What is E-Commerce SEO?
Simply put, eCommerce SEO can be defined as a set of optimization techniques that enable an eCommerce website or business to rank higher in search results. Strategic SEO practices aimed at eCommerce accelerate the Google SERP rankings of a website, thereby fetching more traffic, leads, and sales for holistic business growth.
Online visibility is quintessential for the success of any eCommerce venture, something that can be effectively achieved through well-thought-out SEO practices. For instance, according to the Search Engine Journal, 93 percent of all online experiences start with a search engine. Thus, search engine optimization is an indispensable marketing tool to help users and shoppers find your online store.
Benefits of eCommerce SEO
SEO for eCommerce has paramount perquisites, which include –
- Increased Website Prominence – Organic Google search queries have 70 percent click-through rates. Thus, strategized SEO practices automatically accelerate your business’ visibility.
- Higher Product Purchases – More than 80 percent of online shoppers conduct an online before making any large purchase. So, if you had invested in top-tier SEO practices with localization efforts, backlinks, value-added content, etc., then the magnitude of netizens trusting your brand and purchasing your products shoots up organically.
- Better Customer Experience – A 2019 study by Zendesk shows that 84 percent of customers regard the customer experience as the primary determinant when buying a product or service from a company. Hence, investing in eCommerce SEO practices, such as mobile optimization, chatbots, etc., enables you to provide a better audience experience, leading to customer retention, positive brand association, and outstanding sales.
- Proliferation in Sales and Profits – A Nasdaq survey illustrates that we can expect people and businesses to make 95 percent of their purchases online in the near future. Just a jarring figure means that with the right eCommerce SEO, the prospect of sales and revenue proliferation increases by umpteen times.
Types of eCommerce SEO Strategies
You can extract the abovementioned advantages of eCommerce SEO through three different types of strategies:
- On-page SEO – It is the mechanism of optimizing individual pages of your eCommerce website so that each page ranks higher on Google. On-page SEO usually involves the co-option of keywords at strategic places, such as Meta titles and descriptions, content, image alt texts, etc., o that the right target audience can easily find your page and the relevant products.
- Technical SEO – It is the backend aspect of search engine optimization that makes it easier for search engines to index and crawl your pages. Some of the technical SEO elements include creating a sitemap, mobile optimization, improving page loading speed, and so forth.
- Local SEO – They include SEO practices that help establish your authority as a credible and leading business in the area, fetching more foot traffic to your website and the brick-and-mortar store (if you own any). Some of the game-changing local SEO strategies include creating a Google My Business, creating a locally relevant website and social media content, etc.
- Off-page SEO – Last but not least, we have off-page SEO practices that include everything that happens outside your website, which helps accelerate its SERPs. Off-page SEO strategies are the backbone of eCommerce SEO and include elements like link building, influencer marketing, guest blogging, social media marketing, and so forth.
In this article, we will examine the A to Z of backlinks and eCommerce link building as a stalwart SEO practice with revolutionary potential for your business.
Why Backlinks Can Be a Game Changer for Ecommerce Sites
Backlinks, also known as inbound links or incoming links, are hyperlinks that connect a website to another. They are an integral part of off-page SEO and can be the key to a great SEO campaign for eCommerce sites. According to Forbes.com, link building is not only effective but is an absolute necessity in today’s cutthroat digital domain. Backlinks serve as a ‘vote of confidence’ for your eCommerce venture, leading to more credibility and trust rate, better brand value, increased online visibility, accelerated sales and revenue, and so forth. An interesting study reveals that the first-ranking result on Google SERP has 3.8x more backlinks than in the 2nd to 10th positions.
Backlinks are an indispensable strategy for eCommerce SEO, as they signal to Google that another resource finds our website or business relevant, trustworthy, and meaningful enough to link it to their own content. As a website earns more backlinks, search engines conjecture that the site possesses high-value and worthy content, and can be ranked higher on SERP. Hence, the higher the proportion of backlinks to your eCommerce site, the greater the advantages. However, link building is murky terrain, and although the magnitude of backlinks matters, quality trumps quantity in all scenarios. Simply put, not every link has a similar worth; some backlinks could even negatively affect your eCommerce venture. Therefore, robust and mindful eCommerce link building becomes pivotal, and that is precisely what we will cover in this article.
How Many Types of Backlinks Are Good for Ecommerce Sites
There are different types of backlinks that are ideal for eCommerce sites, and some of them are mentioned below –
Vendor Links
For an eCommerce venture, specific moving pieces, such as logistics, payment processing, marketing, sales, and likewise, has tremendous significance. In other words, as an eCommerce business, you have dynamic business relationships with multiple vendors premised on symbiosis. You can leverage these relationships for strategic link building.
You can consider reaching out to all organizations with which you work or have had stable working relationships in the past and discuss a transactional back linking strategy. For instance, a study by Ahrefs illustrates that 43.7 percent of the top-ranking pages on Google have reciprocal links, meaning that the sites they mention in their content also link back to them.
Unlinked Brand Mentions
For any eCommerce venture, brand reputation, credibility, and customer trust are of unparalleled importance. Considering that 71 percent of adult netizens use social media, strategic social media marketing can be a foolproof tool to elevate your brand’s reliability and trust. Assuming that your online business has a social media presence, there is an excellent possibility your business has multiple unlinked mentions from bloggers, social media influencers, customers, news, affiliate marketers, etc.
You can consider reaching out to web admins, bloggers, or editors of all such sites and request them to add your links. In return, you can offer to share their work on your social media accounts. Lastly, you can start resharing the posts of customers and influencers who use and link your brand, resulting in a snowball effect of more people linking your business for reshares.
Niche Base Links
If you are a business that sells eco-friendly incense sticks, you are going to ask a business that sells home décor for links. Thus, your external link building strategy should focus on your niche. It would help if you looked for links from businesses that are somehow related to your business, but ensure that they are not direct competition.
The argument that niche-based backlinking seeps into link partnership are pretty common. However, studies have, time and again, shown that reciprocal eCommerce backlink techniques have a positive effect on website ranking. In addition, niche-based backlinks do not come with the risk of any penalty.
Guest Blogging
Simply put, guest blogs or posts are articles about topics that a specific target audience might find interesting or meaningful to read. Google considers guest blogging as extremely valuable for SERP. Although guest blogging is deemed an expensive SEO strategy, it is an excellent tool for eCommerce link building. However, it should be done by networking, not spamming. If, when writing a guest blog, your only intention is to get links directly back to your site, then you will probably not get much value out of it. The simple method by which you can find blogs for guest blogging in your niche is –
Just enter on Google’s search bar ‘your niche’ + ‘write for us’, and you will be automatically directed to all the blogs accepting relevant guest posts pertaining to your niche. The benefits of guest blogging include the following –
- It helps bolster organic traffic
- It helps increase brand awareness
- Your eCommerce site receives organic targetted referral traffic
Customer Surveys
As an eCommerce business, you are often responsible for conducting customer surveys to understand their desires, likes, dislikes, pet peeves, and so forth. Customer surveys are crucial for an online business to receive valuable feedback from its target audience, as it facilitates getting rid of unwanted products and services and churning out more high-demand products. However, customer surveys can have uncanny benefits, as well.
The data you receive from a customer survey can be co-opted in multiple ways. Customer survey data is a foolproof way to produce significant linkable assets and content pieces, which you can devise for fulfilling requirements, providing value, and providing the point of a website, all in exchange for links. For instance, if 2000 people from India’s metro cities are interested in buying eco-friendly incense sticks, you can use the data, convert it into charts, and pitch it to home improvement blogs, fragrance blogs, sustainable lifestyle blogs, etc.
Now that we know the types of eCommerce backlinks for SEO, let us dovetail into their revenue-generating capabilities.
Can Backlinks Generate Revenue for Ecommerce Website
Backlinks have massive revenue-generating potential for eCommerce websites. Let us break down the benefits of backlinks in SEO in vivid detail.
Increased Sales and Revenue Generation
Influencer marketing has become a ubiquitous phenomenon. We are exposed to it on a daily basis, simply when browsing a blog, opening the Instagram app, using social media, and so forth. However, the catch-22 of influencer marketing is the links attached to the posts, stories, or reels to other sites, encouraging their followers to check these websites out! Therefore, influencer marketing is an excellent backlink for eCommerce strategy.
It can help your online business carve out space for massive sales and revenue-generating opportunities. Links to your site lead to more people visiting your online store and deciding to buy your products and services, resulting in higher revenue generation organically. For example, a study illustrates that 28 percent of the surveyed companies regard influencer marketing as the fastest-growing online customer acquisition channel, and it is time for you to cash on this opportunity.
You Earn Passive Income
You might be surprised to know that backlinks can facilitate passive income for your eCommerce venture. When more links lead to your website, where all the goods and services are sold or ad revenue is generated, the scope of earning more revenue passively increases. The income boost you receive from other sites linking to your content is phenomenal.
Increased Referral Traffic
Quality backlinks are a foolproof technique that can fetch your eCommerce website more traffic. When the links to your business are on other reputed sites, people visiting these websites will be automatically pulled toward you. For instance, you can increase the online visibility of your business by 20 percent through strategic link building.
However, one of the fascinating aspects of eCommerce link building is that you get referral traffic not only for a specific time span but for years to come. As backlinking strategies are highly targeted, there is the possibility of receiving traffic and earning revenue for years on end on autopilot mode.
Higher Business Credibility and Trust
When Google crawlers are ‘crawling’ a trusted website on which they find a link to your business, they will also deem you trustworthy. Thus, if multiple trusted websites have your business’ links in them, then your Google ranking automatically shoots up. For example, an Aira survey shows that 52 percent of digital marketers strongly believe that eCommerce link building and brand mention directly impact organic search rankings.
Boost in Brand Value
Needless to say, eCommerce backlinks serve as a third-party indicator of the authoritative strength of your website, therefore, offer your business maximum business credibility. Google’s objective is to provide users with results that are most relevant to their searches, and to achieve this; Google depends on the ‘authority’ factor. Therefore, the more high-quality links are directed toward your eCommerce site, the more will be its credibility.
Long-Term Directory and Resource Links
The internet is a bottomless source of data. It will continue to expand and remain a warehouse of information for netizens. Thus, if your eCommerce venture attains high-quality SEO backlinks from reputable directories and other sites, there is a massive possibility for organic traffic to be driven to your online business for years to come.
Reduced Bounce Rates
Another veritable advantage of link building of eCommerce link building is the decrease in bounce rates. Google defines bounce rates as ‘the number of single-page sessions’ or the ‘proportion of individuals who visited only one page of your website and left before browsing through the rest of the website.’
For this reason, internal links are incredibly important when link building as they make it simpler for Google to navigate your business while encouraging visitors to navigate your site content. Thus, when you make it easier for netizens to find relevant content on your site, they will stick through your site longer, and thus, the bounce rates will minimize automatically.
All in all, the revenue-generating capabilities that link building has for eCommerce are paramount. The time is ripe to invest in quality eCommerce backlinks, as their significance will only increase in the near future. For example, research by Aira reveals that 92 percent of the surveyed marketers strongly believe that link building will continue to be a vital Google ranking factor in the next five years.
What Really Matters For Ecommerce Quality or Quantity
When it comes to eCommerce backlinks, quality presides over quantity at any given time. The backlinks your online business relies on should have the following characteristics –
Authority
Getting high-authority backlinks for your eCommerce venture is an excellent business strategy. When your business is linked to other revered and reputable sites trusted by Google, the chances of your business being classified as meaningful and valuable also increase.
There are various tools available to assess a site’s authority. For instance, a link-auditing tool will provide a solid and comprehensive summary of your website’s linking profile. In addition, you will also find other sites linking you, which are linked to your competitor, and which links are not being followed.
Power
Quality eCommerce backlinks serve as the quintessential vote of confidence for your online business, thereby increasing its authority in the eyes of Google. To create powerful backlinks, you can try various link building strategies like influencer collaboration or marketing, writing value-driven articles, etc. The key is to create unique and non-replicable content that offers insights that other brands cannot copy and paste.
One way to ensure that the backlinks your business receives are powerful are by choosing sites with strong domain authority. Of course, getting powerful backlinks for your eCommerce venture takes time and effort. However, patience is worth it as the end result is noteworthy. Therefore, you should ensure that eCommerce link building has become a regular and consistence part of your digital marketing strategy.
Relevance
Last but not least, another pertinent characteristic of a high-quality link is relevance. The external sites that link your business should belong to the same niche as yours to ensure that the referral traffic is relevant. In case the backlinks lack relevance, the traffic directed to you will be of lower value, culminating in higher bounce rates and low sales and profits.
Thus, niche-based link building becomes incredibly important to ensure that your backlinks check off the ‘relevance’ criterion. Google determines a backlink’s quality by gauging the ‘quality’ of the website it is in and also the topic of the link. Therefore, both website authority and relevance take the front seat.
Wrapping It Up
So, there we have it, a comprehensive overview of backlinks and the importance of an eCommerce site. In today’s day and age, backlinks are an indispensable aspect of any digital marketing strategy, and your off-page SEO techniques are incomplete without high-quality link building. The fact that the no.1 ranking page on Google gets an additional 5 to 14.5 percent more ‘do follow’ backlinks from new websites each month is a testament to the profound possibilities that link building has for eCommerce SEO and business growth.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q1. How do backlinks give traffic to eCommerce sites?
Ans. Backlinks give traffic to your eCommerce site by directing organic referral users to your business. When another business of the same niche links to your site, its visitors are lured to click on your site. The same goes for influencer backlink strategies, as well.
Q2. Is image submission really beneficial for eCommerce sites?
Ans. Image submission or image optimization has veritable benefits for eCommerce sites. Needless to say, eCommerce images are crucial in attracting and influencing customers’ buying decisions. Human beings are visual creatures, and it is natural to be fascinated by picturesque images of products. Therefore, images are the medium between the authenticity you want to create in your target audience’s imagination about your products and services. Thus, eCommerce image submission becomes crucial for website design and SEO. Furthermore, adding keywords on Alt image texts is also a proven on-page SEO strategy.
Q3. Can we do business listing for eCommerce business?
Ans. Yes, it is possible to do business for eCommerce ventures. There are hundreds of business listings that you can choose from; the most relevant ones are-
- Google My Business
- Facebook Business
- Yelp for Business Owners
- Yahoo Business Listing
- Bing Places for Business
- Foursquare for Businesses
- Yellow Pages
- Merchant Circle
- Super Pages and much more
