Building backlinks to your e-commerce site is one of the best ways to get the visibility you need. And we know just how important that is for your business — you basically need to be in front of those searching for what you're selling. We can also call them inbound links since the main aim is to drive traffic to your website from other websites.
But you want to pay close attention to the quality of backlinks you generate to your site. This is because they impact your SEO strategy or significantly affect your site's ranking in search engines. However, quality backlinks can be challenging to obtain. E-commerce, on the one hand, also happens to be a very competitive space dominated by a few big brands.
These big brands have lots of money and whole teams dedicated to implementing the best SEO strategies to rank highest on search engines. If you're just starting out, it can be a very daunting task to get your eCommerce site to rank high by generating backlinks. Well, the good news is that getting in front of your target audience through backlinking is not impossible.
This article provides you with valuable tips to help you build quality backlinks to your e-commerce site. There are useful backlinks tools that you can try. But before we delve into that, let's briefly look at how backlinks help your e-commerce site.
How Backlinks Help Sites Rank
Most search engines view a backlink as a sign of approval of the website being linked to. This makes sense because if someone links to your website while posting an article, they most likely consider the information on your website valuable. And the more people who link to your website, the more your popularity increases with the ranking algorithms.
Backlinks are, in that sense, a popularity contest for websites. The more people link to your site, the more valuable your website must be — the logic goes. Google's PageRank was the first algorithm to realize the importance of backlinks to measure a site's importance. Generally, sites with more backlinks rank better than those with fewer links. But one thing to keep in mind is that all backlinks are not equal. This is why we focus on building links from sites with high domain authority.
The Relative Relevance of Backlinks
As if getting people to link to your website is not challenging enough already, it turns out that not all backlinks are good for your SEO. When a site links to your site, a few factors go into calculating the relevance of the link.
As it turns out, the value of backlinks varies from site to site. For example, sites with more backlinks themselves provide more valuable backlinks to other sites.
Imagine that you link your page to three sites. Site A has 300 backlinks. Site B has 150 backlinks. Site C has ten backlinks. A backlink from site A will be much more valuable than one from site B. And site B will also be more beneficial to you than site C.
Another important factor that goes into calculating the value of a backlink is the domain of the site linking to yours. If you are an eCommerce site, a backlink from another eCommerce site is more valuable than a backlink from a dating site. It is crucial that your backlinks come from sites in the same domain as yours. This indicates to search engines that the people in your industry trust and value your content.
So, the quality of the sites that are linking to yours matters. But so does the quantity. It is almost always better to have 200 backlinks than 20 backlinks on a particular page. It is even better to have 200 backlinks from sites in the same domain than 20 from unrelated sites.
Finally, sites with high domain authority (already ranking high on search engine result pages) will be more valuable to link from, as search engine algorithms regard these sites as high domain authority sites.
Building Backlinks
With all of the above in mind, here are 5 strategies you can use to build high-quality backlinks to your website.
1. Network
One way to create high-value backlinks is to network with other people in your domain. The chances are that someone else is also looking to get more high-value backlinks. This isn't a tit for tat kind of situation. It's not simply linking to one person's site so that they can link to yours.
It's about finding people with whom your interests intersect and align. For example, you may have written an article about a product. And then you discover someone who sells something to maintain the product you sell. Your interests overlap! You should reach out to them and see if you can help each other.
2. Guest Posting on Blogs
Another way to create high-quality backlinks is to write guest posts for blogs in your niche. Your guest post would, of course, have to be about something you know a lot about. And because you don't have a lot of space to work with on the blog, you can link to more extensive articles on your website when necessary.
Be careful not to turn an opportunity to guest post into one for indiscriminately linking to your website. Focus on creating value for the blog and then link where necessary.
3. Create and Promote High-Quality Content
This should probably be right at the top of your to-do list when it comes to acquiring backlinks. After all, people will only link to your website if they find the information useful. Take the time to create informative, compelling, specific, and fun-to-read content for your website.
Also, when you are done creating high-quality content, promote it! Don't just sit back and wait for people to arrive at your website. Share your content and preach it to anyone willing to listen.
4. Definitive Guides
One of the most helpful types of content you can create is the definitive guide. The idea is simple; pick any topic in your niche and write about it exhaustively. This might be anything from a long blog post to a short ebook.
The definitive guide, if well done, helps establish you as an authority in that area. So, the chances are that when someone else is writing an article about that topic, they have to link to your definitive guide if their readers want to dive deeper.
5. Create Visually Compelling Infographics
Visuals are becoming more and more important to how well content performs in this world of short-attention-span. Make sure that high-quality pictures accompany your articles. And that the images are very visually appealing.
Also, create Infographics. These are visual representations of the information contained in an article. If your infographics are excellent, others will use them or share them, and they would have to link back to your site to give you credit.
Want more useful tips for creating high-quality backlinks to your site? Feel free to check out our post on the do's and don'ts of backlinking.