics, or maybe a listicle. Do what makes sense for the content.
Affiliate Partnerships and Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing has become increasingly popular in recent years, and has results to back up its popularity.. If done well, affiliate marketing can be a great way to introduce your product to tons of people in a way that feels natural. Short term, this can increase your sales, but there are long term effects as well. As these affiliates promote your product they will link back to your page. This helps build out your link building strategy, and you can see the benefits of these links for as long as that link is active. Here are a few steps to get your affiliate marketing strategy started:
- Research influencers and sites in your niche.
- Read and watch the content of these influencers
- Determine which ones match your voice and mission most closely
- Reach out to them to see if there are any products of yours they would be interested in using
- Determine how and when posts will be made, and what the content will contain.
Performing adequate research on potential affiliates is important to ensure the influencers your brand works with match your values, and will represent your company in the correct way. Of course, you are paying them, but this also links the influencer to your brand in the mind of their audience. If they say or do the wrong thing it may not garner the results you want.
Product Reviews
Product reviews function very similarly to influencer and affiliate marketing but with more of a professional/journalistic twist. This strategy is great for a link building strategy as it provides the perfect opportunity for the review to link to your product page. This will help those finding the review find your product, as well as help that page in the rankings on Google. The main difference between a review and influencer marketing is a product review will be more formal and dive deeper into the form and function of your product. Influencer marketing may have some analysis on how they used the product and if they enjoyed it. Here are a few steps to help you get started:
- Research influencers and publications with similar audiences to yours
- Reach out to them to offer a product for a sponsored review
- Send them the product
These sponsored reviews are a great way to help your link building strategy. As long as the review exists on the internet, you will continue to see some benefits from the link juice, as well as directly from people finding the review and clicking the link.
Unlinked Brand Mentions
A brand mention is essentially anytime someone has written a piece of content and mentioned your brand name in it. These are great because it organically grows your brand. However, these mentions are rarely linked back to your site which means you’re seeing fewer benefits from them than you could be. Luckily, there is a way to help fix this situation and allow you to see more return on these mentions. All you need to do is simply reach out to the original author and ask them if they would add a link to your site. As they’ve already mentioned your brand in the article, a link will be easy to include. Here are a few ways you can find these mentions:
- Setup a Google alert for your brand name or specific product names
- Use ahrefs or another similar site
- Search your brand name with quotations around it
- Click “highlight unlinked”
- Reach out to authors of content to include a link back to your site.
Both of these methods will work great to find any unlinked mentions The ahrefs method is great for finding older articles with mentions, while the Google alert will keep you updated on new activity regarding your brand name or other product names
Ask for Product Feedback
Product feedback is a great way to get some direct input on your product and build your link strategy. There are scores of sites that create “best of” listicles for just about any niche or industry you can think of. This means there are ample opportunities for your product to be included in at least one of these lists. But what if it isn’t? How do you get featured? Well, the best way is to search for listicles listing products within your niche, and then reach out to them for feedback on your product. This way you can understand why your product might have missed the mark to be on that “best of” list, or you find a new publication that enjoys your product and will include it in the list. Here are a few steps to get you started:
- Research “Best Of” lists related to your niche and industry
- If your product is not included reach out to ask why your product had not been included
- If the author did not like your product as much competitors, ask for feedback
- If the author had not used your product, offer to send one for consideration
- If the author likes your product after trying it, request it gets added to the list
- If the author does not like the product after using it, consider it valuable feedback.
These lists can be invaluable for people in any niche as they are an easy way to see what people with similar knowledge are using and enjoying.
Use Video Content
In today’s social media landscape video is extremely important. Short-form videos have become more and more popular thanks to the rise of Tik Tok and Instagram reels. These videos are a great tool to teach your audience about your product, as well as introduce them to the people behind it. The key to good video content is to make sure it is relevant to your audience. If you try to capture other audiences that aren’t interested, or just miss the mark on what your audience likes it could lead to a decreased interest. Videos are great for a linking strategy because different internet publications can easily break out the video and include a link to your site or your social media with the video. Here are a few steps you can use to get started:
- Determine what kinds of videos our audience would find most useful
- Research what other competitors in your industry are doing
- Create videos
- Post them!
Videos are a fun way to get your brand name out there as well as show some more educational content about your product in an easier-to-consume way.
Why you should trust your Ecommerce business to BASE
Are you looking for SEO and link building help for your ecommerce business? BASE has you covered. We have over 10 years of experience in link building. All of our links are created with quality in mind and can be made to fit the needs of any niche or industry. All of our links are high quality, do follow links that include high-quality content. Our experts will help you create the best linkable content for your site.
If you need help with your link building, check out our What it Takes to Rank Tool today to get started!
