U.S. online retail sales are projected to reach $407 billion US dollars in 2021. Your e-commerce site wants a piece of that pie. You can’t use a sandwich board at your shop door. Or those teens swinging oversized signs on street corners. One thing you’ll want to do instead is learn how to build backlinks for e-commerce. This article discusses the basics.
What is a backlink in digital marketing? Quite simply, it is a link from another site to your business website. The reason it needs to be part of your company’s marketing strategy? High-quality backlinks give your small business website greater credibility with Google’s search algorithm. This can increase your ranking position, which amplifies visibility in your customers’ search engine results (SEO).
Benefits of Backlinks in E-Commerce
Backlinks should play a vital role in your SEO strategy. Here’s why:
- Paid digital ads are growing more expensive.
- Higher search ranking = steady stream of traffic to your business website.
- Referral traffic helps endorse your site.
- Backlinks help the search engine bots find your site for faster indexing.
Now that you’re on board with backlinking for SEO and the other benefits, you should know not all backlinks are equal. There are two main types of backlinks:
- Follow: The originating site effectively endorses your website.
- No-Follow: The person/website giving the backlink acknowledges your site but doesn’t vouch for it.
Social media links, and links from blog comments and forums, are almost always no-follow links. Yes, they still drive awareness. But they aren’t going to impact your search rankings. Next, we’ll talk about building the best backlinks for e-commerce.
How To Build Backlinks for E-Commerce
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Create Engaging Content
A backlink is like someone saying in conversation, “Jamie made this great point about dog training.” You need to be making that great point online that people want to cite in their own quality content.
Creating engaging content is critical to business marketing, of course. Coming up with creative ways to market your business can directly impact SEO. Others will want to share and link to your unique content.
“Ultimate guides,” “Best of YEAR,” and stat-driven infographics can all work well as engaging content. Long, thorough blogs that go into great detail on a topic and round-ups of expert opinions are also more likely to be referenced by others. (Plus, those experts are likely to promote the content too).
Don’t forget the importance of making this content visually appealing too!
2. Get Product Reviews
This is the age of the influencer. Reach out to people who have a following related to your product or service. These product reviews are particularly powerful backlinks because they are user-generated content.
You might also encourage your B2B customers to review your business on their sites. Again, it boosts awareness and counts as user-generated content.
Interviewing influencers about their interactions with your brand can work too. Or invite them to comment on a blog. Or contribute to a webinar or podcast. Then, you can share the link to that content with them. They’ll likely repost it.
3. Write Guest Blogs
A guest blog gets your message in front of a new, related audience. It helps to establish your people as thought leaders. You can use this forum to build new business relationships. Plus, it provides backlinks to your site.
Responding to other people’s blogs can also be helpful. It isn’t directly going to result in a backlink. However, if you consistently interact with a blogger in your field or industry, you could soon find that they are linking to you as a source in their future content.
4. Focus on Quality Over Quantity
Beyond the follow, no-follow distinction, there are other reasons to value one backlink over another. For one, external links from high-quality and relevant sites will have a bigger impact. A backlink from a domain that has not linked to you before has more weight too. Even getting a backlink from a page with umpteen links on it will dilute the SEO value—yours is just one of many.
Additionally, it can help if the anchor text is relevant to a keyword on your page. SEO will like it more if Cosmo links to your “organic facial products” (something someone might search for). If they simply say “check it out,” it doesn’t give you the same keyword credibility.
5. Get a Link From a Manufacturer or Supplier
Many manufacturers or suppliers want to tout their business relationships as a way to gain credibility. If they have a logo of your company on their partner’s page, ask that it have a backlink.
Beardbrand lists its beard oil online and offline retailers, which can boost the retailers’ sales but also help their SEO:
6. Get Listed in Online Directories
Online directories can provide powerful backlinks. Having your website, business name, and information in an industry directory, or Best of the Web, or Yahoo’s local listings, can help. As with the earlier point about quality versus quantity, you should prefer the human-edited directory. The search algorithms will too.
7. Become a Sponsor
Sponsoring a community event is a good way to show your business cares. At the same time, it can provide backlink opportunities. The event organizers may have a page listing with links to all of their sponsors. You might even be quoted in a press release about the sponsorship, which could provide another reputable link to your business website.
8. Write a Testimonial
A testimonial helps your supply chain partners promote their business to new clients. Offering to write a testimonial for their site or participate in a case study can support their company’s promotion efforts. At the same time, it is an inexpensive way to promote your business. Your brand gets in front of more people, and you get backlinking for SEO along the way.
9. Be a Domainer
With so many different extensions available, and such interest in web domains, add domaining to your backlinking strategies. It can be more time-consuming, but you could identify sites with relevant keywords currently for sale. Then, contact the owner of a parked site to reach out and ask for the link to be changed to your website.
Conclusion
Business owners and entrepreneurs who want to promote their business online can do big things with a backlink e-commerce strategy. Make backlinking a priority to increase your sales and traffic.
