This is another post which I know has been done before, haven’t they all?! But I still think its worth revisiting. A couple of other good posts on ecommerce link building which I think are worth a read are here on Blogstorm and this interview with Aaron Wall. If you’ve come across any other good posts on the subject feel free to let me know and I’ll link to them here as well.
OK so why is ecommerce link building different?
I think really there’s 2 challenges with most shop sites:
Lots and lots of pages- big sites presents a challenge for link builders because it is usually impossible (and unnecessary) to build links to every product page, although in an ideal world you would want to.
Unlink-able content- actually to a good link builder there’s no such thing but its harder to differentiate the content of an online shop. Often content isn’t even unique let alone link worthy.
Depending on what you’re selling you might also be in a tough market- which makes these problems worse still.
Planning your campaign
Link building for ecommerce is made a lot easier by good planning and management of your campaign. Before you even think about getting out there and building links you need to make sure you’ve got a decent amount of time set aside for planning. Note if you’re an agency- you will probably want to charge for this time.
There are a few areas I think a good ecommerce link building plan will cover-
- Product priority
- Content resource (can you call on product managers to produce content for example?)
- Keyword strategy
- Budget (if you’re looking at paid links, content development etc)
- Competition and targets (how many links you need)
You’ve probably got your own way of planning your link building campaigns, if you’re in the hundreds or thousands of pages range spreadsheets may suffice, for bigger sites I’d seriously consider something like microsoft project to manage the multiple work flows involved.
Link building tactics
I’m going to get right in there now and talk about tactics. I’m not going to cover them all but the message here is really, although at the outset of a link building campaign the task can look daunting, when you break it down to a tactical level, if your content and approach is good enough the tactics you use for link building ecommerce sites isn’t so different to any other site. At the very least work your way through the list of 100 link building tactics one a day and you should come out of it with a couple of hundred backlinks- I don’t think there’s any tactics on there which I haven’t used on ecommerce sites at some point.
Below I’m going to go through some of the tactics which I favour when working on shops.
Internal link building
I haven’t just added this one as filler, this is the first tactic I’d use on any link campaign for an online store. In your plan you should have identified the key products in each product category. From here you will need to structure your internal links so that your most powerful pages (which are usually the homepage and top level category pages) are linking to your most important product pages. ‘Featured products’ type functions are great for this and most ecommerce software has them.
Ecommerce sites are notoriously top heavy when it comes to link equity so getting the link juice to flow from the homepage to key product pages without it being wasted on weak pages is key. Good old HTML sitemap(s) are also worth considering if you have a deep category structure, allowing you to get every category 1 level from the homepage.
Content exchange
Content exchange is great for online shops because in almost any market its reallly easy to write relevant content which you can give to bloggers as guest posts or publish up on decent article directories. Guest posting on blogs works pretty well at the moment if you’re able to scale your operation up to a point where you can churn out enough decent content and build/ maintain relationships with bloggers you’re onto a winner because there really is no limit to the number of links you can build with this tactic.
If you’re building links at the product level the quality of links isn’t usually a massive concern, particularly if your domain is fairly well trusted. At this level you usually need a bit of volume and content exchange is a pretty good scalable way of building medium weight links. Also you should be able to get links to two or three pages into a content exchange so you might want to link to your homepage as well as 1 category level page and 1 product level page.
Reciprical linking
Because an online store typically has stacks of pages and few outbound links I don’t usually have a problem with offering out a few link exchanges. The best sites to exchange with are other shops in a related market/ audience reach if possible. As a general rule of thumb I’d probably look to keep reciprical links to under 15% of my total links on an average store site.
Directory submission
Getting the basics right is absolutely essential with shops (actually with any type of site, but especially with shops!). Look at the potential earning revenue of your shop then weigh it up against the money it will cost to get listed in the top web directories and its usually a pretty good investment. These links aren’t going to bring you rankings on their own but they will bring some trust with them, and thats pure gold for an online shop because decent editorial trust links are harder to come by.
A lot of directories will let you deep link to top level category pages as well as your homepage if you’ve got the cash and think its worth it.
Shopping directories are mostly rubbish but are still worth having if you need the link volume, look for vertical directories and link to your categories.
Paid links
You have to be very very careful buying links for an ecommerce site. I would definitely not use a network. Either broker links yourself or get a link builder to recruit link ads for you. Be aware that links to category level shop pages with keyword rich anchor text virtually never happen organically so if you’re buying think about pointing links to either the homepage, in content links to product level pages or get more creative and link to your link bait, blog or non-commercial content.
Link bait
Link bait and ecommerce don’t naturally seem to mix. The best type of link bait you can do for online shops is to have a number 1 ranking for a popular product. I’m not sure if this can be called link bait even but this is by far the best way of building organic links to a store. This happens in any market but its especially prominent in ecommerce, bloggers and forum users will often search on a product name, rip the url of the first result and paste it as a reference link. So this comes back to what I talked about in the planning stage, you need to target your most valuable products first with other types of link building, but also think about promoting the types of products which are mostly likely to get linked to earlier in your campaign.
Traditional link bait type stuff can also work for ecommerce, user guides and in-depth reviews can work well. If you sell electronics posting expert content on your product pages like ‘how to fix my ipod’ can be really effective.
Affiliate links
Getting your affiliate program setup in a way which will pass link juice can be massively valuable for ecommerce sites because affiliates will usually deep link to product and category level pages. If you don’t want to develop your own affiliate tracking scripts some off the shelf affiliate software like Post Affiliate Pro can be configured for direct linking meaning affiliate links leave no footprint at all.
Its worth pointing out that because most serious affiliates use their own tracking scripts now or implement nofollow on their affiliate links this doesn’t work as well as it once did. Also on the whole I’d say the benefits of running your program through an established network outweigh the SEO benefits of inhouse programs unless you’ve got the profile of Amazon or Ebay (Affiliate Window and Affiliate Future would be my recommendations for aff networks for e-tailers in the UK).
Reporting
Whether you’re in-house or agency you’ll need to report on your link building work but considering you’re likely to be building thousands of links to hundreds or thousands of pages this can turn into a task in its own right. Here are a few tips I’ve picked up for reporting on ecommerce link building:
- If you have a URL structure which looks like www.mysite.com/category_name1/product1.html you can easily report on link counts on a cateogry by category basis i.e. how many links point to category_name1 and all the products within it.
- Use a tool like Raven to keep track of multiple ork stream, tactics and content
- Don’t use Yahoo Site Explorer, the data’s too eratic for big ecommerce sites. I use webmaster tools instead.
- Although PageRank might be on its way out for online shops (or other big sites) looking at your PageRank distribution through your category levels don to product pages i still one of the best ways to manage the success of your internal link distribution.
Big post, big subject. In summary, break the site down into chunks, come up with a variety of solid tactics and don’t underestimate the size of the job.
Hope you’ve enjoyed this post, if you’ve got any tips for link building on ecommerce projects please share them below…
