SEO is a core aspect of any website, especially an e-commerce store.
Relying completely on paid marketing channels to drive traffic and sales can eat away at profit margins. The most profitable websites successfully leverage organic search to drive ‘free’ clicks to site and generate sustainable, ongoing sales too.
In this article, I’m going to skip ahead a few steps when it comes to e-commerce in its entirety. I’m going to presume that you’ve done your keyword research, that your category and product pages are well optimised, and that all the fiddly technical SEO bits are done.
Because the next step after that is sometimes the hardest… linkbuilding.
Why is linkbuilding important?
Backlinks are to Google what word of mouth is in real life. It’s a digital recommendation that search engines can measure to decide how trustworthy, how relevant and how valuable a website and its content is.
Why backlinks matter for e-commerce SEO is that many website owners will believe that just by having an online store, you’ll start driving traffic and sales. But even if you’ve spent time optimising that store, that won’t (usually) be enough for Google to take note and start ranking you in traffic-generating positions.
Why? Because all the top-performing websites in your niche will be carrying out their own SEO strategies. They will have more links (or more digital recommendations), so they will likely outrank you.
But here’s how you can change that…
Start building domain authority
Domain authority, or your website’s authority score’ is a metric that gives a generalised picture of how strong your URL is from an SEO perspective. This predominantly takes into account your backlink portfolio, ie, the combined strength of all the backlinks pointing to your website.
Domain authority matters because strong websites can rank better for all site pages. And e-commerce websites can have thousands of pages, and it’s impossible to focus linkbuilding efforts on every individual product.
This is one of the reasons why a website like Amazon can rank almost immediate for a brand new category page, whilst specialist websites that only focus on that category can struggle to rank at all.
You can begin to build domain authority by building ‘branded backlinks’. These are links that predominantly point towards your homepage in the form of directories and local citations. Starting to develop some of these links will make sure your brand is ranking, will power up your homepage, and start to build overall domain authority which will help internal deep pages (like your products) to rank too.
Generate category links
Deep links into your category pages matter as they help to power up the pages you really want to rank.
Domain authority can only (usually) get you so far. Deep links are typically contextual links from other websites which tend to be from a blog or PR article. They talk around your category area, and then link back to your category as a place where their readers can explore a range of options that may suit their needs.
These category links can occur naturally over time – but only if your category pages are discoverable in the first place!
One of the most effective ways to begin to generate some of these links to get your category pages noticed is by working with sector-relevant bloggers. This can be time-consuming and require some investment – or in the very least shipping over some free products as a thank you / for review. But powerful, contextual, anchor-text relevant links of this nature are a great way to begin building individual page authority and targeted keyword rankings.
Be everywhere your (stronger) competitors are
This is often an overlooked area of e-commerce marketing strategies, but looking closely at what your bigger competitors are doing across all areas of digital marketing can give a goldmine of information. And the same is true for your linkbuilding strategy!
Using tools like SEMrush, you can analyse where your competitors are generating links from, which links are the strongest and which you should look to replicate.
Some won’t be replicable. For example, they may have sister brand sites or ran a really popular social campaign that got the attention of the press. But they will also be listed in directories, or work with certain bloggers, or are including in round-up articles that you could try to replicate systematically over time.
Copying your stronger competitors’ best backlinks is a great way to begin to catch up. It also takes a lot of the legwork out of your initial linkbuilding efforts. Instead of searching for link opportunities, you can quickly gather hundreds of options to begin to list your store, or webmasters to reach out to requesting inclusion in their blog posts.
A final point…
SEO of any type takes time and patience. If you have a brand new store and are relying solely on organic traffic to generate traffic and sales, you will likely be disappointed. I’ve seen some websites rank for their most valuable keyword after just three months. Others, it can take three years. It all depends on how competitive that niche is!
But stick with it. E-commerce SEO should be an ever-present in your digital marketing strategy, working alongside paid search and social, PR and influencers, affiliate and email to form an integrated acquisition strategy that can grow, develop and change over time.
