Top 5 linkbuilding strategies for online stores

Are you looking for a great way to boost your online presence? If you have an online business, you have probably already noticed that the competition is huge. It can be a hard task to differentiate yourself from your competitors. However, if you know how to do it and know how to master it, you have a great advantage. A good way to start your journey to become a successful online store and business is to improve your current presence on Google. In order to do so, it is important to know how to do linkbuilding. If you are interested in knowing how to do so, keep reading and you will be introduced to the top 5 linkbuilding strategies for ecommerce websites.

What is linkbuilding?

Linkbuilding is the process of building one-way hyperlinks to a website with the specific goal of improving a site’s visibility in the search engines.

If you have an online store, business or blog, you should put some interest into improving your current presence on Google and obtain greater results by reaching an overall better ranking on Google. When your online business or blog ranks higher on Google, it will most likely boost the traffic from visitors, customers, etcetera to your site. Just imagine yourself searching and looking for something specific on Google. How often do you actually look at the links further down the Google Search Engine? And how often do you only click on the first two or three links listed from the top? Yes, that is exactly what happens most of the time. People do not want to ‘waste’ time searching for hours for the things they are looking for and they end up clicking only at the top links most of the time. Therefore, your online presence matters in order to get as much traffic to your website as possible.

1.Start by asking others for relevant links

If you want to build links, you need to outreach. You can really ask whoever you want to, but do make sure to ask people with a relevant website. If the website you are linking to does not have relevance for your own website, it is most likely not going to have much of an impact. Therefore, you should be looking for high-quality links from websites with a high level of authority or expertise, or both. This will give your website the best opportunity to create a strong backlink profile. Always keep in mind that when other websites are agreeing to mention you on their website or on their blog, it is not free as it is advertising they are doing for you when they are linking to your site and representing within their own content.

HD Shisha is an online shisha (hookah) webstore who opted for exactly this method in order to boost the engagement and traffic to their website. Since stores selling cigarettes and tobacco products are not allowed to advertise, HD Shisha felt the need to boost their website by using different techniques. By using SEO and linkbuilding techniques, they were able to contact and ask others for links in order to improve their presence on Google and, furthermore, receive more traffic to their website.

Here are some suggestions to where you should be looking for your links:

• Websites related to your business and industry
• Guest posts
• News media within your own industry
• Influencers

When you have found relevant, high-quality links, you want for your website in order to improve your backlink profile, you need to sell yourself. It is important to know how to sell yourself to a possible link creator. Therefore, it is crucial to know exactly what to say when you introduce the link creator to exactly why you should get a link on his or her website or blog. Think of it as a job interview. Here you also need to sell yourself and make the other person believe that you are the best for the job. The same goes for when you are contacting your possible link creators.

2.Use the Broken Links Strategy

This method is fairly easy. All you have to do is look for blogs and pages online with broken external links. Whenever you find any dead link, you create something similar to the broken ressource. The idea here is to contact the blogger and request that they replace the dead links with yours. This linkbuilding strategy should not be your only one but should instead be a part of your much broader strategy.

By using broken links building, you can:

• Make sure to build links on pages that have already inherited authority
• Build links from within relevant content
• Inherit links that previously liked to competitors - it will help optimize your own SEO

A great way to find dead pages that are being linked to is by using a backlinks analytics tool. Here you can, for instance, enter your domain in order to view a list of your competitor’s domains. This gives you a good overview of all your competitors and you can now start analyzing them. By using the backlinks analytics tool, you can analyze each of the competitors and see a list of their dead links. Once you have done this, you should be left with an insight into quality broken links that point to dead pages.

3.Create a blog

A good technique is to start an online blog where you focus on your industry and on your clients needs. It is important that you update your blog on a regular basis and add content often. By doing so, it will most likely gain authority and give your links greater value. Furthermore, when you write and create a post for your blog, you should make sure that the content is of high quality and that you use the basic SEO-techniques. A good way to start is to think about the structure of your post and, moreover, that you use engaging headlines and keywords that are more likely to attract and draw attention to your blog and website. Finally, make sure that your blog posts are relevant to your target audience. By doing so, it is more likely that other people will link to your blog again and again.

The website ting-shop, a furniture and interior store, started doing this with an eye to improve their linkbuilding and engagement. The continuous updates on the blog has helped them to rank higher on Google and get more traffic from visitors and potential customers.

A great technique for finding content for your blog posts is using Ahrefs.com as a tool to get insider information on what people are asking about related to specific topics on Google. The image below shows an example of how you can find the information. In the search bar, you enter the word you want information about. In this case, the word ‘fatboy’ has been chosen. When you click on ‘questions’ on the very left side, Ahrefs should provide you with information about people’s most searched questions. Here it shows us, for instance, the question ‘fatboy how many litres?’. With this information you now have a great topic for your next blog post.

We did this and used the given information in order to create a blog post we knew, people wanted to look for. Below you can see that the blog post is to be found on Google as a featured Snippet ranking as one of the first posts when you search for how big a fatboy is or how you clean it.

Image: Screenshot of the Google search result on “how to wash a fatboy” (translated to English)

4. Make sure that you are active on social media

Social media platforms have become hugely popular and very important for doing marketing. If you make sure to be active on social media, it can give you a huge advantage in your linkbuilding plan. Make sure to be active by regularly sharing new posts, images and updates. If you are not doing so, you are instead doing your brand a disservice. Even if you are new to social media, you can easily boost engagement when you get active. By doing this, you expose your brand and site URL to more people who are able to share your post with their target audience. This should help boost and improve your link profile and your overall visibility.

It is not enough to just be active on social media. You also need to share links across social platforms in order to increase brand exposure. They influence SEO in six directions:

• Extensive content distribution
• Increase brand recognition
• Longer lifespan of your posts
• Boosts local SEO
• Enhance brand reputation
• Improve online visibility and organic traffic

When you use social media for your SEO practices, there are a few different things you should consider. One of them is to make sure you are publishing high-quality content. Google’s algorithms are developed to understand content relevance and quality. This means that Google is able to offer the most relevant content based on searches. Therefore, it is crucial to make quality content every time you post something.

You should also make sure that your content and posts are easy to share. On social media you typically find social share and call-to-action buttons. If your blog has the same, it will most likely encourage your followers and readers to share your information because it is easy and convenient. Furthermore, you should make sure to include and use images as they optimize your content and engage your followers even more. The human brain processes visuals much faster than it can process written content and, moreover, we are easier drawn to visual content than other types of content.

5. Learn good linkbuilding from others

If you are really looking to improve your linkbuilding skills, a good idea is to learn from others around you. You can create a lot of content day after day, week after week, but if you are not constantly improving your skills and learning new things, you probably will not improve the possible traffic to your site either. There is nothing worse than creating lots of content that does not get any recognition or interested readers. Make sure to do a lot of research and learn from others who have really mastered the great techniques. You should never be thinking that you have completely mastered everything you need to know about SEO and linkbuilding. Remember that the internet and Google is constantly changing and improving. There should always be room for improvement in your own skills as well as your website.

Here you can find good resources:

• Search Engine Land

Search Engine Land covers all aspects of digital marketing, advertising technology and the martech landscape. They, moreover, covers breaking stories, industry trends, feature announcements and product changes at popular platforms used by search marketers to reach consumers online.

• CLX.com

CLX brings you in-depth marketing, analytics and optimization content on their blog. Moreover, they offer data-driven marketing training programs and help mid-market to enterprise level companies grow online revenues via managed customer experience optimization programs.

• Moz.com

At Moz they help others do marketing and they focus especially on SEO (search engine optimization) in order to simplify it for their customers.