Home – New › Forums › Marketing mastery › Link Building Strategies For Our Ecommerce Site
- This topic has 12 replies, 13 voices, and was last updated 2 years, 1 month ago by Tom Valcanis.
-
AuthorPosts
-
February 12, 2020 at 11:25 pm #1000031Up::0
I work for an Ecommerce company, in a small marketing team, we sell the same products as other websites at different prices, and different shipping rates.
We’re getting a lot of SEO competition from Amazon, so looking to improve our rankings with link building to improve our rankings
Our on page SEO is good – we have many developers on the team who can make changes to the website. Our Site Speed is also quite good. We’re also improving our conversion rate using tools such as Visual Website Optimiser
We’re also looking to improve or possibly outsource our SEO, however we’re not sure if the ROI will be there – as we’re already doing the following link building steps below according to our research
* FINDING UNLINKED BRAND MENTIONS
We’re using SEMRush to find this information. We’ve been actively sending outreach emails to websites that have unlinked mentions of our brand.. So far, only 1 link is approved after many months of sending emails. Some are also asking for payment for the link.
So far:
39 Requests Sent to convert mentions to backlinks
1 Approved Active* FORUM/BLOG POSTING ON WEBSITES IN OUR INDUSTRY
We’ve been posting to forum/blogging websites related to our business, links are mostly no follow. This method is straightforward, with a high success rate
So far:
174 Blog/forum posts created
131 Approved Active* REDDIT POSTS AND REDDIT REPLIES
We’re finding existing posts that mention categories that we sell in, and reply. We are still building up our karma on Reddit so we can initially insert our link. We’re using the same account/email address to create these, so we feel that there’s some risk here if our account gets banned
So far:
5 Reddit Posts and Replies* QUESTION & ANSWER WEBSITES – EG. QUORA
We use Q&A sites like Quora to diversify our backlink profile and drive traffic. Links are mostly nofollow, we stick to questions that are in our industry. We’re using the same Quora account, and feel our account could be shut down
So far:
33 Q/A Posts (mostly Quora)* BUSINESS DIRECTORY LISTINGS
We tried to stick to local listings (same country as our store) this looked like a no brainer, we’ve completed 69 listings so far, with about 80% approval rate. No payments have been required
So far:
69 Listings
57 Active (approx)* GUEST POSTING
We don’t haven’t done any guest posting yet, we don’t have good writing resources. We’re open to ideas here
So far:
0 listingsWe feel we’re too dependent on these strategies, however from reading various forums, we still feel that active link building is the most proactive way to build rankings. What other strategies do you recommend for our link building that will effectively ramp up our rankings? Thanks in advance for your help!
February 13, 2020 at 2:14 am #1222390Up::0Hi And Welcome to Flying Solo [USER=117108]@serrahmiles[/USER] . It is great to have you!
Thank you for joining our community and posting.
Cheers
February 13, 2020 at 6:02 am #1222391Up::0It’s not my particular area of expertise but it sounds like you’ve part answered your own question. If you’re not getting a ROI on what you believe works, what makes you think anyone else has a secret black box that will?
Personal opinion here, but link building sounds pretty 2005 as a strategy and what you’re saying only confirms it.
Head to head with Amazon sounds like an impossible battle to win this way.
What’s your point of difference? I think price and service and a huge product range is their’s (blind convenience by consumers is in the mix too imo).
You did mention your site speed is “quite good”. That could be taken as not good enough in my book.
I do know something about that (performance) and there’s a direct correlation between site load speeds, bounce rates and conversions, especially on mobile. I have something in my inbox almost daily from Google telling me so.
I also read an article this week (sorry don’t have a link) in a developer newsletter arguing the case (assuming content, product, structural SEO are equal) that the quickest way to get the edge on your competition (especially if the user demographic is searching on a mobile) is to load 20% faster than your competition.
I just ran a test for fun on Amazon AU using “Google lighthouse” with a throttled 4g connection, sorry for using tech speak, but their “first meaningful paint” (which Google understands if no one else does ) is 2.6 seconds.
Does your site beat that by 20%? Might be your developers or your platform need a bigger budget, not an SEO guru.
Just my 2 cents, good luck with it regardless.
February 20, 2020 at 10:47 pm #1222392Up::0Hi [USER=117108]@serrahmiles[/USER]
Linkbuilding is a tricky one as you do not always see a directly measurable ROI for it.
What you should see in the longer term however is an increase in rankings for those keywords you are targeting with your links (anchor text) as well as an increase in Domain Authority.
These two factors should, in essence, should lead to higher visibility in the search results which should then lead to an increase in ROI. Linkbuilding should be seen as a longer-term play and not as a quick win.
Its also good to have a plan of what keywords you want to increase rankings for and going after the low hanging fruit first eg filtering in SEMRush to see what keywords you are ranking 11-15 for, as with a little push (improved on-page SEO and some backlinks) then these may jump onto page one.
In terms of competing against Amazon – it is difficult in fact I wrote a piece about it a while back and spoke at a retail conference about How Australian retailers can prevent Amazongeddon. Happy to share the slides with you – if I can dig them out!!
Cheers
March 10, 2020 at 9:32 am #1222393Up::0Sorry – late to the piece but I’ve been saying for years that site load speed is not really that important. Brian Dean, a guy I sometimes disagree with recently did a fairly in depth experiment on it expecting to prove that it was important – but nope – not at all at this stage.
If you read Google’s own statements they have always said their aim is to avoid the slowest sites, being a second faster than your competition means nothing.
You can see it for yourself here [MEDIA=youtube]zpV0_jdo0og[/MEDIA]
You’ll see us both briefly in the comments there agreeing it’s really about speed being acceptable or ‘not slow’ – don’t get sucked in to wasting time on the little things. Also be aware that most of those links you got from Reddit, forums etc are nofollow links, they make no difference at all to your ranking – its actually the whole point of the nofollow tag.
March 20, 2020 at 1:08 pm #1222394Up::0All these tactics work only in longterm, you have to utilise them constantly for at least a year. The shortcut is to compile a least of authoritative websites and buy paid links (that’s tricky and you may be penalised by google if execute badly) And if you are lucky – you gonna have some boost in your organic traffic results. It has to be done alongside with drafting unique marvellous content upon a thorough KW research
September 1, 2020 at 8:31 am #1222395Up::0Producing amazing content in my opinion is the best SEO tactic. You need to become the “expert” in your field and if done properly it should attract links naturally from similar industry sites which is really what you need to rank well.
September 6, 2020 at 12:30 pm #1222396September 7, 2020 at 6:06 am #1222397Up::1When youre selling the same thing as others…its a tough task in business. You might want to listen to your current and competitors customers complaints and bring it to the attention of the CEO… The company might need a new strategy or direction.
SEO is a great for the long term but its a tough task to master as the the knowledge youre providing needs to be useful and better than all your competitors.
November 20, 2021 at 4:35 pm #1232355Up::0I wouldn’t knock redditt too much. They do have SUB-reddits that can help businesses and bloggers. Would you consider partnering with a blogger to ‘write’ about your biz, maybe get a review about products, or something more specific? maybe offer discounts for one hour a specific day? (it’s a recommendation for brick and mortar stores to use for ‘down’ times of sales). Lastly, did you ever check out a backlink study of Amazon? may find interesting new sites, and definitely do keep a list of ‘keywords’ from Amazon too. Just a few ideas.
December 6, 2021 at 9:32 am #1232536Up::0Hi, These are the Off page seo techniques to build quality backlinks
1) Forum postings
2) Blog commenting
3) Local listing
4) Guest content
5) Influencer outreach
6) Broken link building
7) Social Networking
8) QnA
9) Newsletters
10) Brand mentions
I generally follow kuware.com for Marketing related information. Hope this helps.Alex MerchantJanuary 31, 2022 at 12:14 pm #1234114February 10, 2022 at 9:54 pm #1234338Up::0Having a solid content strategy can help you beat the majors. Consistent, informative, and authoritative content. It took Savvy, one of my clients, almost five-ten years to get where they are through producing solid content on their site and on others. To quote a great 90s haircare commercial: “It doesn’t happen overnight, but it will happen.”
I sell words because my words sell. Copywriter at I Sell Words - 0417120749 -
AuthorPosts
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.