Are you competing against corporate giants and eager to get more traffic for your online store? Luckily, we’ve put together this all-encompassing guide to backlink strategies for eCommerce(such as Shopify, Woocommerce, etc) in 2022, offering 16 tried-and-tested methods. So if you’re wondering “how do i add backlinks to Shopify?”, or want to know how to get backlinks for free – you can be rest assured that we have the answers right here!
Part 1: Why Does My eCommerce Site Need Backlinks?
Start with the essentials. What are backlinks? Also known as ‘inbound links’, ‘one-way links’, or ‘incoming links’. Backlinks are links from other websites that direct to a page on your site.
Why are backlinks important for a website?
Backlinks are an essential part of any SEO strategy, working to boost your website’s position in organic search rankings. This is due to the fact that search engines like Google treat backlinks like “votes”.
When other websites contain a link to your page, whether that be via articles, reviews, blog posts etc, it tells Google that you have authority and popularity in your industry. The more sites that are linking to pages on your website, the higher search engines will position you in their relevant search rankings. Which in turn will direct a large amount of unpaid, organic traffic to your site.
Part 2: How To Do Link Building For eCommerce Store?
Link building is crucial for SEO success, but where do you even begin?
Our ultimate list of 16 link building strategies for eCommerce will ensure that no stone is left uncovered, beginning with free and easy quick wins, leading up to larger and more time-consuming tasks. Complete them all and you’ll be sure to reap the rewards of plentiful organic traffic!
Quick Wins: Ways To Get Free Backlinks For Beginner
Every backlink journey should begin with the low-hanging fruit. These are backlink opportunities that you don’t have to pay for, and should be able to tick off the list with minimal effort (we’re talking a few emails or phone calls).
1. Request Links From Your Suppliers And Manufacturers
Do you stock products that come from third party suppliers and manufacturers? Or do you make your own products using materials sourced from an external supplier? If the answer is yes, the good news is that you could get some quality backlinks out of it! Most suppliers and manufacturers like to display on their website where and how their product is being used and sold. If you have a good relationship with your suppliers, reach out to them about the potential for them featuring your store on their site.
2. Utilize Your Network
How’s your network looking? Do you have friends, family, business partners, colleagues, clients, or employees that have a blog or a website? Now would be a good time to consider if there’s a way for them to naturally link to your store on their site… Then ask them nicely!
3. Try Alumni Lists
If you went to college, make sure to check whether they have an alumni directory online. Many colleges have websites dedicated to listing their alumni, and many of them allow website links.
4. Get Listed On Online Local Business/Website Directories
There are a variety of directories available online for companies that will happily list to your website. When searching for directories online, make sure you target your search to your store’s specific niche.
Here is a list of online Business Directories you can try to Submit Your store to and then get backlinks from:
Best of the Web
Google My Business
LinkedIn Company Directory
Jasmine Directory
Apple Maps
Yelp
DMOZ
Local.com
…
5. Make Sure You Have An RSS feed
First thing’s first, if your website doesn’t have a blog – you need to get one set up ASAP. As we’ll cover in the next section, content is king when it comes to link building for eCommerce. Once you have a Ecommerce blog, you should check that you have an RSS feed. You can achieve backlinks merely by having one! This is because websites scrape RSS feeds across the net to repost content. However, make sure your posts contain internal links to other pages on your site, just in case the reposts don’t do the polite thing and link to your original post.
6. Utilize Online Mentions
Have your brand or products been mentioned anywhere across the web without a link? A Google search should let you know! Politely reach out to the websites and ask that they provide a link with their mention.
Find out all of the results containing your company name by using quotation marks (eg “Your Brand Name”) in the google search bar.
Or if you want to exclude your own site and make the searching result more exact, you could enter your Brand Name, and just add ‘- site:(your website)’. In ths way, you’re able to find out all of the other websites that mentioned your brand.
Tips: BUZZSUMO and Brand24 are two very helpful tools that make tracking Brand mentions easily. They worth a try if you want to save time.
Intermediate: Content, content, content!
7. Create Quality, Share-worthy Contents
Content is the backbone of high quality backlinks. This method may take longer than the first 7 strategies on this list, but regular content on your blog will do wonders for all aspects of your SEO. For eCommerce stores that are set up with Shopify, backlinks usually come from reviews and external articles.
However, you should make the effort to kit out your site with a blog page and RSS feed that features high quality, resourceful content. “Ultimate guides” are an ideal way to do this, providing in-depth expertise that people all over the web will find useful. If your content is really useful, others will link to it!
8. Guest Posts
Guest posts are another age-old hack for backlink building. Thousands of blogs on the internet will allow relevant guest posts, which provides you with the perfect opportunity to provide a link to your own eCommerce store!
But how to find the websites that accept guest posts? Every questions could get answers from Google! Enter search strings such as Your Keywords “write for us”, Your Keywords “guest post opportunities”, or Your Keywords “submit an article”, etc in the search box to find guest posting opportunities.
Tips: Here are the lists of sites that accept guest posts. You can check and find the sites related to your products:
250+ Free Guest Posting Sites List
286 ECOMMERCE GUEST BLOG OPPORTUNITIES
9. Get Social
While links across social media are not recognised as high authority links by Google, the more link traction you have from social media the better your SEO will be. Two great sites for this are LinkedIn and Pinterest. Posting a blog to LinkedIn that attracts lots of re-shares naturally increases the amount of links to your page. While posting on Pinterest can help your site rise through the ranks on Google Images.
10. Be Newsworthy
A great way to create share-worthy content is to keep an eye on current trends. Try looking at Google Trends to look for topics that relate to your industry and write articles about them that people will find insightful.
Note: The news cycle is fleeting so these articles won’t perform at the same level forever.
The Final Step: Tougher Tasks
11. The Broken Link Strategy
The broken link strategy is a standard across link building practices, and an easy (albeit time-consuming) method to gain a nice list of backlinks. How it works, is you begin by looking for prospective sites that could link to your store. Then scour through the links featured on their posts and pages and look for broken links. These are links that no longer work. You should then politely reach out to the webmaster to let them know, and offer for the link to be replaced to feature your site.
12. Keep A Close Eye On Competitors
Which sites are linking to your competitors? And how are they linking to them? A great way of checking up on this is with a backlink checker link Semrush. These services often come at a price, but they allow you to see who is linking to your competition. This makes it easy to model your strategy on your competitors, and even get inspiration for where to seek links.
13. Influencer Marketing
Offering your product to influencers in the hope that they will review it or recommend it is a great way to achieve some high quality links. This doesn’t have to mean paying world famous Instagram stars to toss your product in the bin, the internet is rich with micro-influencers who blog or post about your niche.
14. Product Reviews
In the same vein as strategy 13, getting product reviews from bloggers or webmasters in your niche or target market can provide some of the richest and most resourceful backlinks available.
All you need to do is getting in touch and send your products to them. When they review your product, usually you will get a link to your store(or it’s fine to tell them you need a dofollow backlink to your store).
15. Skyscraper Technique
What is a Skyscraper Technique? This’s where you identify a top-ranking Google page with a desirable backlink profile. To pull off the technique, you need to outdo their existing content with a new post of your own.
Go into more detail on the topic, use relevant images, and provide a video if you can.
Once you have a valuable post, reach out to the backlinks on the original post. Politely explain that your content is better, and ask them to switch to your post instead.
16. Become A Source For Journalists
Lastly, you can try platforms such as Haro, SourceBottle and Qwoted to get connected with journalists. By registering a account and answering journalist’s questions, your reply would be possibly used in their articles. In this way, you can get backlinks from other websites, including the famous ones like Forbes.
Those are very good tools for small businesses looking to grow visibility online.This method can be time consuming as you may have to reply quite a few questions and get only one approved, but a solid portfolio of websites will dramatically help your backlink strategy.
There you have it… 16 fail-safe backlink strategies for Ecommerce Store SEO success! We know it seems like a lot to take in, but if you try each strategy one-by-one and complete as many as possible – you’ll be well on your way to climbing the ranks of search engine rankings.
Good luck!