Best SEO Backlinking Sources for eCommerce Sites in 2020

eCommerce SEO Backlinks 2020

While SEO in 2020 is highly impacted by the quality of your content and the quality of your website, including your loading speeds, healthy, high-quality backlinks are still a signal of authority to search engines. They can help your website and specific web pages within your site to rank higher in search engine results.

However, many historical sources of backlinking sources no longer carry the same authority, don’t make it easy to submit your content to earn a link, or only provide “no follow” links which don’t have the same impact on your search engine rankings. So what’s a marketer to do?

We polled some SEO experts to get their feedback as part of our Community Collaboration series of articles. Here are a few sources of backlinks that were recommended to us by industry experts, as well as some general methods for finding unique, highly-relevant backlink sources:

Medium

“Medium allows us to share our content to a wider audience, while also providing an authoritative backlink to our site. This has allowed our content to rank much higher in search engines.” – Spencer Connell, Praxis Metrics

Scoop It

“We use Scoop.it as another posting source for backlinks to our site because it’s easy to post content with a short blurb. This allows us to attach even more keywords to the backlink, improving our search engine visibility.” – Spencer Connell, Praxis Metrics

Press websites & Major Publications

“Media has some of the highest domain authority and feeds high-quality links. If your product is media-worthy, getting this type of PR can significantly boost traffic and sales.” – Sasha Berson, Comrade Web

Blogger Outreach

“We help ecommerce companies craft and execute their link building strategies. A blogger outreach campaign is tried and true. Consumers respond to social proof and bloggers need content, making this strategy a win/win.“ – Michael Salvo, Whitecap SEO

Guest Authoring

“You can offer content to companies you do business with, and even major publications, like popular online magazines. In essence, instead of completely focusing on content for your own website and marketing channels, you can provide content to other publications, seeded with valuable backlinks back to your website.” – Seth Rand, Wizard Digital

Manufacturer Websites

“Links from manufacturer websites’ “Where to buy” sections….This is a solid way to build up a natural link profile from trusted sources.” – Sasha Berson, Comrade Web

Competitor Broken Backlink Campaign

“We mine our ecommerce clients’ competitor backlinks for 404 errors. Then we reach out to the site owners letting them know they have a broken link on their site, recommending they now point the link to similar content on our client’s site. The site owners are grateful to clean up a broken link, and now our clients have a solid new backlink without having to craft content. Another win/win.” – Michael Salvo, Whitecap SEO

Product Information Aggregators

“Websites of price aggregators, products comparison sites, marketplaces, and websites with posts like “20 best <category> products in 2020” are valuable sources for backlinks. Google and its users prefer top lists and comparison formats (think Yelp and industry-specific directories: they always rank above actual vendors) as they help consumers make a faster, educated buying decisions. Thus these sites rank well and drive a lot of traffic to ecommerce.” – Sasha Berson, Comrade Web

Podcast Guest Appearances

“We recommend focusing on natural sources of backlinks. Podcasters are often looking for guests with interesting experiences to share, which is a great way to get your brand in front of a unique audience. A side benefit is that you’ll often earn backlinks from show notes and other related resources.” – Seth Rand, Wizard Digital

Ultimate Guides

“Community efforts like this article can lead to more valuable content, which will often attract more backlinks than traditional articles. Consider sourcing content from a variety of trusted sources to build more powerful posts and articles.” – Seth Rand, Wizard Digital

Affiliates & Coupon Sites

“Amazon has heavily relied on affiliates to build its business. It’s a powerful strategy for both, SEO and sales”. Additionally, “People proactively search out discount codes, thus these websites are tremendously popular, have high domain authorities, and allow placement of a large number of #follow links.” – Sasha Berson, Comrade Web

Have a question about why one of these companies made a particular recommendation? We’d be happy to put you in touch with them!

This article is part of our #CommunityCollaboration series, where we’ve polled industry experts to bring you insights from across the eCommerce community. Check out other recent #CommunityCollaboration articles:

Are you a JetRails partner? Do you want to submit recommendations for community collaboration articles like these? Reach out to your JetRails partnership manager for more information!