Link building for eCommerce
As an SEO, building links for an eCommerce site is one of the toughest parts of my job. Generally speaking these links don’t happen organically as people don’t usually link to either product pages or category landing pages.
For me, this problem has become one of the most enjoyable parts of my job. It allows me to be creative and build good, solid relationships which can be a whole lot more rewarding than creating the usual link bait or targeting blogs on which we can write guest posts.
Here are a few methods I use. Feel free to add to them. I’d be interested in hearing your suggestions.
- eBook distribution - Very often eCommerce sites have fantastic original content already on the site. This can be used to create an eBook relatively easily and very cheaply. Make sure the content links back to key landing pages. It’s important that some time is spent presenting the content effectively. Distributing the eBook can be done through your own site as well as eBook directories. Some eBook directories are better than others so discretion needs to be used here.
- Video product reviews – Do you sell products which would benefit from video demonstrations and ‘how to’ guides? You almost certainly do! This is a great way of distributing content and building links. It can be done really cheaply these days too. Submitting the videos to sites like YouTube and Vimeo can boost your product pages’ search rankings. Video sites also help generate relevant and organic traffic to the shop as YouTube and Vimeo videos can rank well (mostly for long tail keywords).
- Submit your product feeds to shopping engines - There are so many shopping engines out there that you can easily submit your feed to. Most industries even have a specific shopping engine which will drive highly relevant traffic to your site. This is great stuff – these visitors are ready to buy!
- Product reviews from industry specific bloggers - Speak to your buying team and send some high profile bloggers products to review. This is a win-win situation – the blogger gets some great content for their site and you get a link back to your product or category page.
- Links from affiliates - Put your affiliates to work! If they sell your products they should be happy to show it. Give them a badge to place on their website which links back to you. You can control the code so you know where the link goes and what the Alt text says.
- Links from associated websites - Most online retailers have business partners or other sites they’ve created. Make the most of these sites and create a link to specific pages. You don’t need site wide links – just create a couple of highly relevant links to the right pages and move on.
- Contact suppliers and manufacturers for links - Work with your buying team. Ask them who would be open to this kind of suggestion. I’ve found that even suppliers and manufacturers who sell the same products through their site are happy to provide links.
All of these link building methods are really cheap (if not free) to put in to action and apply to virtually any eCommerce site.
Happy linking!
Categories: Link building, SEO
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About Brendan - I'm a SEO based in Manchester, currently employed by the good folks at Confetti Celebrations.
I've been working in SEO for over 5 years now and occasionally dabble in the odd bit of eMarketing. I've spoken on SEO and eMarketing at Universities throughout north west England.
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