SEO tactics, especially building backlinks, can be extremely tricky for small online stores. They have to compete against larger companies like Amazon that everyone already knows and trusts.
Most small-sized online store owners and brand managers would prefer to invest in Facebook ad campaigns or other forms of marketing that are easier. However, with the right backlinks, even a local e-commerce store can outrank big players like Amazon.
It is also an effective way to build an e-commerce brand name from the ground up and reduce the amount of money a business owner needs to spend on PPC marketing.
You should know that not all backlinks can provide the same amount of SEO link juice. Websites with higher domain authority like Forbes or BuzzFeed are better than ordinary websites. Some backlinks may not offer any SEO link juice and might provide only referral traffic.
You can use an SEO tool to check all the links currently on your website along with their Domain Rating (DR), URL rating, referral traffic, anchor text, and backlinks. Ideally, quality backlinks should have high DR, do-follow links, and referral traffic.
Getting quality backlinks is not easy or quick, and there is no guarantee that your efforts will pay off. That is why we decided to find some actionable backlink-building strategies from SEO experts at Odyssey New Media. The company has been named a top-ranking SEO agency in Birmingham on Clutch.
It is also one of the market leaders for social media companies in the UK. They offer a range of professional digital marketing services that guarantee maximum ROI for marketing investments. These are some of the methods used by the SEO experts themselves to build backlinks for their clients.
We assume that you already have some knowledge about SEO techniques, DR, no-follow links, do-follow links, and backlinks before you read this article.
Start With the Easy Targets
One of the best ways to get quality backlinks is to look at outdated and broken links. It is easier to ask for a link that can be updated rather than asking for a new link altogether. You can start by finding broken backlinks to your competitors. Put your competitor’s URL on an SEO tool and find out the dead backlinks to their webpages.
Look out for any broken backlinks that have a high DR score or referral traffic. Once you’ve done that, there are a couple of things that you can do. For instance, you can recreate the content that no longer exists on your competitor’s website and ask the site owner to place a link to your content.
However, make sure that your content matches the context in which the broken link was placed. You can also take a look at all the domains that are currently linked to the non-existing content. Repeat these steps for all of your competitors, and you will have a decent base of backlinks to start.
Look for Popular Content
Let’s assume that your business sells fashionable leather belts, and you want quality backlinks to your product page. One of the things that you can do is look for popular content related to a keyword of your choice, such as fashion accessories. A simple Google search can give you a list of options where you might be able to get your product mentioned.
Most of the top results would probably be e-commerce pages themselves, so they would be of no use to you. However, you may find a blog post that talks about ‘14 latest must-have fashion accessories’.
Reach out to the writer or website owner and ask them if they will be interested to change the article to ‘15 latest must-have fashion accessories’. Once you get hold of the writers contact details, make sure that your email contains the following:
- What you need from them
- Why do you think your products are worth mentioning in their article
- A proposal for a way to talk about your products in the article
- An incentive, such as a small percentage of every sale that happens from their website
- Any other way you can help the writer’s website to get a backlink
You can make a list of similar keywords and repeat the process. You also may have to send more than one email to a writer requesting them for a backlink.
Get Backlinks From Top Competitors
You would surely have competitors that have been in the business longer than you and have collected quite a few backlinks. You can use an SEO tool to find those competitors and the backlinks they have acquired. You may notice that a lot of those backlinks simply reach their homepage.
With the right site structure, the SEO juice from those backlinks will flow down to every page. Anyway, once you find the referring pages, you must visit each one and ask yourself why the writer has mentioned your competition. You may find some of them to be product reviews or directory listings.
You can approach the writer and ask them if they would be willing to review your product or include it in their listicle. You will probably have to offer them some incentive like a sample of your product or a percentage of the sales.
Use Customer Inputs in Your Content
Input from your customers is a great way to provide evidence to prove your point in your content. It is also an excellent way to create quality backlinks for your online store.
For instance, you can talk about a problem your products can fix in a blog post and show the number of customers who have experienced it firsthand. Or you may have received a lot of queries related to one of your products, so you create a blog that answers all of these queries.
After that, you can take one of the phrases related to your content and check out the search volume or SERP details on an SEO tool, as well as several backlinks pointing to the top 10 results. You can reach out to some of them with high DR, asking them to update the backlinks to some fresh new content such as yours.
You can also repeat the process from some phrases that are somewhat related to your content but not exact. If you find some results with a good amount of backlinks and high DR, you can check if your content complements or completes those articles.
We hope that this article has given you some food for thought on ways to build backlinks for your online store. You may have to spend some time researching sources and emailing writers to build your backlinks.
But backlinks are one of the sure-shot methods of building authority. Once you achieve that, you will have an organic flow of backlinks from higher domains without even asking for them.
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