When it comes to eCommerce link building, there might be quite a few things that companies might need support with.
That’s why we’ve created a comprehensive beginner’s guide that’ll take you through the process of building links for your eCommerce website efficiently.
To give you a taste of the topics we’re going to cover, this guide includes what eCommerce link building is, why it’s important, and what the best way to find link opportunities for your eCommerce website is.
Let’s jump right into the first section and explain what eCommerce link building is.
Key Takeaways:
- eCommerce link building is the process of earning backlinks to your ecommerce site so it ranks higher in search engines and pulls in more organic traffic.
- The most effective link building approach for ecommerce websites is to build linkable assets like guides, original research, and tutorials, then pass authority internally to the pages that drive revenue.
- Only dofollow backlinks pass PageRank. Nofollow, UGC, sponsored, and most affiliate links don’t, but they can still drive referral traffic and brand exposure.
- Broken link building, unlinked brand mentions, and resource page outreach are three of the highest-ROI tactics in an ecommerce link building strategy.
- A clean backlink profile, varied anchor text, and high quality backlinks from relevant referring domains beat sheer link volume every time.
- A strong link profile increasingly influences AI tools, not just search engines. LLMs lean on authority signals when deciding which ecommerce brand to cite.
- Done-for-you services like Respona can take the entire link building effort off your plate, often a more focused alternative to a generalist SEO agency.
Link building cheat sheet
What is eCommerce Link Building?
eCommerce link building is all about building links back to your eCommerce site which can then boost your rankings on the search engines.
In other words, eCommerce, or electronic commerce, link building is when an online business is building high quality links back to their product page in order to increase their pages’ organic traffic and increase their website’s domain authority (DA).
Since algorithms take into account backlinks as a positive signal for a website or web page, backlinks are important for your eCommerce business. Link building is equally important for all platforms, so it doesn’t matter whether your store runs on BigCommerce or Shopify.
There are various link building tactics in terms of link building for eCommerce businesses.
One of the most prominent is to create content that people will want to link back to.
Graphics, infographics, tutorials, guides, well-thought-through pieces of content and statistics are some of the most linkable types of content.
Let’s have a look at Zola, a very successful registry and wedding planning eCommerce business.
The homepage, shown below, makes it crystal clear that the company is definitely creating useful, link-worthy, and shareable content for their audience:
As you can see, there’s pretty much everything one might need to know or use when it comes to wedding planning.
Let’s have a look at a specific example of unique and linkable content from Zola.
The page you see above is just one out of many detailed and useful checklists that the Zola team creates in relation to wedding planning and registries.
Let’s see how this Zola page is doing in terms of organic traffic and backlinks, according to Ahrefs:
The numbers of backlinks, referring domains and the organic keywords this Zola page ranks for are quite impressive for this industry, aren’t they?
Additionally, we can see that this eCommerce business also gets significant organic traffic, part of which may be due to the fact that Zola creates high-quality link worthy content.
We therefore understand that great content must definitely play a significant role when it comes to eCommerce search engine optimization (SEO) and the success of your business in terms of organic traffic and its search engine ranking on results pages (SERPs).
What’s great about creating and sharing informative content is that other people such as bloggers might find it useful to link back to your resources in order to give their audience examples for their statements, thus boosting your credibility and organic traffic.
Similarly, your great content could be used as a starting point for reaching out to influencers and so boost your social media marketing.
You’ve got a taste, but let’s get into more detail about why link building is important for your eCommerce business.
Why is eCommerce Link Building Important?
Are you wondering why eCommerce link building is important and how it can help eCommerce businesses get visibility for product-specific searches?
According to a study by Backlinko, pages with a higher number of backlinks are pages that tend to rank higher:
Which means that acquiring links is essential if you want your business to be included at the top of the SERPs.
Additionally, the 2021 census report shows that retail eCommerce sales are, in general, steadily increasing.
In fact, there has been a significant increase in retail eCommerce sales of 32.4 percent (±1.8%) from 2019 to 2020.
The increase proves that eCommerce stores and online retailers have great potential for growth in the coming years.
At the same time, though, competition is getting more intense as more and more players get into the game, and virtually every category will sooner or later be cluttered.
Having said that, backlinks can be a way to get better results faster and stand out in an already-cluttered space.
Let’s have a look at an example of a local search for the UK, using the search operator ‘slippers’, what our American readers will know as ‘house shoes’.
Here’s an overview for the target term ‘slippers’ from the Ahrefs Keyword Explorer:
As we can see, this is a term with cost-per-click (CPC) of $1.00, which means that there are advertisers and brands on the SERPS who are bidding for the term.
Given the value of the term, eCommerce businesses would naturally want to have visibility for it.
Let’s now have a look at the SERP overview for the target term we’re focusing on.
Author’s Note: Due to browser preferences and general browser behaviour, there are some differences between the two screenshots from Ahrefs and Google.
The results at the top are usually the ones that have the most links from other websites.
We need to mention that the number of backlinks from relevant referring domains is only one of Google’s ranking factors – there are other factors involved, such as brand awareness, overall website authority, etc. – but it’s a rather important one.
In other words, besides the brand, which definitely plays a key role in search – i.e. people are more inclined to click on a result by a popular brand like ASOS since it’s a brand they know already – eCommerce link building can help you get visibility for terms with commercial value for your business.
Here’s something that wasn’t really on anyone’s radar a couple of years ago: backlinks now affect whether AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google’s AI Overviews cite you.
When someone asks an AI tool “what’s the best protein powder for keto?” or “where should I buy running shoes?”, the AI has to decide which sources to trust.
Just like Google search, it leans on authority signals: domain trust, topical relevance, and the quality/quantity of the websites pointing in.
How does it pick which ecommerce sites to cite?
By looking for consensus. So, sites with strong backlink profiles from relevant, authoritative sites get pulled into answers consistently. The ones without? They’re invisible in AI answers, even if their products are great.
The good news is that you don’t have to do anything different. The same linkable assets and outreach work that earn you valuable backlinks for traditional SEO are exactly what gets your ecommerce brand cited by AI tools.
One link building effort, two distribution channels. And those AI citations themselves drive real referral traffic when readers click through to the source.
What is PageRank?
Whenever the topic of link building comes up, there’s a certain buzzword that soon follows.
That buzzword, is, of course, PageRank, AKA “link juice”.
PageRank is one of the core algorithms that make up the greater Google… algorithm.
It’s not publicly available (anymore), but what it is is essentially a score that each page is assigned depending on the quantity and quality of its inbound link profile.
More links = more PageRank = higher rankings in search results.
That’s the most basic explanation of the system – and things are not so black-and-white in reality.
Let’s get into some additional nuances of eCommerce link building. More specifically, which links are actually good for your SEO.
What Makes a Good eCommerce Backlink?
During link acquisition for your website, you want the absolute cream-of-the-crop: not forum and directory links or blog comments.
There are several important qualities a link must possess in order to be considered “good”.
Linking Domain’s Age and Authority
Older domains are seen as more trustworthy by Google. They have had the time to establish thought leadership and strong backlink profiles.
Domain Authority and Domain Rating are two metrics that function almost exactly the same: one is developed by Moz, the other one – by Ahrefs.
Both of them give scores to entire domains based on their backlink profiles – a lot like PageRank, just sitewide.
Number of Other Links on the Page
Ideally, you want links from pages with few external links.
This is because the PageRank a page is able to pass on is distributed through all of its outgoing links.
So, more total links = less PageRank distributed by each individual link.
Relevance
This one is rather straightforward – you don’t want links from a dog grooming website to one that sells sports equipment.
Anchor Text
Besides just being relevant, your links’ anchor texts also need to include some variation of your page’s target keyword in it.
Exact-match and partial-match anchor texts are the best for SEO purposes, as they help your pages rank in SERPs for these keywords.
Rel Tag
Rel tags are HTML bits of code each backlink has.
There are many different rel tags available, but the 4 most important for eCommerce link building are :
- rel=dofollow (or rel=follow)
- rel=nofollow
- rel=UGC
- rel=sponsored
Dofollow links pass on PageRank.
All the other tags don’t. If a link has neither of these, it’s automatically dofollow.
This is important, as a lot of other eCommerce link building guides focus on link building strategy types that get sponsored and UGC links (such as product reviews, influencer marketing, Google Ads, etc.).
In our guide, we will show you how to get dofollow links – the only ones that actually help with SEO.
You now know why link building can be very beneficial for your online store.
We think you’ll be thrilled to know more about which are the best ways to find links for your brand.
Let’s get into it.
What’s the Best Way to Find Links for Your eCommerce Website?
We’ve already established why getting links can help your eCommerce store increase its visibility and help you rank higher.
What we need to note is that both internal links, that you include in one page of your website to another page or resource of your website, as well as inbound links, that are links from other websites, can help your eCommerce SEO, as well as boost the effectiveness of your content marketing.
On the other hand, it’s also important to highlight that, when it comes to link building, especially if our product pages or category pages are the most important ones – and the ones we’d like to have backlinks to – it can be tricky to get links back to those pages.
For that reason, we have to find an alternative way of generating backlinks and improving our website’s overall authority and trustworthiness.
Many businesses might focus on a number of link building strategies like finding broken link opportunities (error 404 not found), or looking for unlinked mentions, etc.
Naturally, since they’re interested in promoting their product pages, they’re reaching out to website owners and asking for links directly back to their product pages.
We believe that this isn’t as effective, since most people wouldn’t be inclined to link back to a product page.
One of the most efficient ways is to create valuable content around your products and try to build links back to these pages.
From there, you can add internal linking back to your product pages and pass on link equity, through dofollow backlinks, to your product pages.
Author’s Note: If you want to know more about the differences between dofollow and nofollow links, read the guide on our blog.
As you can imagine, people are far more likely to link back to a content page rather than a product page — this is why such a link building technique can work well for us.
We’re jumping right into an example.
Example: Perfect Keto
Perfect Keto is an eCommerce website that sells high quality keto supplements and keto diet products.
What they do is use their blog content to link back to other landing pages they have.
More specifically, a blog post about the best nuts for weight loss includes, among others, a link to a recipe landing page…
…which takes us to this recipe landing page:
…where we can find a link to a product page:
We can see that the brand is using their blog content to give internal links to their landing pages, which include links back to their product pages, which are naturally the ones they want to promote most.
Put another way, Perfect Keto internally link back to their landing pages and eventually to product pages, so the product pages can rank as well.
Here’s the product page we got to by following the links shown in the screenshots above:
In one sentence, links snowball into each other.
How does that work exactly?
Since they’re internally linking to the product pages from their blog post, that is also passing link equity to the product pages.
As simple as that!
Wanna see some data?
Even though the Ahrefs report doesn’t report internal link groups, we understand that with over 640 backlinks from 177 referring domains, the number of backlinks for this page is very high, especially considering that this is a product page.
In other words, by getting backlinks to your blog post, which is easier to do than getting them straight to your product pages, you can pass on link equity to your product pages, like Perfect Keto does.
That’s just one of the ways you can use to build links back to your eCommerce brand.
Keep reading to find out how this process can work for your own business.
How to Get eCommerce Links?
If you want to run link building in-house, the basic process looks something like this:
First, you build something worth linking to. That’s your linkable asset. Could be an industry report, an original study, a free calculator, a really thorough guide, whatever fits your niche.
Then you find people who might care. You’re looking for bloggers, journalists, and website owners who’ve written about similar topics, or who’ve linked to competing resources. Tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, or Respona itself can help you build those prospect lists.
Next, you pitch them. This means finding the right contact, writing a personalized email that doesn’t sound like every other outreach email in their inbox, and following up a few times without being annoying.
And then you do it again. And again. Link building isn’t a one-and-done thing. It’s a slow compounding game that pays off over months, not days.
It works. But it’s also a lot. Between building the assets, finding prospects, writing pitches, following up, negotiating placements, and tracking everything, a serious ecommerce link building strategy can eat up a full-time role (or more).
Which is exactly why we built the other option.
Skip the Outreach: Place an Order With Respona Instead
If running outreach yourself sounds like more work than you have time for, that’s where Respona comes in.
Here’s roughly how it works for ecommerce brands:
You tell us what matters. Which pages on your ecommerce site you want to promote, the keywords and queries you’re trying to rank for, your anchor text preferences, the kind of websites you’d love to be featured on, and anything that’s off-limits.
From there, we go hunting. Our Campaigns feature pulls articles that are already ranking in search engines and already getting cited in AI-generated answers for the queries you care about.
These are the pages already shaping what buyers see when they search, so a backlink from one of them actually moves your visibility (instead of just padding your backlink profile).
You get a list of opportunities to review. Approve the ones you like, skip the ones you don’t, and we handle everything from there.
That includes prospecting, reaching out to the website owner, follow-ups, negotiations, and locking in the placement.
Prefer to skip the review step? You can also just place an order for placements within a specific DR and traffic range and let us run with it.
After your links are live, all you have to do is track your visibility increase.
It’s a good fit for ecommerce stores, SaaS brands, agencies, and basically anyone who wants quality backlinks, more referral traffic, and stronger visibility (both in traditional search and in AI answers) without having to run outreach themselves.
Pricing starts at $100 per placement, with bulk discounts available.
Link building cheat sheet
Now Over to You
And there you have it.
We’ve covered what ecommerce link building actually is, why it matters (for both search engines and AI tools now), and the most effective link building tactics for getting quality backlinks to your ecommerce site. From broken link building to unlinked brand mentions to resource page outreach.
Yes, link building takes time. Yes, it takes consistent effort. But it’s also one of the highest-leverage things you can do for your online store.
If you’d rather skip the manual work entirely, place an order with Respona and our team will handle the whole link building process for you. We find the prospects, run the outreach, and secure the placements. You focus on running your store while we earn the high quality backlinks that move the needle in search engines and AI answer engines.
Ready to get started? Place your order through the link above and we’ll get to work.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Is link building still relevant for SEO?
Very much so. Google’s link spam updates have only reinforced the importance of a high quality backlink profile from relevant, authoritative websites in your niche.
How is eCommerce link building different from regular link building?
The challenge eCommerce businesses face is the fact that you need a blog to build links – not just product pages, which is often a secondary priority for owners.
In general, eCommerce link building and regular link building follow the same process: creating link-worthy content and reaching out to relevant websites with your link pitch.
Are nofollow, UGC, and sponsored links obsolete for SEO?
These links do not pass “link juice”, but can still be a great way to spread awareness about your products – especially if a popular influencer reviews them or even organizes a giveaway.
Should you avoid reciprocal links altogether?
Yes – reciprocal backlinks are automatically devalued by Google, meaning that the effort you spent on building them is wasted.
What’s the best way to build valuable backlinks for eCommerce?
As we already mentioned, the best reliable way to obtain high-quality links for your eCommerce store is to invest time and resources into linkable assets, and then conduct link building outreach with the help of software like Respona.
Generally, it is advised to do link building in-house as opposed to hiring a link building service or SEO services, which you oftentimes have very little control over.
What is broken link building, and does it actually work for ecommerce?
Yep, and it’s one of our favorites. Broken link building is when you find broken links (those annoying 404 errors) on relevant ecommerce websites or blogs, and then reach out to the website owner suggesting your content as a replacement.
How do you turn unlinked brand mentions into backlinks?
This one is honestly low-hanging fruit. Unlinked brand mentions are spots on the web where someone has mentioned your ecommerce brand but didn’t link to you. Tools like Respona or Ahrefs can find these for you. Then you just send the website owner a quick, polite email asking if they’d mind adding a link.
What’s a linkable asset, and why does it matter so much for ecommerce?
A linkable asset is content built specifically to attract backlinks. Think original research, statistics, in-depth guides, calculators, industry reports, that kind of stuff.
Does local SEO matter for ecommerce stores?
It depends. If your ecommerce store has physical locations, pickup points, or warehouses that customers actually visit, then yes, local SEO is worth your attention and pairs nicely with your link building work.
What’s the deal with anchor text? Should I obsess over it?
Don’t obsess, but don’t ignore it either. The goal is variety: a mix of branded anchors, partial-match anchors, the occasional exact-match anchor, and some generic ones like “click here.”
Do affiliate links help with SEO?
Not directly. Most affiliate links are tagged as nofollow or sponsored, so they don’t pass any PageRank to your ecommerce site.
How long until ecommerce link building actually pays off?
Usually three to six months before you start seeing real movement in organic traffic and rankings. It depends on a few things: how strong your existing backlink profile is, how competitive your niche is, and how good your linkable assets are.
