Millions of people shop online every single day. With over 50 per cent of these online shopping resulting from organic traffic, making your site visible in search engines by optimizing your pages and building quality backlinks should be a key concern.
If you are on this page, I’m sure you already have an eCommerce site, and you are wondering how you can get natural backlinks in the most effective way possible to increase sales, enhance your website’s popularity, and spread brand awareness.
Now that you’re ready to take the next big step to attract shoppers to your e-commerce store, below are 9 effective strategies you should follow to get natural backlinks that would keep visitors rolling in.
1. Create Quality Content
Having quality content on your site is one of the most valuable internet marketing tactics you can use to enhance your marketing efforts. If you haven’t thought of it before, now is the time to start taking advantage of content creation before it gets too late!
According to Backlinko, long-form quality content receives almost 80% more backlinks compared to short low-quality posts, this shows that search engines are attracted to long-form quality content
Writing high-quality and keyword-rich content that solves your visitor’s problem is very important to get much exposure, improve your site ranking, and get many backlinks to your website.
The truth is, no one is interested in reading a website that has no quality content. If you are willing to put in the effort to develop a site filled with quality content, individuals will find your site worth linking back to. Also, It would help you create brand credibility while positioning your company as an expert resource for your product or service segment.
2. Update Old and Outdated Content
Updating old content saves you time and delivers faster results than creating new content. There are billions of sites on the internet, and search engines need to display the most relevant and updated sites to searchers. What they simply do is to crawl your site and look for fresh content.
If your site is found with the most updated content, you would get in the good books of search engines, and this will help you skyrocket those rankings without a lot of extra work. However, failure to maintain fresh content will result in your search engine rankings slowly slipping away from your desired results.
3. Create Guest Posts
Guest blogging for backlinks and traffic to your website does work well. It’s an excellent way to show off your expertise to a different audience and expand your reach while getting high-quality backlinks to your site.
The key strategy behind this is to write better content than your competitors and try to get them published on websites that are already popular and have a strong audience in your niche. Once you can get your name and website published on one of these website blogs, you can hopefully rob off their success and attract readers to your site.
4. Get Listed Alongside Your Competitors
The first thing to do here is to find out who your competitors are before figuring out who is linking to their site. With the use of tools like SE Ranking, it becomes easier to know your competitors and find out where they are getting their backlinks from.
Once you get that done, you need to ask yourself why they link to your competitors and how you can do better than them. They could be linking to your competitors’ website as a resource or through an article directory. If it’s any of them, email the owners of these sites and try to get them to post a link to your page as well once you do the needful.
That’s all you have to do. Provided you keep at it and get enough backlinks, you should be able to outrank your competitors using this strategy.
5. Get a Link From Suppliers and Manufacturers
Asking manufacturers who you sell their products or work with is one of the fastest methods of collecting backlinks. Your suppliers understand that you represent their brand online and would be more than happy to add your link to their site.
For instance, if you are a personal injury attorney and you conduct different consultations online, it will be a great idea to contact relevant websites, partners or legal resources to get double advantage and quality links from both sides. Here is a good example from Mission Legal Center that has created a separate page called Personal Injury Resources including all useful guides, resources, partners, courts, and libraries for the intended audience.
However, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t chase larger companies. It would be of great benefit if you get a backlink from any of the big guys because they often have good domain authorities, huge amounts of traffic, and are valuable for your business for exposure.
6. Create Consumer Guides
Creating consumer guides is a key backlink strategy in e-commerce that should not be missed. Everyone likes to link with a guide because it gives complete information about a topic in one place.
To do this, you have to offer something valuable and helpful on your website that people want or need. Once they have found your site, they will link to it so they can quickly come back for more whenever they wish.
By offering valuable and unique content such as how-to guides or e-books that can serve as a lead magnet, you would naturally get high-quality backlinks for the long term.
7. Find Broken Links
Broken links happen when a page links to resources that are not available anymore, and this can lead to generating a negative user experience for visitors.
All you have to do is find websites in your niche that link to your competitor’s page with one or more broken links. Once you have found such websites, get in touch with the site’s webmaster to inform them that the links are not working and to request linking to your site in return.
No one wants to link to a poor quality site with bad content. So before you reach out, your e-commerce store must be of good quality with fresh and unique content so that the sites you find will have no hesitation in linking back to you.
8. Monitor Brand and Keyword Mentions
With the increased power of the individual customer, it is as vital as ever for e-commerce businesses and brands to maintain continuous monitoring of product, brand, and industry keyword mentions.
By constantly monitoring online media channels through tools like Mention, you can easily track your brand on the internet wherever you might be mentioned and get whoever did to link back to you. Additionally, you can also set up your company or brand name to be alerted anytime someone mentions you.
This gives you the chance to leverage existing backlink opportunities you might probably miss out on.
9. Use Haro
Do you want a PR to help you drive free traffic and backlinks to your site? Responding to requests through HARO – Help A Reporter Out is the best option for you.
HARO helps to send requests of reporters of big authority sites doing stories on particular topics to subject matter experts in various niches they can interview or quote to get their insights and add them to their stories.
Reporters tend to write better stories backed up by experts. If one selects your response, you would get a backlink from the high authority site that published the article. Joining HARO is free. However, they have a fairly strict policy for violating their terms.
Bonus tip: Monitor your progress
For a successful link building strategy, it is important to monitor the progress of your website and figure out which links work well for you and which ones don’t work at all. Using web analytics tools can help you reveal the best-performing pages on your site, traffic quality, conversions and take the marketing process to the next level.
For this purpose, you can use Finteza to get advanced analytics, view the truest picture of your website performance, and set up conversion goals based on visited pages and events.
Final Words
Not all e-commerce site owners know how to run their business effectively. Applying all the 9 techniques to your website would get you closer to the top of search results earlier than you think.
It could take quite some effort and patience to build backlinks naturally, especially at the beginning. Make sure to check your page rank, traffic quality, conversion, and external links to have an idea of the quality of the backlink that is being passed on to your website.
Irina Weber is an experienced Content Marketing Expert at SE Ranking. After working in content marketing for enterprises and startups for more than 8 years, she wants to exchange ideas and share information learned with other content marketing experts. She is passionate about digital marketing and always up-to-date with the latest trends.
Backlinks stock image by one photo/Shutterstock
