You have an ecommerce store. You’ve poured your heart, soul, and savings into it. But the sound you hear most often is crickets. It’s a lonely feeling when you know you have great products but no one is showing up to buy them.
Part of ecommerce SEO is getting backlinks, let’s dig deep into how you can do just that.
This is where you learn how to build backlinks for ecommerce. Getting consistent traffic feels like a massive puzzle, but backlinks are a huge piece of it. Think of it this way, getting traffic from Google isn’t luck; it’s a system, and figuring out how to build backlinks for ecommerce is a major part of that system.
Table of Contents:
- Why Your Ecommerce Store Desperately Needs Backlinks
- Before You Start: The Foundation for Link Building
- Proven Strategies for How to Build Backlinks for Ecommerce
- Guest Posting on Niche Blogs
- What to Avoid: Link Building Mistakes That Can Hurt You
- Conclusion
Why Your Ecommerce Store Desperately Needs Backlinks
What exactly is a website backlink? It’s simply a link from one website to another. When a popular blog links to your product page, that’s a backlink, and it serves as a powerful signal to search engines.
Think of them as votes of confidence from trusted sources. The more reputable sites that “vote” for your online store, the more Google trusts you, which can increase your domain authority. This trust is what helps you climb the search engine ranking for the specific keywords your customers are using in a google search.
But it’s not just about pleasing the search engines. These links also send real people to your Shopify store. This is called referral traffic, and these visitors are often ready to buy because they came from a source they already trust, helping with lead generation. A good backlink profile tells both search engines and customers that your store is a legitimate and valuable place to shop.
Before You Start: The Foundation for Link Building
Let’s get one thing straight. You can’t build a strong house on a shaky foundation. The same idea applies to link building, which is a key part of any successful digital marketing plan.
Your store needs to be worth linking to first. This starts with your product and category pages. Are your product photos high quality and your descriptions detailed and helpful? A great user experience is the first step because no one wants to link to a confusing or unappealing ecommerce website.
But to really earn quality links, you need more than just product pages. You need things that people naturally want to share and reference. These are called “linkable assets,” and they are the cornerstone of your content marketing and building strategies.
Creating Your Linkable Assets
A linkable asset is a piece of quality content on your site so good that other people want to link to it. It provides value beyond just trying to sell a product. This link-worthy content is your link building bait.
One great idea is to create detailed buying guides. If you sell hiking gear, a guide like “The Ultimate Guide to Choosing Your First Backpack” is incredibly useful for a beginner. Bloggers and forums are much more likely to link to a helpful guide than a simple product page.
You can also create fantastic blog content. Sticking with the hiking store example, you could write about “The 10 Most Scenic Trails in California.” This type of blog post attracts a broad, relevant audience, and other travel or outdoor blogs would happily link to it. Don’t forget that consistent blog posts are essential.
You could also create helpful tools. For a store that sells coffee beans, a simple online “Brew Ratio Calculator” could attract hundreds of links from coffee enthusiasts. The goal is to create something so useful or interesting that other websites want to point their readers to it.
Original research, case studies, or posts that gather interesting statistics also work wonders. For instance, a pet food store could publish a study on the nutritional benefits of a grain-free diet for dogs. People love linking to data to support their own points. Strong internal linking within these assets to your product pages is also a smart move.
Finally, create infographic and other visual content. Infographics are highly shareable and easy to digest, making them magnets for backlinks. You can summarize data from your case studies or blog posts into a visually appealing format that other site owners will want to embed on their pages.
Proven Strategies for How to Build Backlinks for Ecommerce
Once you have your foundation in place, it’s time to start actively building backlinks. This isn’t about spamming your URL everywhere. It’s about smart, strategic outreach and is central to any ecommerce link building plan.
The building process requires a mix of different ecommerce link building tactics. Some methods are easier than others, but they all work toward the same goal of improving your authority score. Let’s look at some of the most effective methods to secure backlinks.
Supplier and Manufacturer Links
This is the easiest place to start. The companies that manufacture or supply your products often have a page on their website listing where people can buy their goods. This page is usually called “Where to Buy,” “Stockists,” or “Retailers.”
All you have to do is perform a quick google search to find that page on their site and see if you’re listed. If not, send them a friendly email. Just let the website owner know you’re an official retailer and would appreciate being added to their list. This is usually a quick and easy way to get your first few high quality backlinks.
HARO (Help a Reporter Out)
Help a Reporter Out, or HARO, is a free service that connects journalists with expert sources. Reporters from all sorts of publications, big and small, use it daily. They are always looking for quotes and insights for their articles.
Here is how it works. You sign up for a free HARO account as a source. Three times a day, you’ll get an email with a list of questions from reporters. You just scan the email for questions related to your niche, a core part of public relations.
If you sell skincare products, you can answer questions about morning beauty routines or the benefits of certain ingredients. You then send a quick, helpful response directly to the journalist. If they use your quote, they’ll almost always link back to your website, giving you powerful media links. These can be some of the most impactful quality backlinks you can get.
Broken Link Building
This is a classic and very effective broken link building strategy. The internet is full of broken links. Web pages get moved or deleted all the time, and you can leverage this to your advantage.
Your job is to find them and offer a solution. You start by finding a broken link on a website in your niche. You can use various SEO tools for this, many of which offer free broken link checkers to find dead links on a trusted site.
Let’s say you find a resource page on a popular hiking blog that links to a guide about choosing hiking boots, but the link is dead. Since you have your own amazing guide on this topic, you can email the site owner. Your email should be helpful, not demanding. You might say something like, “Hey, I was reading your awesome resource page and noticed a link was broken. By the way, I recently published a detailed guide on that same topic. It might be a good replacement.”
A lot of the time, they will be happy to swap the dead link for yours. This approach helps you build relationships with other website owners while also landing a valuable website backlink.
Product Review Blogger Outreach
There are thousands of bloggers who review products. Your job is to find the ones in your niche and connect with them. This is not about sending mass, impersonal emails; that just doesn’t work anymore.
Instead, find bloggers who align with your brand. Read some of their posts and leave thoughtful comments. Share their articles on social media.
After you’ve established a connection, you can reach out with a personal email. Mention a specific review you liked. Then, you can offer them one of your products for free to review. You must make it clear you are looking for their honest opinion. Google’s guidelines on link spam are very strict about paying for links that pass ranking credit, so you are offering a product for an honest review, not a guaranteed positive one with a link.
Guest Posting on Niche Blogs
Guest posting, or guest blogging, means you write an article for another website in your industry. In return, you usually get a short author bio at the end of the article. This bio includes a link back to your store.
The trick here is to focus on quality over anything else. Don’t just write a quick article to get a link. Pitch topics that will genuinely help their audience and write the best guest post you possibly can.
The better your article, the more likely the site owner will be to work with you again. This not only builds a high-quality backlink but also positions you as an expert in your field. This is a time-tested building backlink method.
Uncover Your Competitors’ Backlinks
Why reinvent the wheel? Your competitors have already done a lot of link building work. You can use this to your advantage by seeing exactly who links to them.
Tools like Ahrefs or Semrush let you type in a competitor’s website and see a full list of their competitor links. You can then go through this list and find great opportunities for your own store. It gives you a clear roadmap of what works in your industry.
If a website has linked to three of your competitors but not you, they are a perfect target. You can reach out to them and show them your superior content or products. You may find they are happy to link to you too, helping you build a stronger link profile and improve your search engine result placement.
| Strategy | Difficulty | Cost | Potential Impact |
|---|---|---|---|
| Supplier Links | Low | Free | Low-Medium |
| HARO | Medium | Free | High |
| Broken Link Building | Medium-High | Low (Cost of tools) | Medium-High |
| Blogger Outreach | Medium | Low (Cost of products) | Medium |
| Guest Posting | High | Free (Time investment) | High |
| Competitor Analysis | Medium | Low (Cost of tools) | High |
What to Avoid: Link Building Mistakes That Can Hurt You
It’s just as important to know what not to do. Some link building tactics can actually harm your website’s rankings. Google is very smart, and trying to cheat the system will almost always backfire.
Never, ever buy backlinks from spammy websites or link farms. These sites exist only to sell links and have no real audience. A link from a site like this is a huge red flag to Google and can get your site penalized.
A penalty means your site’s rankings will drop significantly, and it can be very difficult to recover. Also, stay away from Private Blog Networks (PBNs). These are networks of websites created solely to build links to a main website. Google can easily detect these manufactured networks and will devalue any links coming from them.
It’s a short-term trick with long-term negative consequences for your engine ranking. The guiding principle should always be quality over quantity. One single backlink from a highly respected website in your industry is worth more than a thousand links from low-quality, irrelevant directories.
Always ask yourself: would I want a link from this site if Google didn’t exist? If the answer is no, then you should probably avoid it. Your goal is to build backlinks that provide real value and traffic, not just ones that try to manipulate search engine result pages.
Conclusion
Building a strong backlink profile doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time, effort, and persistence. But the rewards are well worth it, as a strong ecommerce link is an asset that grows over time.
You are not just building backlinks. You are building relationships, establishing your brand as an authority, and creating sustainable, long-term traffic for your business. As you’ve read, a mix of tactics is the best approach.
Learning how to build backlinks for ecommerce is a journey, but it’s one that leads to more customers and more sales. Just focus on creating real value with quality links and the high quality links will follow, filling your online store with eager customers.
