Link building is one of the most challenging and yet, most rewarding practices. It allows you to establish a solid backlink profile, increase industry authority, and gain customers’ trust. That’s exactly why you need to approach it strategically.
In last year, We have published the article Effective Ways to Improve Your SEO Rankings with these Quick DIY Tips in 2019, In this updated guide we bring the latest and best tactics to link building for eCommerce brands.
Here are a few link-building tactics that will work for your eCommerce brand.
Produce Gorgeous Blog Content
It all starts on your site. Namely, to build stronger relationships with customers and position themselves as authoritative resources, ecommerce brands need to create user-centric, insightful, and helpful blog content. Content needs to deliver value to your readers, provide them with actionable tips, or teach them something new.
One such example is Dollar Shave Club. Their blog targets their customers – men. Therefore, the content they create is highly diverse and yet, highly targeted. Their goal is to answer commonly asked questions, offer fresh insights, and provide helpful guides. Just some articles you will see on their blog are The Bearded Dudes’ Guide to Eating Without Getting Food in Your Beard, A Gentleman’s Guide to Splitting the Group Check, or A Cultural History of the Plumber’s Crack. From these titles, we can conclude that their posts are designed to be fun and relatable, which makes them highly shareable and linkable.
Starting to see the value of your content, your readers will share it. This way, the reach of your content will expand and it may soon get noticed by industry influencers that would promote it as a relevant and helpful resource.
Build Relationships with Influencers
Customers don’t look at the branded content when making purchases. Namely, 90% of them state (Source:blogs.constantcontact.com) they trust online reviews impact their buying decisions.
That’s why influencer marketing plays an immensely important role in your link building strategy.
For starters, you need to find authoritative names in your industry. If you’re a fashion online brand, you will want to connect with fashion bloggers. The link building guide in fashion, beauty, and lifestyle industries suggests that there are a few ways to identify fashion influencer, including:
- Competitor analysis – use Ahrefs and Majestic to analyze competitors’ backlinks and identify potential collaboration opportunities.
- Google search – combine your keywords with Google’s advanced search operators to get relevant results. This could be something like inurl:category/fashion intext:”guest blogger” OR “guest contributor”
- Social networks – you could search them via Google. For example, a search like site:instagram.com ” 2000..5000 followers” “fashion blogger” will provide you with a bunch of fashion bloggers that have between 2000 and 5000 followers on Instagram.
Now that you’ve made a list of influencers, there are a few tactics to apply. The first is sending out product samples, hoping that they would review your product and link back to it. Always choose bloggers that provide natural, honest, and spam-free product reviews. Most importantly, never ask for reviews and backlinks directly. If a blogger likes your products, they will review it and link back to it. You should also keep in mind that this kind of content is not free. Reviews are generally considered sponsored content and, logically, most influencers will request upfront payments.
Another amazing way to include influencers is to encourage them to create killer content on your behalf. Let’s take an example of ASOS, a fashion retail brand. They built sponsored accounts for established fashion bloggers, where they published photos of themselves wearing their branded apparel. Each influencer profile has a brief description that helps a customer choose what they like the most, as well as actionable fashion tips and call to action buttons. This campaign turned out to be a huge success, gaining numerous backlinks from authoritative blogs and sites.
Make your Products Authentic and Memorable
In the sea of ecommerce sites similar to yours, you need to set yourself apart. And, one of the simplest ways to do that is to create memorable products. For example, you should take advantage of the upcoming holidays to think outside the box and create new and compelling offers.
Wish.co.uk is a perfect example of how this can be done. Namely, they provide extravagant Zombie paint-balling experiences. This offer helped them increase brand awareness and build buzz around their brand, sending amazing backlinks to their page.
Another amazing example is ThinkGeek, a brand for geeks. They got loads of backlinks and mentions for a product called Canned Unicorn Meat. In addition to the product picture and a title, they also added a detailed product description and a few more photos that made this product extremely effective. It started as an April Fool’s prank, but it gained popularity and is now sold like a real product. Pure magic!
Turn Brand Mentions into Quality
How do people find new ecommerce brands? Let’s get back to the example of fashion online stores. Most customers would start with a simple Google search, like “Top fashion ecommerce brands.” In this case, they would see hundreds of lists, highlighting the popular ecommerce fashion brands and providing links to them. I performed this exact search and found that there are 177,000,000 relevant results. Some of them are from highly reputable sites like Big Commerce, Shopify, Awwwards, and Forbes.
So, chances are your brand name already exists on one of those lists. And, your goal is to check whether a blogger linked back to you. You can also Use tools like Google Alerts or Mention to track your brand or product mentions across the web. If a blogger mentioned your brand or cited you but didn’t link back to you, you should reach out to them and simply ask them to insert a link to your website. This is one of the simplest and yet most powerful ways to obtain reputable backlinks.
Obtain Links from Manufacturers’ Sites
This is an effective way to maximize brand visibility and build high-quality backlinks. The idea is simple – to earn a backlink from the sites of manufacturers whose products you’re selling online.
First, you should analyze the manufacturer’s site and see whether they already have a page dedicated to their retailers. If they do, then simply ask them to add your site and link to their list.
Second, if they have a blog, this may also be a great opportunity for you. Ask them to contribute to their blog. No matter if you’re sharing your experiences, industry trends, or actionable tips, you will put your content directly in front of the manufacturer’s audience and maximize your chances of earning authoritative links.
Take Advantage of Videos
Video content has gained momentum over the past few years. It lets you educate and intrigue audiences through valuable narratives, in-depth how-to videos, humorous stories, and walkthroughs. This is the kind of content that ranks well in the SERPs and appears in the featured snippets.
Videos are also seen as an engaging content format. As such, they usually attract massive shares and inspire user interactions. When shared as a valuable resource all across the web, your video content may get noticed and be linked to by some credible names in your niche.
This is exactly what brands like Sephora do. Namely, if you go to their TV page, you will see that they publish lots of highly valuable how-to videos, where they share some practical tips with their audiences. Above all, they also add prominent CTA buttons, leading to their product pages, where customers can buy the products they see in their videos.
Now, to increase the reach of your videos, you should also share them on YouTube. Analyze their performance regularly to see who embeds your YouTube videos and then, reach out to these bloggers, asking them to link back to your original video on your site.
Over to You
Spammy link-building practices are no longer effective, but building natural backlinks can give your SEO efforts a notable boost. Sure, you don’t need to apply all of these practices at once. Experiment with them, combine them and test their effectiveness to see what works for you. Looking more a better search ranking for your eCommerce site? You can get help from MageComp’s Digital Marketing Experts and Get Free SEO Audit Report.
