12 Strategies for Acquiring Backlinks for Ecommerce Sites

The biggest challenge and downside of link building is that it doesn’t bring immediate results. It takes time to see if what you’re doing is working. Thus, the process is not fast.

In this blog post, Alex Husar, CTO at Onilab with experience in Magento development services, will introduce you to the best-practice link-building tactics for Ecommerce websites that you can follow and incorporate into your SEO strategy.

The definition of ecommerce link building

As a process, ecommerce link building means getting other websites to link back to your ecommerce platform. Its main goal is to increase your website's ranking in SERPs.

Links back to your site are also called backlinks or inbound links. Each backlink suggests to Google and other search engines that another website vouches for you. Altogether, inbound links make up your backlink profile and, the stronger it is, the better your search performance.

What does it give you as a result?

• Improved credibility
• More traffic to your ecommerce platform
• Sales growth

Now, let's examine the top proven ecommerce link building strategies. They will help you earn high-quality links from trusted sources.

Combine integrated content marketing with a compelling blog and newsjacking

Among the first things you can do is create your own one-of-a-kind, quality content. This is your ultimate starting point: putting together articles, tutorials, case studies, comparison pieces, guides, overviews, interviews, and posts to form the unmatched blog.

You should ideally aim at crafting something valuable to your readers. Preferably this should be done in separate posts, each devoted to a single topic that’s covered at length. Organize such posts logically, use proper keywords, place internal links, and there’s a chance that your content will get shared on its own. Be innovative, informative, audience-oriented. Only after you have something worth sharing you can step forward and show your content to the world.

Take a look at the blog section of the official L’Oreal website, which is shown in the screenshot below. The article is well-structured, up to the point, and contains many links. As you can see, it ranks high in the search results and is the first post among non-ads.

Not sure what else to write about? You may get more site visits by presenting relevant ideas (that connect with your business somehow) as news stories. Although this technique of covering trending topics with a twist around your niche isn’t shiny new, getting such media coverage can lead to more organic traffic. The main rules here are the following:

• Don’t be too promotional — obvious reseller linkbuilding motives are never good;
• Don’t miss the trend — the right timing is key, so you must be very quick.

Plus, if you’ve mentioned a company, product, or person in your content, reaching out to and informing them about it can bring you links (provided they like what you wrote). At least, your post can thus be shared by those whom you’ve mentioned across their channels, and that’s already great.

Offer an education section

Following on what I said, share your expertise. If there are many commonly occurring questions regarding your niche or the product you’re selling, invest some of your time giving detailed answers collected in separate FAQs. If there are unique or interesting things that you can cover, share recommendations, or interesting facts, go for it.

As long as you’re not copying or re-writing something that the internet is swarming with but interlinking the content you’re creating within your website, you’re on the right track.

Embrace video marketing & infographics

People love visuals. Therefore, if you have the skills and resources to create some great visual content and assets, why not? Engaging illustrations and infographics that can cover a relevant topic and display the information in a fun and engaging way is an idea worth mentioning.

Besides, you can submit your videos not only to your store’s website and social media accounts but also to YouTube or Vimeo. There’s a big chance that they’ll get viewed and shared after some time.

Monitor links back to you with Netpeak Spider

One of your main tasks is tracking where your content was shared and making sure that you have links pointing back to you. The same story goes for cases when someone copy-pastes a part of what you’ve created without giving you proper credit. Requesting to link to you and cite you (instead of taking it to a displeased tone that demands to remove what was ‘stolen’ immediately) is, perhaps, the right path to take.

To monitor links back to you, you can use Netpeak Spider. It’s as simple as that:

1. Enter the initial website address into the ‘Initial URL’ field.
2. In the general setting, make sure that the crawling of all external links is enabled.
3. Start the crawling.
4. When the crawling is done, you can export the report on all external links for further analysis.

You can crawl all external links even in the free version of Netpeak Spider crawler that is not limited by the term of use and the number of analyzed URLs. But if you want to export various reports, segment and filter data, save projects, and much more, you need to subscribe to the Netpeak Spider Standard plan. If you are not familiar with our tools yet, after signup, you’ll have the opportunity to give a try to all paid features immediately.

Check out the pricing plans, subscribe to the most suitable for you, and get inspiring insights!

Appear on directories

Just as it was done in the good old days, your company should ideally be up and available in all the catalogs, maps, and tabloids. Browse company directories that are substantial for your Ecommerce business. You can even narrow down your search by location or niche.

After selecting suitable directories, spend some time creating pages that introduce people to your business and give them your contacts. Remember, at best, don’t use the same text on multiple directories when describing yourself.

Get featured in resource sections

On a similar note, monitoring resource pages that provide lists with helpful links can take you a long way. For instance, let’s assume that you’re running an Ecommerce store that sells organic food and products. You can attempt to get featured on various overview pages with lists such as ‘Top Healthy Organic Recipes’ or other pages that fit your industry. Pay additional attention to those resource sections that have ‘Suggest a Resource’ forms that allow pitching links that people may find useful.

Guest post on relevant sites

Guest posting is another viral ecommerce link building strategy. In essence, you need to reach out to those who have websites, blogs, or social media relevant to your niche and offer your content to be mentioned or published. In many cases, only unique articles by guests are accepted for submission, meaning that you’ll need to write something ‘to give away’. Guest posting does its bit if the resource that you are posting on is authoritative and well-ranked.

Try to establish a relationship with the websites that you’d like to be featured on. Don’t be pushy. Use various means of communication apart from emails — it's the best backlink strategy for ecommerce in this case. Follow up regularly, and offer something in return if you can.

Look for relevant broken links around the web

What someone lost can be something you find. Put simply, if you’ve noticed that a website that overviews something relevant to your industry has a page with a backlink that leads to a broken 404 error page, you can suggest replacing it with a link that leads to similar or identical content that you have.

To spot broken or invalid links on someone else’s website, you can make use of one of the many tools, such as Netpeak Spider. With the multi-domain crawling feature in Netpeak Spider, you can check multiple websites for broken links.

To detect broken links in the list of URLs, you need to:

1. Insert a list of URLs.
2. In the General settings, enable the multi-domain crawling.
3. In the "Restrictions" settings tab, set the "Max crawling depth" at the level #1.
4. Start the crawling by hitting the Start button.
5. When the crawling is completed, filter the results in the main table → Reports tab in a sidebar → Broken pages.

Provided that your content is a suitable replacement that also brings value, such a helping hand reseller linkbuilding tactic can get back fruitful results. If you don’t have such content, you can create something similar to what was previously used to replace the lost page (hint: you can take a sneak peek at what the lost content was like using tools such as archive.org).

Finally, remember to regularly check your website for broken links, as they’re a nasty issue.

Run targeted forum marketing campaigns

Mentioning other ways of building links, commenting on various forums, community discussions, and blogs is an excellent tactic. As you monitor the topics that touch upon your niche, you can reply to questions, chip into the dialogue, and share your opinion. The volume of your replies is up to you, but as long as you suggest reading more on the topic and leaving a link to a relevant article or post of yours, this tactic can bring you back quality traffic.

Partner up with local businesses & relevant websites

Developing effective link building tactics for ecommerce brands will be beneficial for both parties is an essential and inseparable part of link building. After all, since all link placements and shares are done exclusively voluntarily, finding partners and beneficial interests with others is a step in the right direction.

You can begin your search based on your location or look for other Ecommerce websites and offer mutual link exchange to other businesses in the area. Similarly, such trades can be made within shoulder niches.

Feature influencers & brand ambassadors

Having someone speak about your business is an outstanding strategy of link building for ecommerce websites. It’s commonly known that the simplest way to get client feedback is to collect reviews that are showcased on the website, social media, and review platforms. When influencers or people whose opinions your target audience trusts agree to mention your brand on their blog, page, account, etc, it’s a splendid opportunity you need to grab hold of.

Such backlinks will be powerful and, most importantly, boost your chances of leading quality leads to your Ecommerce store. Similarly, having a brand ambassador promote your products can raise awareness and accelerate the turnovers.

Start charity projects & display coupons

Your non-profit activity definitely deserves some spotlight. If you’re helping out other organizations or giving something away, you can get featured on the websites of those you’ve helped. Contributors and donors are usually mentioned in event overviews or even on separate partner pages.

Various discount pages with coupons are also a relevant thing for link building for Ecommerce websites. Many platforms feature pages that collect coupons for further distribution, like LivingSocial. You can give them a shot at placing your special offers on them for additional links and coverage.

Conduct an efficient SEO audit with Netpeak Spider

Running regular website audits helps you improve your link building strategies for ecommerce purposes and monitor the overall state of your website's performance. Netpeak Spider is an excellent solution for that.

Thanks to this tool, you can track your website's key metrics, retrieve crawling results in a convenient PDF file, and integrate data from other SEO tools for in-depth data gathering.

Plus, Netpeak Spider is extremely easy to work with. All you have to do is follow these three steps:

• Prepare the list of URLs you need to check or paste it from a clipboard into the search bar at the top panel
• On the right sidebar, select all the metrics you need to check
• Click "Start" to launch the crawling process

Here's a brief overview of several Netpeak Spider's key features:

Data filters and segmentation

Netpeak Spider breaks down the crawling data into segments and lets you select the parameters you need to check. With an interactive real-time dashboard, you can set custom filters or even change the data overview for more convenient insight collection.

Internal PageRank calculator

The built-in PageRank calculator helps you track each page's internal linking. You can track the link weight distribution on any page and see which ones burn incoming link equity and which ones don't get any of it.

Integrations with Google Analytics and Search Console

Our tool lets you retrieve data from services like Google Analytics and Search Console to enrich the research data. Thus, you can access essential insights on traffic, your page goals, conversion, and other essential eCommerce metrics.

Final words

All in all, ecommerce SEO link building is a profitable strategy for boosting your online store. It is certainly worth the time and investment — virtually, smart link building allows you to grow your website’s rating, credibility, and organic traffic, as well as to form stronger relationships.