With a solid SEO strategy, your website can get shown to the right user at the right time as they travel down the conversion funnel. For eCommerce businesses, improving SEO is crucial since your entire business is actually online. The majority of your traffic comes through organic search, so it’s very important to make your website both search engine and user friendly.
At the end of the day, the motive of Google, Bing, and every other search engine is to provide relevant information and a good user experience to keep users coming back to find the answers that they’re looking for, so let’s take a look at how we can build your website’s backlinks to better help potential customers find your business online.
On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO
SEO work falls under two main categories:
On-Page SEO: Changes performed on a website to improve its visibility like meta tags, sitemap, page speed, schema mark-up, header tags, alt tags, content optimization, URL optimization and so on all falls under on-page SEO. There are tons of on-page factors that count toward your organic ranking.
Off-Page SEO– The things we do offsite (like creating backlinks) fall under off-page SEO. Backlinks are the links that are pointing to your website from other websites. Backlinks are the backbone of SEO and will help increase the ranking of your eCommerce website if done the right way.
Do-Follow and No-Follow
Backlinks are sorted into two different types:
Do-Follow Links: The links which allow the search engine to follow and pass on the link juice are called do-follow links. By default, if you hyperlink to a website, it will be do-follow link. Webmasters provide the do-follow links to other sites that they trust and allow both search engines and users to follow them.
Example:
<a href=”https://www.hellospark.ca”> Digital Marketing Agency</a>
No-Follow Links: If a webmaster adds a no-follow attribute to a link, the search engine bot will not follow the link and the link juice will not be passed on. This gives the webmaster control over which links the search engine bot can follow on their website.
Example:
<a href=”https://www.hellospark.ca” rel=”nofollow”>Digital Marketing Agency </a>
No-follow links will not help to improve the organic rankings directly, as explained by Matt Cutts in this fantastic video about how no-follow links are weighted, but no-follow links also have the power to improve referral traffic and visibility of your eCommerce website (if done effectively).
Quality Backlinks
Now let’s discuss a few ways to create quality backlinks:
Guest Blogging/Product Reviews: Do some outreach to influencers in your specific industry and try to acquire relevant and quality backlinks through popular content like “How To” guides and tutorials. If you build a good relationship with an influencer, you can offer them samples of your product and ask them to write a review for their website if they like it.
Infographic: Creating infographics is a popular way to naturally attract more visitors. If other bloggers or content curators embed your infographic on their site, it creates more backlinks leading back to your business.
Industry Specific Association or Manufacturer’s Link: Find popular communities and associations within your industry and request that they add backlinks to their website that point towards you.
Competitor Analysis: Research your top competitors and do backlink analysis on them with tools like Ahrefs, Majestic, and Open Site Explorer. Review their backlinks and explore any opportunity to get a relevant resource for your website.
Broken Links: Look for popular websites related to your industry which have shut down or changed their brand name. Check their backlinks and find the now-broken links from their other website. Check if they are relevant, then contact them and point out which links are broken while also asking them to link back to your website.
There are lot of ways in which you build backlinks for your website. Make sure you are creating the backlinks from a relevant and high authority website. You can check the website domain and page authority with the Moz SEO Toolbar.
Ever since Google introduced the Penguin Update in 2012, websites that buy links or try to otherwise manipulate Google’s results have been penalized for their shady activities. Google is always updating their algorithm to make it more efficient and to prevent spam. To avoid being penalized yourself, make sure that you’re not creating any irrelevant, low quality backlinks and never buy paid links.
Need help improving your SEO strategy? Get in touch with us.
