Link building is one of the most challenging aspects of SEO. You need to ensure that your presence is spread far and wide beyond your own website. Plus, you need to check that the site having your link is a quality link.
A link building company will help you build your eCommerce brand’s link profile. When you have a healthy link profile, you succeed in gaining customers’ trust and crafting a formidable industry authority.
Both these aspects come in handy to propel your business to the next level of traction.
Link building comprises of two key activities:
- Creating compelling content
- Distributing the content with the right outreach techniques
But still, many eCommerce companies feel that this is one of the most challenging aspects of SEO. Hence, they seek the assistance of a link-building company that is proficient in white-label SEO.
1- What is link building for SEO?
Link building is an important aspect of SEO. It’s the process of acquiring links from other websites that point to your website. This helps your website rank higher in search engine results pages, which leads to more people visiting your site and buying your products or services.
The crawl index is a very important statistic used by Google in its search engine ranking algorithm. Google measures the number of links pointing to your site. It then combines this with the number of pages that link to you, as well as other ranking signals.
So, the more links and other resources you can build for your website, the better. This makes a compelling case for quality link-building services.
2- Why is SEO link-building important?
In 2009, Google developed its Penguin algorithm. This algorithm helped Google identify websites that had been unfairly building spammy backlinks and penalized them appropriately. In 2014, they released another algorithm update known as the Penguin Update. This algorithm has been designed to filter out websites that have not built links in a legitimate way.
There is an important effect of this update. It hurt websites that had been building backlinks through techniques such as link directories. It also came down heavily on websites that were selling backlinks from one site to another and even guest posting on blogs.
Hence SEO webmasters now focus on legit SEO link-building services. They do this with the aim to improve their organic search rankings on SERPs.
3- What link-building strategies work?
Today we take a look at some high-impact link-building tactics in 2022. Implement these within your website to get a definite rankings boost.
3.1- Video Marketing
When you include video marketing in your digital marketing game, you can be sure of more eyeballs coming in the direction of your brand. Videos are fast emerging as the preferred way to bring to life your product and services in front of the people who matter the most, i.e., your target customers.
Some great ways to leverage video marketing as a high-quality link-building tactic include
- Walk-throughs of product and service workflow
- Detailed instructional videos and step-by-step guides
- Educational how-to videos
- Humorous stories and narratives to increase brand engagement
The result of this effort is a visible boost in impression and engagement. Such a link-building tactic will help keep site visitors hooked and facilitate higher click-through rates.
Such video content has the potential to come up tops on SERP with an appearance in the Featured Snippets section.
For example, if you run a fashion online retail store, you can have a video about ‘5 ways to pair a suit with office wear’. Such engaging content will definitely be picked up by bloggers. This will provide an outreach opportunity for you as well.
3.2- Create Impactful Blog Content
Your site is the primary home for your brand. You need to make sure to leverage it with high-quality blogs that are informative and valuable. Such blogs go a long way in forging stronger relationships with customers.
When you present in-depth blogs, your target readers start viewing you as an industry authority. This way, they remember your brand instead of your competitors when the time comes to make a purchase decision.
Such articles and blogs will take the form of
- Insights on men’s grooming
- Tips and advice
- Educative content that teaches something new
- Step by step guide
- How-to articles
Take the case of Dollar Shave Club. They have fun-filled content like “A Gentleman’s Guide to Splitting the Group Check”. This way, they want to target their primary audience – young men. Their articles are not necessarily always about shaving and grooming. It can also cover related aspects like leading a smarter and better lifestyle.
The result of such witty and fun titles is that they become more likeable and shareable among men. They are relatable to the main readership, i.e., young men.
The wide sharing and linking will help it reach influencers who will see the value in your content. When they link to your brand, it will lead to an enhanced visibility boost.
3.3- Use influencers when creating content assets
It is no surprise that bloggers, YouTubers, and Instagrammers have been steadily taking over our social feeds with their dapper ensembles and a keen eye for style. eCommerce stores have been quick to hop on the train by partnering with these influencers to showcase their latest designs or campaigns through editorial pieces.
The power behind these influencers is that they have the ability to increase engagement on social media posts from both followers and potential customers. Their posts are constantly seen and shared amongst their friends, family, and followers. This bumps up the engagement factor for your eCommerce site.
When reaching out to influencers, there are a few key factors that need to be taken into consideration with making the right decision.
- The influencers’ target audience needs to align with your niche. Suppose an influencer has 30,000 followers but all in the age group of 40+ age group of office goers. Such an influencer may not be an ideal fit for your fashion brand, aiming the millennials and Gen Z.
- Get them to use your own brand/store products. You can set up a dedicated account for fashion influencers and let them try on clothes from your collection. This way, they can make a new and alluring style guide that their followers can read through. Your site link to individual pieces of clothing will ensure further engagement with a ‘Buy This Look’ caption/button.
3.4- Use guest blogging
Some marketers would be of the opinion that guest blogging is no longer a search influencer. It may be partly true. Earlier in the day, it was easy to build links via guest posting. But over the last few years, it has been getting significantly difficult to gain rankings juice via guest posting.
Various search engines like Google have updated their algorithm to better weed out spammy links and poor-quality content. But if you are a savvy marketer, you will know that guest posting has the scope to deliver results. The only condition is that you need to focus on quality over quantity. This will align your guest posts to the value-first philosophy of Google algorithm updates.
So, you need to create actionable content with an in-depth value which hasn’t been covered in other posts. Also, you need to focus on which sites you will pick for guest posting endeavours. You need to go for a suitable site specifically for your niche via Google Search or a by examining the backlink profile of competitor sites within your industry.
Once you have figured out the list of sites, you can start contacting them one by one and check if they accept guest posts. Make sure to have the direct email of the contact rather than the generic ‘sales@’ or ‘info@’ email ids associated with the standard ‘Contact us’ forms on their site.
If you get a reply, you will be directed towards the guest posting guidelines. This way, you will get an ‘in’ for developing guest posts for that site. Of course, you need to make sure that your post abides by their guidelines. This will have a much better likelihood of being published on their website.
3.5- Enhance the shareability of your product or content assets
If you are a known brand in your niche, you can be sure that many others would be vying to use your link. Imagine the traction and visibility you get when you open your content assets to them. You will witness an immediate boost in engagement and conversion.
The finest example of this tip is the use of Getty Image’s Embed feature. Getty’s had a huge repository of photographs online. The credibility and trust associated with this image services were unparalleled. They have released 35 million photographs, thus elevating the shareability of their content assets.
With this step, they boosted organic traffic back to their website. This way, they leveraged their credibility and could save on efforts of mapping a customer journey and creating diverse forms of content at every stage to help customers move from site visitors to loyal customers.
Instead of trying to create organic links through blog assets, they tried out a new approach with their existing assets. With conventional blog-based efforts for high quality link building, they would need to create a fresh and quality piece. Then, they would have had to create a customer journey using internal linking.
Instead, they used a way to direct users to the core product of the site, i.e., the high quality and make the stunning photographs embedded.
This way, they created a massive opportunity to make the link shareable outside (or beyond) your own established consumer network. This paved the way for enhanced engagement and a likelihood of sales from this new stream.
3.6- Turn mentions into outreach
Let’s take the case of a fashion brand to explain this point. Your fashion brand may already be a part of credible ecommerce portals like Harpers Bazaar, Shopify and BigCommerce. If you see your name but see that the blog writer has not linked your site, then this presents a good opportunity for quality link building services.
There is one smart way to see if any other site has any mention about your band name. You can check it on Google Alerts or Mention – two of the foremost web monitoring tools. They will help you track and extract brand mention across the web.
This way, you will come to know if any blogger has mentioned your brand name. But if they have not linked your site to the name, then you can reach out to them. You can request them to add a link and link back to you. This is one of the most sure-fire ways of building your links. It needs a bit of effort, but those who use it, report amazing gains with this effort.
4- To conclude
Many business owners in the online retail space are of the opinion that they don’t need to put in a lot of effort with link building. They feel that since they sell products, they don’t need to invest time in offering quality content.
But time and again, many eCommerce sites have shown the power of applying link building tactics.
These strategies have gone on to power the growth story of these eCommerce sites. The momentum of growth initiated by quality link building makes this a highly preferred digital marketing tactic for eCommerce sites of all scale, size, or industries.
Connect with a reliable link building company offering Kelowna SEO. They will help devise and deploy SEO link building strategies to take your business to the next level of growth.
