Link building serves more purposes for ecommerce websites than any others. For ecommerce websites, it’s not just about SEO and authority, but also about sales and conversions.
By building backlinks from relevant websites in your niche, you can direct relevant traffic to your website and even to your product pages. This helps generate more sales in addition to being good for SEO and SERP rankings.
In this guide, you’ll learn six advanced ecommerce link building strategies that go beyond the clichés like guest posting. Let’s get right to it.
6 Advanced Link Building Strategies for Your Ecommerce Business
Choose all or a few of these advanced ecommerce link building strategies to build high-quality backlinks and direct relevant traffic to your website. Make sure you focus your efforts on websites that have an audience similar to the demographics of your target customers.
Here are some of the must-try ecommerce link building strategies for you:
1. Get your products listed in roundups
One of the best link building strategies for ecommerce brands is to get their products listed in product roundups and listicles. These posts list a bunch of the best products in a category and help potential buyers find the right product for their needs.
The people searching for the best products in a category are high-intent consumers who want to buy a product and are comparing various available options. If you get your product listed in such roundup posts, you can drive high-intent traffic directly to your product pages.
Here’s how you can get your products listed in roundups:
- Search for “best + product type + use case or benefit or target customer or problem” and find the top posts. For example:
- Best running shoes for professional athletes, or
- Best shampoo for dry and frizzy hair
- Alternatively, use tools like Semrush or Ahrefs to find the top-ranking posts for the “best products for [your product type/purpose]” keyword.
- Reach out to the publishers or editors of the top-ranking product roundups and request them to include your product in the article. Don’t forget to tell them why your product deserves a mention.
- You can also convince them by sending a free product to try or providing an insightful product description yourself, to make their job easier.
- Follow up with people who don’t respond, but don’t spam their inboxes.
Here’s an example of a product roundup with direct purchase links for each product:
Alternatively, you can get sponsored listings, where you pay a publisher to add your product to the top of the list. We recommend trying the first way and then using the later tactic only to get top listings on authoritative sites.
2. Ask for product reviews from influencers and bloggers
According to Statista, 67.4% of people read 1-6 reviews before purchasing a product.
Reviews from influencers hold more value as people trust the influencers they follow. Another study revealed that 28% of consumers discover new products based on influencer recommendations.
What does this mean for you?
You should find relevant influencers and bloggers in your niche and get them to write detailed reviews for your products. Ask them to add links to your product pages to drive traffic to your website and, eventually, get more sales conversions.
Send free products to notable bloggers and influencers in your niche to improve your chances of getting a review. Here’s an example, where a mom blogger reviewed a car seat that she received for free:
The disclaimer at the end shows that though she received the product for free, her opinions are not biased. This adds trust and credibility to the review, making prospective customers more likely to check out the product.
You can also leverage affiliate marketing and pay commissions to bloggers for each sale made using their link. This will incentivize them to promote your products and add links to your website in their blog posts and other content.
3. Claim unlinked brand or product mentions
This is a simple strategy and here’s how it works:
- Find websites that have mentioned your brand or products but haven’t linked to your website.
- Reach out to the website editors and ask for links to your brand or product mentions.
But how will you find unlinked mentions?
Use an SEO tool like Semrush or Ahrefs to find mentions.
Ahrefs’ “Content Explorer” tool, for example, can help you do that. Type your brand or product name and exclude your website using the minus sign followed by your website URL.
For example: “Ravel shampoo” – site:ravelcare.com
You can easily find web pages with unlinked mentions of your brand or product. Filter the results by domain authority and page traffic to shortlist the most valuable websites to acquire links from.
Another thing you should do is to set up Google Alerts for your brand name and product names. Every time someone mentions you online, you’ll get a notification and you can check if it’s linked or unlinked.
4. Use reverse product image link building
This advanced ecommerce link building tactic is not used as much as it should be. It involves doing a reverse search for your original product images online and finding instances where it’s used without credit and link.
Here’s how to use this advanced link building strategy for your ecommerce products:
- Find original and valuable product images or related graphics on your website.
- Use Google Images to perform a reverse image search and find websites that are using your images. You simply need to go to the search bar, choose the images option, add an image, and search for it.
- Reach out to the ones that have not provided image credit and link to your website, and get links from them.
5. Create link-worthy content for your ecommerce website
This is a sustainable and organic strategy of link building for ecommerce websites. It involves creating high-quality, link-worthy content that organically attracts links.
Some types of content that people organically link to, include:
- Infographics on industry-relevant topics
- Original research studies or surveys related to your niche
- In-depth product guides and tutorials
- Comprehensive and evergreen how-to guides
Take this comprehensive resource on “How to Tie a Necktie” by Ties.com, for instance.
It acts as a one-stop guide for anyone who wants to learn how to tie different knots in a necktie and other websites link to it to provide value to their audience.
An analysis by Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker shows that this web page has 349 backlinks from 157 domains.
6. Get directory and Google Business listings
Building directory and Gogle Business listings is one of the best ecommerce link building strategies for local businesses or businesses that target specific geographies.
This is how it works:
- Claim a Google Business, formerly Google My Business (GMB) listing for your website, with a link. If you have regional websites, claim multiple, region-specific listings.
- Find relevant local directories that list companies like yours and claim directory listings with links to your website.
Anyone checking business directories to find specific types of businesses in their area has a high purchase intent. By listing your website on such directories, you can let prospective customers discover your brand.
Using links, you can direct these high-intent customers to your ecommerce website and product pages.
Bonus Tip: Use Internal Linking to Direct Traffic to Product Pages
While backlinks are more directly related to SERP rankings and domain authority, internal links also serve a purpose.
By adding links to your product pages to your blog and website content, you can direct website visitors to products they might be interested in.
You can even create product roundups and listicles to get organic traffic with a commercial intent. Then, link to each product you’ve listed to make it easy for interested people to find and buy those products.
Here’s an example of a blog post by Lush, a beauty and cosmetics brand. Check out how they used internal linking to direct readers to specific product pages on the website.
You can use a similar strategy to create relevant and useful content for your target audience and use internal links to direct your ecommerce website visitors to your product pages.
The best types of content for this purpose are product comparisons and product listicles. Such content has a commercial intent and is great for bringing prospective customers to your website.
Ready to Build High-Converting Links to Your Ecommerce Website?
For ecommerce brands, backlinking not only helps build authority but also directs relevant traffic to product pages. This, in turn, helps drive more sales conversions.
Use the advanced ecommerce link building strategies mentioned above to build high-quality backlinks from relevant websites in your niche. Choose websites that have an audience similar to your target customers to boost sales conversions.
So what are you waiting for? Choose a mix of strategies and start building backlinks today. You can also choose to outsource your link building to us.
