Link Building Strategies For Our Ecommerce Site

[quirklessbeing]

I work for an Ecommerce company, we’re a small marketing team, we sell the same products as other websites at different prices, and different shipping rates.

We’re working on link building, so that more pages link to our site, and therefore increase 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 now spending most of our time link building. Below is our link building progress over the past few months.

* 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 listings

We 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!

[martinibuster]

Links that are under your own control, like dropping them in forums and Reddit, are generally frowned on and may not result in actual link equity and rankings movement.

If you're going to participate in a forum community, it's better to not link to yourself either directly on the post or in the signature area. Profile links are garbage.

The better approach is to add an un-linked signature with your brand name or have your brand name be your nick. Then become a topic expert. You'll build goodwill being a topic expert answering questions in a non-promotional manner. The technique of answering a question then dropping link back to your site is considered spam and can cause negative will to be generated.

For ecommerce, imo, you really have to think about what happens post-transaction and how to make sure the buyers have a good experience and so on. Newsletters, guides, how-tos, FAQs and ways for customers, (pre and post transaction) to meaningfully interact.

Those kinds of activities tend to generate the signals that can then boost rankings of individual product pages.

Those are general recommendations. Specific recommendations depends on the products.

[not2easy]

Hello quirklessbeing and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

Guest Posting has not been very useful for some years now. Though it is a common and popular suggestion from those offering SEO services, it was so overdone that Matt Cutts said years ago, "Stick a fork in it", discussed here: [webmasterworld.com...]

Today it pays to think like your customers as to where and how they find products like you are selling that they end up buying. Local publications or a very active presence on social media, or specials like refer-a-friend that earn a discount on their next purchase when they refer a friend. Incentivizing word of mouth gets your name/brand known in a positive way better than artificial backlinks. That 'word of mouth' is better than links if they tell others what a great experience they had buying from your company.