Due to their mostly commercial orientation it is quite hard for Online Shops to get backlinks. But for several reasons backlinks are valuable for your online marketing strategy: On the one hand you will get direct, sometimes also targeted traffic. On the other hand backlinks are important for your search engine optimization (SEO).
Read on to learn more about Linkbuilding
There are a lot of rumours circulating about SEO, but there is also some consistency: Next to the important basis of on-page optimization all experts agree on the value of backlinks for SEO. And it’s not the quantity but rather quality of the incoming links that counts. Creative linkbuilding for Online Shops is not about forum spam or web catalogue entries. One backlink from a trustworthy, contentrelevant website with the right anchor text is worth more than 100 forum links or catalogue entries.
Now let’s face the facts and think about some creative methods for Online Shops to gain valuable backlinks:
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Convince with creative design and features
If your shop stands out from the mass you will get links for that. Furthermore an individual shop design communicates personality and uniqueness of your shop. As an outstanding example take the shop hema.nl (wait some seconds and the show starts). Be sure they got a lot of Links (here is one more) and social media attention with their creative idea. There are various possibilities to make your shop special, creative product presentation or videocontent are just two more ideas.
But be aware that your chosen design should not harm any usability aspects and should perform well in points of conversion rate optimization -
Be a guest author or interview guest
Share your experiences with the ecommerce industry and be a guest author on authority ecommerce blogs. Be active and contact the Blogger, they are always looking for some interesting content. Besides it’s a good start for networking. There could be even more benefits than backlinks. You could also search for blogs in your niche and suggest to write a nice How-To or a detailed product test report and insert a nice anchor text deeplink to your product page…more ideas about this in point 3.
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Let others write reviews about your products or service
It is nice to get the chance to write an article on a blog, but it would be less work to make other people write reviews about some products in your shop and make them deeplink to your product page. Again the first step is to find relevant bloggers or other people in your niche. Try to find them on Google by entering your product with non commercial terms, for example:
waterbed +advantages or tent +test…here you will find more search queries to find link sources. In your customer satisfaction surveys you should ask your customer if he or she has a blog or Twitter account. Send a code snippet and suggest to insert the code. Be creative and code a nice icon with a keyword alt_tag and a link to your homepage or to the product page of the product that was ordered. If the link is not placed voluntarily you at least have a new blog to contact someday.
When you have found some interesting bloggers, contact them and suggest to send a product sample, so that they can test the product and write an article. Play it safe and send a code snippet of the link you want to be placed in the article via E-mail. So you can be sure the link carries the right anchor text and points to the product page.
In addition to blogs there are for example some authorities on Youtube that test products and recommend them to their users. This is less about linkbuilding but about generating targeted traffic to your shop. -
Create non commercial content
Have you ever thought about starting your own blog? You should think about this, because there are various possibilities for your online marketing strategy (more detailed in a separate blogpost). For linkbuilding for your online shop you must be aware that people tend to link to non commercial content. Your own blog would be the perfect place for this. You can start to introduce yourself to your visitors, test some of your products and pass useful information to your potential customers. For example if you have a shop for camping you could write a detailed checklist what the camper should not forget on their next trip. For sure, there are many lists like that in the internet, but be creative and you will stand out. Produce a video that you think your target group will like or start a lottery with attractive prices and make it a linkbait. Last but not least a blog is a perfect way to improve your internal linking.
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Sponsor events and charity
Don’t get me wrong, you shouldn’t sponsor charity events for linkbuilding reasons! There are many other reasons to support special associations or charity events. But there might be a chance to profit by your charity. On the one hand, your customers will be pleased to see your engagement for charity. Probably someone will link to your blogpost where you write about the event, or someone will tweet about this. On the other hand you will have the chance to get a link from the charity organization website. Often there is a “sponsor”-page with high valuable backlinks.
