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Building Backlinks: The Holy Grail of Online Store Success

Search Optimization

When done right, search engine optimization can boost your online shop's visibility in SERPs, bringing in customers and revenue consistently. The ever-increasing cost of paid advertising makes e-commerce SEO incredibly important for online stores.

However, there are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of sites virtually identical to yours. How do these big, data-mined databases decide which websites to feature on their front pages?

This is where off-page SEO comes in handy. Off-page SEO relies on various components of search engines to convey what is more relevant and vital. Backlinks, created when other websites link back to yours, are an essential component of this phenomenon.

In addition to strong internal links, your website needs links from authoritative, pertinent websites that point back to it.

In this post, our Florida SEO marketing experts will look at the three types of links as well as some of the best link-building advice for your online store to get things started.

What is Link-Building?

adding link to product description
Photo from Shopify

Link-building is the process of getting links on other sites that lead back to your page. Building links is essential for online businesses because it helps build authority and trust.

Even though it's not the only part of a good SEO strategy, building links is a crucial part that can help your other work. Link building helps your website rank higher, brings in more visitors, and helps you sell more products.

If you want to rank well for popular, profitable search terms, you'll need to get creative with how you build links.

What Are the Two Types of Links?

Generally speaking, two types of links will be used on your eCommerce site: internal and external. Knowing where links fit into your SEO strategy is just as important as knowing the different kinds of links available.

1. Internal Links

A website's internal links are the connections between individual pages within the same domain. A high number of inbound links to a specific page on your site tells search engines like Google that the information there is crucial.

In an online store, it is expected that users will be able to find their way around using the main navigation and category pages. Similar Products feeds can also be generated from the content of individual product pages and blog posts.

Even product pages benefit from having internal links to related content. Using information that links to specific products to support a headline is one method of establishing credibility online.

2. External Links

Hyperlinks to external websites are a great way to expand the reach of your content. Think about the trust and respect that has been expressed. When other websites link back to yours, Google sees this as a sign that yours is a legitimate and trustworthy resource.

While some external links may be more trustworthy than others, not all are created equal.

You can expect Google to use the linking website's authority and value to indicate how highly you value your site. A link's worth can be affected by its reliability, popularity, relevance, and other user experience aspects.

A few of these links may even come from sites that you would rather not have linking to yours because they are either broken or full of spam.

In that case, you should try to remove the links or go through a disavow process to have them blocklisted. This is an advanced procedure you probably won't need to perform often or immediately.

What’s the Difference Between Follow and No-Follow Links?

sample nofollow link settings
Photo from Ahrefs

A follow link tells search engines that the link should be followed, while a no-follow link tells search engines that the link should not be followed.

A follow link can be found in the address bar of a web page. You can improve your search engine optimization by marking certain links as no-follow and removing your "vote."

To establish a good e-commerce website, you must have an equal number of follow and no-follow backlinks.

How Do You Determine a Link's Value?

A backlink's potential value and impact on your site depend on many factors. Here are some of the most important ones:

  • External links from high-quality, relevant sites have a much more significant impact than links from unrelated, smaller sites.
  • Links from unique domains are more valuable than links from sites that have previously linked to you.
  • Links with relevant anchor text convey more keyword-specific value. For example, if you're a dentist, a link is generally more valuable if it comes from keyword-rich text like "porcelain dental implants" rather than "click here."
  • A page with many links passes less value per link.

To determine how much authority a website has and how much impact a link from an external website could have, you can use tools like:

  • Ahref's Website Authority Checker:Ahrefs has its proprietary authority metric called Domain Rating (DR), which estimates the site's "link popularity" compared to other websites. This tool follows the rule of thumb that a higher Domain Rating indicates a more authoritative website.
  • Moz's Free Domain SEO Analysis Tool:Like Ahref, Moz makes a Domain Authority (DA) score, which predicts the likelihood of a website ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). Domain Authority scores range from 1 to 100; the higher the score, the more likely the site will rank.

These tools will provide a few metrics to compare against other sites to determine how valuable a link from a specific site is to you.

How Do You Get Started With Link Building?

Now that you know why backlinks are so essential and what kinds there are, the next question is how to actually acquire them. The following are five ways to begin constructing backlinks for your online shop.

It's important to remember that there are dozens, if not hundreds, of ways to build backlinks. It's in your best interest to learn about them and determine which ones are best for your business and brand.

1. Produce content that people will feel compelled to talk about.

Content marketing, in its most basic form, is simply the creation of really great and compelling content—whether written, visual, video, or audio— that is so compelling that people are naturally inclined to share it. This is, and always has been, an excellent strategy for attracting many inbound links to your online shop.

For example, a well-known dental blog, Innovative Dental - Cosmetic & Implant Center, created a one-of-a-kind and comprehensive YouTube video on "Cosmetic Dental Veneers Review." This intriguing piece has already received over 100k views on YouTube.

2. Have your products reviewed by amplifiers.

Reaching out to amplifiers and asking them to review your product is one of the most popular ways to get backlinks and high-quality traffic to your store. These amplifiers are mostly well-known people, like journalists, influencers, YouTubers, and podcasters.

Start by learning about the blogs in your niche and how big they are on average. You can get the authors' attention by getting to know them and commenting on their posts.

Once you've gotten to know and like the authors, you'll want to tell them about your product. You can use the following script and make a few minor changes.

Dear ________,
Hello, my name is ________, and I'm a (your info) specializing in selling (your product). I've been enjoying your blog on (topic) and wanted to let you know that I really liked your most recent post (focus of a recent blog post).
This is just a quick note to let you know that we've launched a brand new e-commerce site where you can buy (your product). Here are the following reasons/features why our products stand out from the competition:
  • (reason 1)
  • (reason 2)
  • (reason 3)
A sample of (your product) has been shipped to the address provided on the contact page. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do, because if you do, you might want to tell your readers about it. Please send me a message if you're curious about these. The phone number I can be reached at directly is: (direct number).
Cheers,
________
(yourwebsite.com)

3. Obtain a backlink from your supplier.

It only makes sense for many e-commerce businesses that sell the products of other companies to obtain a backlink from the manufacturer whose products you're carrying. It's often as simple as sending them a polite email and asking them to add you to their list of partners or retailers.

You can list all of your product's retailers, offline and online, on your website. This helps those retailers sell more and also helps their SEO by providing a backlink from a high-ranking domain.

Start Building Links For Your E-Commerce Store

Building backlinks to an e-commerce site is a time-consuming process. Link-building activities, from content creation to outreach, are carried out meticulously to achieve this.

The time and effort you put into developing a successful link-building strategy will be well worth it in the long run. Why not work with Florida SEO marketing professionals to maximize the effectiveness of your link-building system for your online store?

Here at Digital Resource, we promise to maximize the return on your investment in search engine optimization. We guarantee that your online shop will be at the top of the results pages when people look for the products you sell.

Contact us today for a free consultation.

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