How to build backlinks for eCommerce [The Ultimate Guide]

In this step-by-step, complete guide, I will show you how to improve your eCommerce link building (offsite SEO) and increase sales.

If you haven’t yet checked part 1 –  Advanced SEO for E-commerce complete guide, I encourage you to check it. That’s because you will rank way easier if your onsite SEO is on top.

So, you got your online store up and running. Great! Now it’s time to drive traffic and make sales.

But let’s face it – getting traffic is hard. It doesn’t have to be.

I’m going to share the exact eCommerce link-building tactics that helped me improve my search engine rankings, increase my traffic, and grow my store’s sales.

Scalable growth with a Link Building Framework

Let’s get our feet wet!

What’s the Link Building Framework?

The eCommerce Link Building Framework is the document you should refer to repeatedly when executing any link-building campaign.

This Link Building Framework can be used for any link-building campaign, not just for online stores. It’s our tactical blueprint for backlinking and also a simple CRM.

What to do next?

1. Start by creating an Excel spreadsheet. If you are collaborating with team members, you might want to create a Google spreadsheet.
2. Name it “[your store’s name] Link Building Framework.”
3. Add the following columns. We are going to explain each column in detail below: Website, Rapport Built, Contacted, Replied, Linking, Contact details, Asset type, Article name (if applicable), Audience, Most used keywords, Backlinks profile, TF (Majestic), PA, DA, Traffic (optional), Conversion rate (optional), Number of orders (optional), Revenue (optional)

This is how the link-building framework for my online store looked. Click on the image to view full-size.

Make an inventory of your linkable assets

Why should people link to you? Your linkable assets answer.

Your linkable assets are unique to you. They should be different from other websites. I’ve identified some common linkable asset categories to help you get thinking about what your online store’s linkable assets could be.

Content assets

As Kerry from GetResponse says in this article: It’s becoming an age-old adage already, but, more and more, it is proving to be true again and again – content is king. The most valuable links are organic, and the best way to build them is to continue creating the very best content you can and get it shared far and wide across social and in your email campaigns.

Content assets open up your store to many link opportunities. Also, content assets are again about being useful and helping people solve their problems.

When you think of content assets, don’t just think of text.

Think Geek is an excellent example of an e-commerce site that creates many content assets on its product pages.

Product assets

Because you are an online store, often, this is your best linkable asset. It might also be the easiest path to get some quality backlinks.

Depending on your product prices, you can use this asset for giveaways, donations, promotions, reviews, and contests. Just be careful not to go overboard, or you might lose more money than you earn from this tactic.

Knowledge and opinion assets

AKA the “thought leader” link-building tactic.

Share your field expertise with the community through guest authoring, posts, and interviews.

Apart from being a reliable approach to quality link building, this method builds your authority within your store’s domain.

Collaboration assets

Create partnerships with your suppliers, customers, authority figures in the field, and PR resources. You can later leverage these relationships to create link-building opportunities.

Make a list of your assets

You will input this information under “Asset type” on your Link Building Framework file.

Once you start link building, you should identify which assets bring you the most links. In your link-building framework doc, just click on the “Asset type filter” and filter the different types of assets.

Then focus on what works best by generating links with those particular assets.

How to find link opportunities

Now it’s time to find websites and pages that are most likely to link back to your online store. You either are going to find them manually or extract link opportunities via data scrapping.

Collect all website links under the “websites” column on your link-building framework.

Here are 5 methods to find link opportunities for your store:

Look for blogs in your field

Let’s say you sell geek gadgets. The best way to find geeky blogs is to look for blog lists and content curators.

Check this great post from Buzz stream on finding content curators. Extracting dozens of URLs from list pages can be tedious to do by hand.

Link Gopher is a handy-dandy little Firefox extension that extracts all links from a page and removes duplicates for you:

A great tool I recommend for finding link opportunities on related blogs for your e-commerce website is Link-Assistant from SEO Power Suite.

You can outsource the link-building efforts by using one of the best link-building services we reviewed.

3.2. Look deep for forums, directories, and communities

You should know where your target audience hangs out. Identify a list of niche websites and social networks.

When thinking about your audience, don’t just think about your market-defining audience.

Let’s say you sell teeth whitening kits. Your initial instinct might be to think of people with dental problems or those who are self-conscious.

If you think more creatively, you may expand that search to other people who are likely in need of teeth whitening. For example, people who will get married soon, graduating students, and YouTubers.

For my gadget store, I targeted not only geeks but web developers and entrepreneurs.

Again, here, you can get a hand of help from Link-Assistant, which can scan the web for forums and communities to place your links.

Scan your competitor’s backlinks

My favorite tactic. By reverse-engineering my competitors’ links, I managed to discover some valuable link prospects for my store:

App.NeilPatel.com (Free, Paid)

Neil Patel’s app is a convenient way to get information about your competitors’ keywords and backlinks. I use it daily for its simplicity and accurate information.

Moz.com (Free, Free Trial & Paid)

Moz.com is a robust option to get information about competitors’ backlinks, being one of the oldest. They have a 30-day free trial option that I encourage you to consider.

1. Copy a competitor’s online store URL. A home page or a product page, if you’d like to be more targeted.
2. Go to [MOZ Open Site Explorer] and paste it.
3. Under the inbound link, you’ll find all the websites that are linking to your competitor’s page. You can also see whether a link is do-follow or no-follow.

SEO SpyGlass (Free & Paid)

Besides all the other backlink tools we recommend, SEO SpyGlass (Check our review) is a desktop app (Windows and Mac) that provides accurate information. Their pricing structure is appealing.

Ahrefs (Free trial & Paid)

Ahrefs has a reliable backlink database that is regularly updated.

3.3.5 SEMrush Backlinks (Free Trial, Paid)

SEMrush (Tutorial, Exclusive deal) is my favorite tool for analyzing backlinks. It has a comprehensive backlink database and offers a link toxicity score, making it easy to distinguish good backlinks from toxic ones.

Other tools you can use to find competitors’ backlinks: SeoBility.net, LinkMiner from MangoTools.

Find guest-authoring opportunities

If you plan to capitalize on your knowledge asset, you should find places to share your expertise.

Identify Good And Bad Links

You should have at least 100 link opportunities in your Link Building Framework by finishing the last section.

Now we will qualify, organize by importance, and take out the bad links from the list.

I’m going to share 10 ways to distinguish good link prospects from bad.

Domain age

No matter what Matt Cutts says about domain age, it remains a paramount factor in search rankings and website authority. Marketers like Neil Patel still believe in the domain age.

The older the domain of your linking prospect, the better.

This Domain Age Tool allows you to see the domain age of every domain name you type in. It works with a list of sites, so you can prospect all the domain names you’ve collected in the previous chapter at once.

I would remove from my link-building campaign domains that are very new, less than 1 year old.

Website relevance

How relevant is the website to your linkable asset?
Look for related keywords appearing in:

• Title tag
• Anchor tags
• H1, H2, etc. tags
• URL of the web page
• In the body copy

I love using WordTracker Scout for that. Scout is a Chrome extension that gives you keyword insights for the page you are currently viewing.

Website traffic

“The best backlink is one that sends you traffic.” – Brian Dean, Backlinko

While it’s impossible to know what traffic exactly a website gets (unless you take a sneak peek into their Google Analytics), you can still have a good estimate using online tools, both free and paid.

The most accurate is SEMrush Traffic Analytics. The basic information is available in the Premium plan, while for more details, you need to purchase the add-on, which costs an additional $200/mo. I don’t recommend it if you don’t own a digital agency or keep a very close eye on your competitors.

Another option for getting traffic information about websites is SimilarWeb. Like SEMrush, the paid version of SimilarWeb gives you more details, while the free one is pretty limited. Unfortunately, for small sites, the figures are not present or are inaccurate.

The last option we recommend is Ahrefs, which, just like SEMrush, has organic traffic estimation on its paid plans. To make this clear, it doesn’t include details on referrals or social media traffic; it only estimates traffic from search engines.

UX metrics

Remember the importance of UX metrics for your link-worthiness. Your backlinking prospects’ UX metrics are important as much when you qualify websites.

For that, you can also use SimilarWeb. It gives you an approximate overview of a website’s Time on site, Pageviews, and bounce rate:

You don’t want backlinks from websites with a time-on-site under 1 minute and a bounce rate over 70 after traffic and sales. However, these types of links can still boost your search engine rankings.

MOZ Page Authority (PA) and Domain Authority (DA)

Domain Authority is a score (on a 100-point scale) developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engines. Use Domain Authority when comparing one site to another or tracking your website’s “strength” over time.

The MOZ Bar is a simple Chrome Extension that allows you to qualify an online store’s authority.

Inbound links

The quantity and quality of inbound links are significant in how a website ranks on the search engine results page. From the previous sections, you already know how to check Inbound links with the Open Site Explorer.

Several more ways

Two other quick ways to qualify competitor inbound links are:

Using the following Google search query: “link:”competitorsite.com” -site:”competitorsite.com.” This search will find all links to the competitor’s site and exclude any internal links.

Outbound links

Check which links to external websites are on the URL.

Social activity

Do people engage with the brand? Look for factors like:

• Likes and followers
• Shares and Tweets
• Number of comments on the site

I like to use the SharesCount.com tool for social engagement analysis as it gives you a quick overview of the site’s social media impact:

Design & Layout of the site

The website’s design and layout are the last but not least aspects you should consider when judging the quality of a backlink. That’s because the design is a UX factor, but it speaks for the owner’s professionalism and involvement. If there are no broken elements, no broken pages, and the design is simple and clean, you may have spotted a winner.

By checking these 9 factors, you should be able to separate the good from the bad links.

Don’t hesitate to remove any links from your Link Building Framework that seem obscure, lack any element of trust, or have bad inbound and outbound link profiles.

Monitor your backlinks

Okay, you’ve built some links, but as Felix from MonitorBacklinks says, “Link building campaigns are not just about building or earning links. What’s the point if you can’t keep them? Monitoring your backlinks is just as important as building them.”

It’s important to keep your hard-earned backlinks alive. Check this article to learn one way to monitor your backlinks easily using MonitorBacklinks. (Note: a paid tool.)

Why do you need a Backlinks audit?

Any site that is seen participating in link schemes is at risk of a ranking loss. Even worse, any site that HAS participated in link schemes is also in danger.

That means if you have a site that you are now running “by the book,” but you had been involved in some dodgy link schemes in the past, your rankings could still be seriously affected if you never cleaned up those poor-quality backlinks.

To put it bluntly, Google doesn’t want you to build links to your own website, at least not links whose sole purpose is to improve your rankings. As you look through your own backlink profile, it’s important to identify links that may be causing your site problems.

When critiquing/cleaning up your backlink profile, your job is to identify your links and clean up ALL poor-quality ones that point to your site. The next job is to build new, better-quality links to replace the ones you’ve removed.

The first step in cleaning the links you have identified as “bad” is to contact each webmaster in turn and ask them to remove the offending link(s). Successful or not (and in most cases, it won’t be), document every attempt you make.

Please keep in mind that backlinks audit is not a one-time job. You should do it at least every couple of months to keep it healthy. Your competitors may launch negative SEO attacks and destroy your rankings if you don’t disavow the backlinks fast.

Conclusion

Good work for getting so far!

Many e-commerce website owners struggle with link building. This limits their SEO success because links play a big role in SEO.

But there’s no doubt about it: building quality backlinks to your store is one of THE best ways to get traffic and sales. eCommerce link building is so effective because it requires more effort than most other growth strategies.

But the willingness to try harder is what separates good from bad marketers.

So are you ready to get started?