Link building for e-commerce websites is one of the most debated topics by e-commerce SEO service providers across the world. The main point is to evaluate risks and rewards from doing the link building for e-commerce websites.
Before doing anything else you need to know that Google will not wait to penalize your site if they discover any kind of manipulative activity into link building in order to manipulate your search results.
Until a few years back the entire focus of the e-commerce SEO agencies was on quantity over quality. As it helped them add thousands of backlinks every week with automated tools and software. But, that is now the thing of the past. Now, Google’s algorithms have evolved and are more discerning about the automated, unethical, and low-quality backlinks.
Now Google outright ignores the low-quality backlinks. So, you should be very careful about creating high-quality links because they still carry a lot of weight. Google decides to place your website and rank it in search results based on the quality of the backlinks you have.
So it is utterly important that you do the link building for your eCommerce business very carefully. You should conduct a site audit of your backlinking profile before implementing any backlinking strategy.
After this, you should compare the backlinks of your competitors. This will give you a clear picture of where you stand with your SEO efforts, backlinks quality gaps, and keyword rankings. And it also gives you a clear insight into how well your backlinking efforts are holding up.
Now you must be thinking about how to do an eCommerce site audit. Don’t worry we will cover that part briefly in your discussion below.
Conduct an e-Commerce Site Audit?
Though doing a site audit is necessary and very important for all types of websites. But, site audit for e-Commerce websites is mandatory and should be done very religiously.
The site audit helps understand the problems and issues in the site which needs to be fixed in order to attract more customers by getting better positions in the search engine result pages.
It is no denying the fact that a well-built SEO-friendly website is necessary for e-Commerce sites to gain better positions in search engines. Backlinks are one of the main factors which Google and other search engines consider while ranking a website.
The backlinks from reputed websites give the websites the upper edge than the ones having low-quality backlinks. So, even a website having double the number of low-quality backlinks would be beaten by the high-quality backlinks website having half the number of backlinks.
Review Your Backlink Profile?
Conducting backlink analysis with your competitor sites is a good idea to compare your strength against them. Also, it may give you ideas about where should you get your high-quality backlinks from.
A backlink profile will provide data about every link pointing to your site, but you will need access to a tool to find them.
There are tools available online like Ahrefs, SEMrush, etc., which can quickly scan the web and gives you all the links pointing to your site along with their page ranks, domain ranks, anchor texts, etc.
With same tools, you can get the details of the Backlinks pointing to your competitor’s site.
Disavow Your Toxic Links
You need to go over your reports very carefully. First of all, go over the toxic backlinks pointing to your website. Disavow them immediately as this gives the wrong impression of your website to the Google bots. And that could potentially affect the search engine result positions of your website. Toxic links are those links which have more than 65% spam score.
Check Your Anchor Text
Branded anchor texts are more authoritative for ranking. But if you see many links with irrelevant anchor text, then it could be the result of a negative SEO attack. Competition sometimes does mischief’s to lower down your site’s rankings.
Check for Anomalies
If you see any sort of anomalies in the link acquisition, followed by sudden dips, it is an indication of a spam attack. You should always keep monitoring these.
Use the disavow tool to remove those links which you find in such anomalies to keep your site’s rankings good. Remember surge in the backlinks might alert Google and it can impact your website rankings.
Do Follow or No Follow Backlinks
There are two types of backlinks DO FOLLOW and NO FOLLOW Backlinks. Do follow backlinks are the links that indicate the Google bots that they endorse the website and that specific content it is linking to. Whereas, No Follow backlinks are those links that endorse content or website but don’t indicate Google that they follow them.
There is a third type of backlinks called UGC (User Generated Content) these are links that you create yourself by posting on business directories, pdf submission sites, etc.
Most valuable of these is the Do Follow backlinks. It doesn’t mean that No-Follow and UGC backlinks keep no value for your website. But, Google and other search engines consider them as just a citation.
So, you should try to get Do-Follow backlinks from High Authority sites so that your website gets high search engine rankings.
Once you have a good idea about the quality of the backlinks you already have then it’s time to get to work at improving your profile. If your site is new, then you won’t have any, but even if your website is years old and well established, more quality backlinks are never a bad thing.
Use the following tips to build quality links using strategies that won’t get your site burned from the SERPs.
How to Do Effective Campaigns for Link Building for e-Commerce Websites?
Backlinks are important for all the websites and website owners or agencies handling the sites run backlink campaigns to acquire backlinks and get higher positions in search engine result pages.
But, for e-Commerce websites, there are few things that should be kept in mind while doing backlinks campaign. Let’s see what it takes to run an effective campaign of link building for an e-Commerce website.
Reach Out to Sites in Related Niches
Reaching out the sites in the related niches and asking them for linking to your website or products is the best way to get backlinks. Check out the domain score and spam score of the sites you want to reach out before actually writing emails to them. Try to get backlinks from the sites having a high domain authority.
For instance, if your e-Commerce store sells kids toys, then reaching out to the sites in parenting, kids care, kindergarten schools, etc., would be good. As the readers on those sites would find it relevant and interesting the products or posts those sites would link to. The idea is to provide value to their audience.
Utilize Broken Links
Go check for the broken links on the sites you want to get backlinks from. If you find any broken link on them and your product fits in that place, you can email them to link to your product or site.
Broken links happen when a site already linked to that site is expired, or it doesn’t have that product available on their site. You find the broken links manually reading through their text and clicking the links in there. Or you can use the broken link checker tools to find broken links.
Guest Posting
Many sites allow guest postings. Means you can write on them as a guest and link your relevant products or site in your post. Linking the products or website would give you a backlink for your own e-Commerce site.
Again, make sure your post or article you write as a guest writer provides value to the audience of that site. Do not insert a lot of links in one single post. Instead, write on different guest posting sites and insert relevant links into your posts.
Create More Content
Content is the reason searches happen on the internet. Content is always king and it always will be. More content means more pages for Google and other search engines to crawl and index.
Having a blog on your e-Commerce website which is updated regularly has 400% more chances of getting higher rankings than those don’t have a blog or no regular updated on their blogs.
Creating content doesn’t mean that you start creating content on anything. Your content should be relevant, unique, and valuable to your audience.
More content on your site means more opportunities for your site to get indexed and ranked for relevant keywords. With fresh content on your site, Google bots keep coming back on your site to crawl and index the new content.
With repeated cycles of Google bots crawling your site and finding new content, new keywords, your site will grow in authority.
Having more content gives other site owners more reasons and content to link to. That way your e-commerce site will attract more natural links from other sites over time.
You should know that over 50% of people shopping online read 3 to 6 pages before actually buying a product. Hence, write proper product descriptions, disclaimers, product care instructions, shipping information, etc. It enriches your content and convinces your potential buyer to buy from your site.
Work with Affiliate Marketers
There are many people who work as an affiliate and promote your products and services in order to earn a commission upon sale. These affiliates promote your products on social media, their websites, blogs, closed groups, etc.
In that way, you get backlinks from their websites, blogs, and social media. Also, you get additional referral traffic on your website.
Work with Influencers
Influencers are people having a huge following on their websites, blogs, social media channels. Their followers mostly trust them and when they endorse a product their followers buy them.
Check out YouTube and Instagram for influencers operating in your niche. Reach out and ask them if they would like to create a sponsored post or a video about your product or brand.
You can pay them for promoting your products and brand on their channels. Established influencers with millions of followers charge huge money, so if your budget doesn’t allow you to hire them you can look for the influencers who are having their followers in thousands. You will have to pay less money to these up-coming influencers.
Sometimes a free sample product is enough to convince an influencer to put a video on their youtube channel or write about on their blogs.
In both ways, you get backlinks for your website and relevant referral traffic from these influencer channels.
Avoid Using PBNs or Buying Links
PBN stands for Private blog networks. This is a huge industry, but these could be risky if you participate in link building with them. The PBNs create artificial links to a site to increase its ranking potential.
Do not think that you can fool Google. It’s smart enough to understand the natural links and artificial links. Most of the time the sites having backlinks from PBNs are deindexed and slapped with Google’s penalty.
So, in any case, do not involve in any such practice which artificially creates backlinks to inflate your search engine ranks.
The sites from PBNs usually offer to sell links. Do not get into that, because most of the time those links are from low-quality sites. Also, it poses the risk of Google discovering it from a PBN and penalizing your e-commerce site.
Conclusion
Backlinks have always been and always will be an important ranking factor. Implementing white hat link building strategies is the best way to get high-quality backlinks and it ensures the long-term benefits to your e-commerce site. Avoid the wrong practices for link building and keep your e-commerce site safe from deindexing and Google’s penalty.
If you want you can hire an e-commerce SEO agency like us to do SEO and link building for your e-commerce site. The advantage of hiring an e-Commerce SEO agency is that you have peace of mind regarding the safety of your site and getting natural backlinks. The e-commerce agencies do this task day in and day out. So, they have the complete know-how of doing it ethically and organically.
