Building high-quality backlinks is essential, yet often confusing, for eCommerce sites trying to drive more traffic through SEO. Without the right strategy, it’s easy to waste significant time and effort pitching irrelevant websites or creating content that no one links to.
As an e-commerce site owner dependent on discoverability to sell products, you may continually be seeking the perfect link-building formula for your store. The truth is – there is no “one size fits all” approach. Link building requires research into assessing opportunities that align with your niche, offerings, and audience.
This post walks through a methodology for eCommerce sites to evaluate their own link profiles, identify prospects, and secure placements ranging from guest contributions to earned media coverage. With the right frameworks, tools, and outreach, you can start to methodically gain valuable backlinks from authority sites to bolster rankings.
Whether you feel overwhelmed or don’t know where to start with link building, leverage these comprehensive techniques to quantify and shore up your domain authority. Join me as we analyze link building from an angle – from auditing to targeting to scaling a process that works for your store based on data and relevance. With a sound approach, your eCommerce site can dramatically expand its reach.
Here are some tips on analyzing your current backlinks and finding new link-building opportunities:
Use Backlink Analysis Tools
Tools like Ahrefs and Moz enable you to analyze which sites are currently linking to your domain. This allows you to understand where your existing backlinks are coming from and identify what type of anchor text links correlate with higher rankings and traffic, informing future link-building efforts.
Build Relationships for Links
Start building connections with industry websites, bloggers, journalists, etc. that are relevant to your eCommerce site but not yet linking to you. Leverage these relationships to secure guest posting opportunities, expert quotes, interviews, and other placements that will result in quality initial backlinks.
Create Visual Assets
Develop visual assets like infographics that seamlessly allow other sites to embed or link back to your content. Be sure to optimize these assets by including target keywords and links so that you benefit from future linking potential.
Get Listed in Roundups
Proactively request that your eCommerce site get included in relevant “best of” articles or roundups of top shops/products in your niche. Securing these placements raises awareness and drives referral traffic from authoritative, enduring links.
Expand Link Prospects
Expand your link-building process beyond manual outreach by utilizing paid tools like BuzzStream or Linkody which help identify numerous guest posting opportunities, link insertion prospects, and other website partners open to contributor pitches.
Increase Link Value
Strategically enhance assets like co-created research reports with native value-add for partner websites. Integrating your brand and backlinks within these value-added assets gains more powerful placements that transfer authority.
Secure Media Links
Utilize platforms like Help a Reporter Out (HARO) to build connections with business journalists and secure expert quote or interview opportunities resulting in quality links from media domain news coverage.
Use Web Platforms
Actively participate as a guest speaker, expert panelist, or content contributor for relevant podcasts, webcasts, and other digital audio/video platforms that provide brand exposure and recognize your participation with valuable backlinks.
Qualify Link Opportunities
Thoroughly evaluate potential link acquisition opportunities using metrics like Domain Authority, word count, organic search traffic, etc., ensuring prospective website partners have adequate authority to transfer SEO value.
Conduct Competitor Link Gap Analysis
Using link analysis tools, thoroughly analyze the domains linking to your main competitors that are not yet linking to your own eCommerce site. Identify these missing links as high-potential prospects for outreach. Gaining comparable links helps equalize competitiveness.
Craft Diverse Anchor Text
When actively pursuing earned links through guest posts, embeds, or brand mentions – take care to diversify your anchor text, avoiding overuse of exact-match commercial keywords. This helps build a natural flow and avoid Google penalties for manipulation.
Automate Link Outreach Campaigns
Intelligently automate link prospecting and high-volume outreach campaigns via software like Pitchbox or Skribar to gain more high-quality placements at scale on qualified sites open to accepting contributed content and links. This amplification can increase link velocity.
Track and Analyze Rankings
Use rank-tracking software to closely monitor the organic search visibility and keyword rankings for your priority landing pages every week. Identify positive ranking gains and correlate them to recently acquired links to quantify SEO impact over time, guiding strategy.
At the end of the day, not all link-building tactics will resonate with every eCommerce site. The key is to better understand opportunities aligned with your brand through analysis and then pursue those avenues creatively but systematically.
With the frameworks provided in this post arming you with knowledge of prospecting tools, valuation metrics, outreach channels, and asset creation, link building does not need to feel like an uphill battle. All sites must start somewhere by laying foundations through strong partnerships.
Over time and with consistency, your eCommerce site can establish itself as an authority-earning link instead of desperately seeking for them. Focus on quality over quantity, diversify placement opportunities, and monitor the impact of your efforts to course-correct accordingly. Don’t view backlinks as obstacles but rather signposts directing new customers to discover you. With a sound roadmap now in place, the journey ahead looks bright.
