Does concentrating on link building make a difference for your eCommerce business? The equivalent of having a physical shop on a busy street for eCommerce companies is ranking highly on Google for relevant terms. You’ll generate a ton of sales simply because you’re in the right place at the right time when people want to spend money. 

To do this, you need solid links from relevant websites linking back to yours combined with effective internal links. To get started, we’ll explore some top link building tips for your eCommerce shop.

The act of securing hyperlinks on other websites that go back to your page is known as link building. Link building is important for online businesses as it aids in the development of trust and authority. While not the only element of an effective SEO strategy, link building is a critical piece that can help bolster your other efforts. 

Links play a vital role in growing your site traffic and are one of the main ranking factors in search engine (Google, for example) algorithms. Links demonstrate support from one website to another and provide visitors with a direct way to your website. Link building improves your website’s ranking, increases traffic, and helps you sell more products. You’ll need to get creative with your link building if you want to rank well for competitive, profitable terms. 

Internal and external links are the two most common forms of links that your eCommerce site might use. Understanding the various types of links available is just as vital as comprehending their position in your SEO strategy.

Internal links are connections within the same domain that connect pages. A large number of links pointing to a single page on your website signals to Google that the material on that page is essential. Internal links from your main navigation and category pages are a given in eCommerce. They can also be created using a “Similar Products” feed that appears on each product page and blog content. 

Internal links can be beneficial on any type of web page — even product pages. This punching bags product page exemplifies the use of creating content that establishes credibility with info that links to particular products that support a headline. 

External links are hyperlinks that link content on your website to another high authority web page. Consider these votes of confidence and reputation points. External links connecting back to your website show Google that you are legitimate and reliable. However, not all external links are created equal. 

Just as Google leverages links as a method to gauge the authority and value of your site, it will do the same with the site linking to you. The trustworthiness, popularity, relevancy, and a number of other experience factors can influence the value of a link. In some cases, you may even see external links from broken or spammy sites that you do not want pointing to your own. In that case, you would look to get those links removed or work through a disavow process that blacklists the links in question. 

This is a fairly advanced action that you will likely not have to take early on or very often. 

A follow link indicates to search engines that the link is trustworthy, whereas a nofollow link communicates to search engines that the link should not be followed. Making some links nofollow can help with search engine optimization and essentially erase your “vote.” A balance of nofollow and follow backlinks is normal for a website.

What is anchor text and how does it work with links?

The anchor text is the section of the link that may be clicked, and it’s usually easy to spot because it’s underlined and includes blue lettering. Anchor text is incredibly crucial since it helps Google understand what your website is about. You should try to make your anchor text look natural and include keywords that you want your site to rank for as much as possible.

These are the different types of anchor text that you’ll use for link building.

Exact match 

Keywords are used as anchor text in exact match. When it comes to Google rankings, including keywords as anchor text can be quite beneficial. 

Partial match 

When you use partial match anchor text, you use a combination of keywords that are relevant to your website. Even though it isn’t an exact match, this is still a great approach to inform Google what your website is about and drive visitors.

Call to action 

A call to action is a remark that encourages the reader to take action, and it’s essential for link building. CTAs have been shown to increase click-through rates, which leads to increased traffic and success for your website. The phrase “Learn More” with a link to your sponsored social media page is an example of using a CTA for anchor text.

Branded 

When you utilize the brand’s name as anchor text, it’s known as branded anchor text. If you’re talking about Google and want to link back to their site, for example, your anchor text would be “Google.”

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The strength of your link profile and knowledge of link building has a direct impact on where your website appears in search results. It’s crucial to identify content that you can build links to and also take advantage of outreach methods that use bloggers and other websites to help you gain traffic and credibility. To increase your audience and establish credibility as an eCommerce site, get creative with link building and use these helpful link building tips.

1. Create a blog and research competitors 

Adding a blog to your site with relevant content, and then doing outreach to get people to link to your articles is a great strategy to gain links. By linking out to higher converting pages, you can pass on the favorable impacts of the referral. In Ahrefs, search for a competitor and look at the “Top Pages by Links” area to see which pages have referrals. With these ideas, you can create content that competes with similar pages and increases the chances that someone will link to your resources. 

Keep track of your top competitors to see if they have any new prospects for backlinks that you don’t. Conducting a competitive analysis to identify missing links is essential for understanding where your competitors stand. 

2. Link to product pages with resource page link building

Because many eCommerce site owners struggle to develop links to category and product pages, resource link building is a useful link building technique that links to products. You can begin with the most traditional approach of prospecting for resource pages. Use inurl:resources OR inurl:links “PRODUCTCATEGORY” as search terms. After you’ve located a few reference pages for that product category, reverse engineer the pages listed to find more backlink opportunities.

There are resource pages for consumer products that link directly to products and categories. For example, a home gym enthusiast’s research page could include links to exercise clothing, water bottles, protective gear, and gym equipment. This home training equipment page highlights the search phrase, “train at home,” to link to the various related products the company sells. 

3. Utilize a FAQ page

FAQ pages are useful resources for solving problems in your sector. They’re a form of a linkable asset with the goal of getting a page to rank well in search engines for a lot of long-tail keywords on a single topic. People will find your content if they search for these terms. 

The FAQ towards the end of this category page for wholesale cleaning supplies by Zogics is a great example of combining the power of informative content that makes use of link building and using a FAQ to gain extra visibility.

A link profile is a collection of all the links discovered on your website. Consider it the link fingerprint of your website. A good link profile contains just clean links, with nothing that appears spammy or forced/manipulated. The age of your site, the business you’re in, the quality of your links, and other factors can all influence your link profile.

The following are the components of your site’s link profile:

  • the types of links that go back to your site
  • the anchor text of those links
  • how those links were obtained

The above elements are taken into account by Google in order to keep SEO as clean as possible. Using services like Moz Link Explorer allows you to verify your link profile and understand why your eCommerce pages are ranking where they are in search results. You can also gain a competitive analysis, find broken links, review and monitor your backlinks and inbound links, and more. Often, it’s your homepage that earns the most links from the most high-profile sources.

Consider this homepage for Laflore Paris that has earned links from high authority sites like Treehugger and Vogue UK. Once you identify these links by reviewing your link profile, they can be further used as a trust signal for potential customers by adding “As Seen On…” badges on your site’s homepage.

5. Develop affiliate partnerships

Affiliate links are usually labeled as “Nofollow,” which indicates they won’t have much of an impact on your results. However, they will boost your exposure and drive more traffic to your eCommerce website. More natural backlinks may arise as a result of this. 

Developing affiliate partnerships with bloggers and influencers is a great method to not only increase sales and traffic to your site, but it’s also a great way to gain links leading to it. You can get connections from high-quality sites if you choose the correct affiliate partners. Another advantage is that these links are frequently sent to your product pages.

Key takeaways

Link building for eCommerce sites is not a quick process. It’s accomplished through strategic planning, accurate value assessment, and careful execution of link building activities ranging from content development to outreach. At the end of the day, the time and effort you put into getting your link building strategy up and running will be well worth it.