Link Building Tips for eCommerce Sites

One of the biggest and most common SEO challenges is building links for e-commerce sites. It can be especially difficult for small companies with limited internal support or a small SEO contract to rise to the challenge of online competition for that well-earned dollar. Discouraging may be an understatement. Take a deep breath, because there is hope yet. Here are some tips for small e-commerce sites and their link building SEO efforts.

Reviews

Ask people in your niche to review your products. You can also send follow up emails to clients asking them for a review of the product they just purchased.

These can be extremely valuable for your bottom line, especially if your products are worth buying. If you do get a review, whether good or bad, it is vitally important that you follow up with an email thanking them for their review and, if appropriate, what you can do to assist them further. This can be the difference between a repeat customer and good word-of-mouth, or a totally fail.

Non-Salesy Content

Create some content that is worth linking to that provides expertise or insight into your industry or niche. Then manually spread this to appropriate places: industry blog, social media outlets, and, of course, your website. The content doesn’t have to be immediately applicable, but can serve as a great resource for them later. This means your visitors will want to come back.

Ex: If you are an ice chest producer, here may be some great ways to bait with content:

1. The best ways to keep bears out of your ice chest
2. How to correctly pack ice during a long road trip
3. Why dry ice may be the best option

If you not only provide the product, but the information that proves valuable when using that product, you will be not only linked to, but revered as an authority within the industry.

Networking

The ol’ back-scratching technique. Hey, it works! Ask your friends and business partners throughout the industry to exchange links, testimonials, reviews or ideas on how they were successful with their e-commerce SEO efforts.

If you are a small company that doesn’t operate throughout the entire United States, try reaching out to other businesses in your industry that operate in those areas. If they hand you a nugget of knowledge or link gold, send them over a bottle of wine from a local vineyard. I’m sure they won’t mind.