Gorgeous pictures, immaculate copy, and tons of great reviews.
The product page is where the magic happens.
Next to the home page, your product pages are the most important for your website’s success.
Every backlink strategy for an ecommerce brand should always start with the product page. These are the most important pages to rank for on SERP because they drive traffic directly to the point of conversion—instead of a lengthy sales funnel process.
Product pages can be the most difficult to get backlinks for because they do not fit neatly in conventional SEO strategies.
This post discusses tips and tricks for getting backlinks to your product pages.
Looking for help with ecommerce SEO? Take a look at our SEO process for ecommerce stores.
In this blog post, we will go over the following methods of building backlinks:
Blogger Reviews
Bloggers provide an incredible opportunity for the ecommerce shop to bolster their SEO.
You might be asking—could I really get an influential blogger with a massive audience to link to my product page? Absolutely.
The reason is simple: content.
Everybody needs content. You need content, I need content, bloggers need content.
Our team recently published an entire blog post on this topic called ‘125 Top Product Review Blogs (By Category)‘. Depending on your industry, this could be a great place to start.
Conde Nast Traveler is an incredible travel blog that serves as an example of a perfect type of blog to get your product featured in.
Here is an excerpt of Conde Nast promoting a brand in the upstate NY area:
Now, I don’t know whether or not this is an organic promotion by the content creators at Conde or not, but what’s clear here is that they are providing a number of backlinks to ecommerce products.
Checking out the ‘Mermaid Dry Shampoo’ leads you to a page on Captain Blankenship’s website—the company which sells the product.
Specifically, the one below:
A couple things to note here: Conde Nast Traveler carefully curated content around Captain Blankenship’s products in an appealing way to a demographic fit and provided a ‘Do Follow’ link to their product pages.
How to Get Started
Start by identifying the key influencers in your industry.
Who are your customers following on Instagram? Whose blogs are they most likely to be reading?
Next, I recommend crafting a story around your product and work on building a relationship. Treat bloggers like you would a successful business person you are attempting to network with—because that’s exactly what this is.
The goal here is to get have the influencer conduct a product giveaway or review. You should ask for this only after you’ve built up the rapport.
Think about it as though you’re approaching a girl at a bar. You wouldn’t immediately ask her to go home with you—you’d probably get a drink thrown in your face.
You would start by buying her a drink, woo’ing her and then going for the close.
If you do a good job building a relationship with the blogger they will often do a review for a few units of free product, but some will request a cash compensation. I caution my clients to not immediately capitulate to these requests unless the opportunity is particularly good (high viewership, ideal niche fit).
When looking for the right opportunities important factors to consider would be their domain authority and monthly viewership. Viewership and domain authority are often tightly correlated. Tapping into the right network correctly will not only yield a backlink, but also put your product in front of thousands of readers related to your niche.
For more on the outreach process, I’d recommend Jason Quey’s Influencer Outreach Plan and my own post on the 125 Top Product Review Blogs (By Category).
Quora Answers
Difficulty: 3
Value: 6
Quora and similar Q&A style forums have long been an effective method of getting backlinks for your site.
The site itself has a very high domain authority—helping you get on the front page of search.
Here we start by finding relevant questions to the solutions your product offers. From there, write-up a high quality, relevant answer with a backlink or two included. These backlinks should serve to enhance your answers for when others want to explore the question further.
Again, the key here is to not come off as spammy.
Quora is an incredible forum where users have their questions receive high-quality answers with a short turnaround. Quora users expect quality.
If their users detect that you’re using their platform for self-promotion rather than to add value then you can expect to be downvoted and have your brand image tarnished.
Here is an example I found someone asking about how to grow their fashion ecommerce brand. My intention here was to provide value and use backlinks for users who want to deep dive the subject:
For the ecommerce store, I would recommend researching questions which relate to the problem your product solves.
Say, for instance, you own a company that sells dog toys. Good topics to research might relate to dealing with active dogs, how to get a dog to enjoy their crate, or keeping dogs mentally engaged.
Below is an example of a good internet citizen answering the question “How do you replace a car radiator?”
This would have been a perfect place for a manufacturer of radiators or coolant accessories to place a backlink of a product page.
Looking to start building out your own content? Check out our post on building a content sales funnel around the buyer’s journey.
Value: 7
Reddit can be a tricky source to get backlinks, but if done correctly it can yield great results.
The website is divided according to different categories called ‘subreddits’. Each subreddit has its own set of publishing and behavior rules, style of content, and area of interest.
One of my favorite subreddits is r/ecommerce. In addition to r/ecommerce, there are more specific subreddits about sub-categories such as r/magento or r/AmazonSeller. There are literally hundreds of subreddits relating to just about everything.
If you’re new to this platform, you will want to start by leaving a few comments on other posts to get some ‘karma’. Karma is a social currency on Reddit which speaks to the value of your engagement on the site.
As far as internet communities go, Reddit is one of the shrewdest and most adverse to promotional material I’ve ever seen. When you post almost without fail you can expect your account to be researched by users to see where you have engaged in the past.
With that in mind, when you post here it is important to heavily value-stack your content.
Posting in a subreddit with a link embedded does not immediately pass link juice to your site. Your post has to get so many upvotes before the links in the posts are ‘Do Follow’ links.
A Better Lemonade Stand explains this concept really well (Purple = Do Follow, Pink = No Follow):
While it’s unclear how many upvotes your post needs before it gets a ‘Do Follow’ link, upvotes are the deciding factor.
Online Directories
Directories can be an excellent way to build contextual backlinks to your ecommerce store. They allow you to submit your site link and valuable website information to appear on their directory.
There are primarily two forms of online directories do use as a backlink building strategy:
- Web Directories
- Local Listing Services
Here we dive into both, explaining how you can use them to drive maximum traffic to your store.
Web Directories
Value: 6
Think of web directories as smaller versions of Google. They often function as a catalog of articles and websites which can be searched by users.
Web directories were much more popular in the early days of the web before Google and other dominant search engines gained their popularity. Posting backlinks on these sites will most likely not get you valuable traffic (unless you find a really good one), but they will increase the authority of your site.
This is because most web directories have very high domain authority, which means links from these sites carry a lot of weight in the eyes of search engines.
To get started you will need to build or find a list of web directories. My recommendation is to simply search “free web directories”.
Here you’ll be greeted with many, many lists of different web directories. The best thing to do is to find ones that are as relevant to your industry as possible. That said, most web directories cover a wide variety of industries, so I wouldn’t be too picky when building your initial list.
Next, you’ll want to select your first web directory and go to their website. In this example we go to Submission Web Directory to walk you through how to submit your site to directories. This directory has a domain authority of 55 and has the categories I’m rank for. While we’ve chosen a specific web directory to cover here, you’ll find that most are very similar and easy to use.
Through this process we will be building links to our post on The Basics of On-Page SEO For Ecommerce Stores. The anchor text we’re targeting is “On-Page SEO Guide For Ecommerce Stores”.
If you’re following along, you’ll want to click on ‘Submit Link’ at the top left of the page.
Next, you should be taken to a form page. See below:
Take your time to fill out everything very carefully. The most important thing to remember is that you want to be creating contextual ques around your link to give search engines more information to go off of. I like to make sure my title follows closely with the title of the page I’m linking to while being a little bit different.
Use synonyms, change up your phrasing. You do NOT want to get flagged for duplicate content because you were careless in how you went about building links. Take your time to compare how I’ve filled out the form above with the page I’m building links to (The Basics of On-Page SEO For Ecommerce Stores).
Finally, you should either be taken to a thank you page or see something to the effect of ‘Link Submitted, Waiting For Approval’. I’ve seen the approval process for free listing be as quick as 2 hours or as long as 12 months.
Like most other backlink building strategies, the key to success here is to have a high volume of contextual links from high domain authority sources. Keep in mind, not every link will be approved.
When I’m using this method, I try sit down for an hour and aim to build 20+ links. This shouldn’t be too hard for you once you get the hang of it (auto-fill form fields are amazing here ????).
Local Listing Services
Value: 9
Listing services are directories used by customers to find and qualify professionals in their area. They can contain businesses from plumbers to an architect to AI developers and everything in between.
Unlike web directories, local listing directories can drive some serious traffic. Traffic generated from these sources are typical high-intention users. Think about it, these users have went to a directory, for example Angie’s List, looking to compare professionals for a specific problem they are currently having.
These types of visitors should be considered deep within your sales funnel. If you had to classify them according to the buyer’s journey, they would fall within either the Consideration Stage or Decision Stage.
Credit: Hubspot’s Blog
Disclaimer: If your business does not have any type of physical presence then you will be severely hamstrung on how effectively you can use local listing services. Some allow you to set a location with a service radius without making your address visible, but this method will likely not be as impactful.
Top Ten Local Listing Services
- Google My Business
- Facebook Business Page
- LinkedIn Business Page
- Bing Places
- Angie’s List
- Yelp
- Yahoo Local
- Better Business Bureau
- Manta
- Trip Advisor
Some of these listing services will be more valuable depending on your industry. Spend some time researching which local listing services are most important for your business.
For example, if you’re offering construction supply products it will be a very good idea to get on Angie’s List because many of their users look up services related to construction and contracting.
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To contact me directly I can be reached at [email protected].
