Starting an online business nowadays may feel intuitive. After all, it’s the age of the internet, and people all around the world can access your site. Plus, it’s much cheaper to focus your business operations online. But, there’s always the issue of competition. There are millions of websites and eCommerce businesses online competing for people’s attention. To stay afloat, you need to boost your online presence.
Online marketing can be intimidating. There are a lot of factors you need to take into consideration ranging from SEO to your website’s authority, backlinks rate, and bounce rates, to name a few. But similar to most complex things, you need to start with the basics to understand where your business resides and how to improve it.
The Challenges of eCommerce SEO
One of the most significant factors affecting an eCommerce business’s success is their site’s ranking on Google’s SERPs (search engine results pages). One approach Google uses to rank websites on the results page is YMYL criteria, which stands for Your Money Your Life.
YMYL websites are those whose visitors may be influenced to make decisions that affect their financial, mental, or physical wellbeing. Your eCommerce site falls into this category because it’s a place where visitors and users spend money on services or products.
Because the stakes are so high, Google holds YMYL sites to high standards. Google penalizes inaccurate product descriptions and outdated information. With time, these kinds of issues will lower your website’s ranking.
The Importance of Backlinks
A backlink is created when another website links to a page on your website. In many situations, backlinks are a type of information citation. They may also be linking to a resource you’ve created or a product you sell.
Backlinks are incredibly important to the online success of your website. Google considers a healthy amount of backlinks to be a sign that your website is credible, and many people refer to it for information on a regular basis. Backlinks from reputable websites are especially valuable because Google views them as a stamp of approval from a trustworthy source.
Types of Backlinks to Aim For
In general, there are over a dozen types of backlinks, all varying in value and difficulty of accomplishing. But there’s no need to overwhelm yourself trying to land backlinks of all types. Instead, you should aim for a healthy number of backlinks that have a balance between ease of landing and value for search engines, in a few key categories such as:
- Blog Backlinks
While blog backlinks can be time-consuming initially, they are one of the easier forms of backlinks to land once you get started. To start, you need to create a blog on your business’s website and post high-quality content regularly. When it comes to posting a new blog post or article, always ask yourself, “Are people likely to find this information useful or interesting? Will they link to it from their websites?”
When you have a quality blog post, don’t hesitate to reach out to your peers and network to see whether they would like to link to it on their own sites. Over time, your blog’s content would achieve the status of EAT content, which stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness content. EAT is a criterion that Google uses to evaluate websites and determine where each site would land on its results page.
- Influencer Backlinks
Thanks to social media, influencer marketing has become increasingly lucrative. This type of backlinks doesn’t require a lot of work and time, but they do rely directly on your financial situation. You can either pay influencers on social media to promote your business or send them a sponsored package of your service to review for their audience and hope they will post about it for free.
Similar to other types of marketing, you can’t just choose influencers at random to market through. You, instead, need to look for influencers whose audience demographic is similar to your ideal customer base. Ideally, you can form an ongoing partnership.
- Contextual Backlinks
Contextual backlinks are those that make sense in their surroundings. They are generally embedded within content or text, usually found in blog posts, articles, landing pages, and case studies.
Non-contextual links are not nearly as valuable as contextual links. That’s because search engines rely on the anchor text the link is embedded within to categorize the contents of the link. The context of this link will affect how Google ranks your website, so you want to maximize its value. Additionally, visitors are more likely to click on a link where they have an idea where it’s going to lead them, rather than a link floating solo at the end of an article.
Staying Up to Date
Google’s methods of determining the quality of a site are constantly changing to serve searchers better. While you begin your journey of understanding backlink building, you will likely discover the many facets of SEO, which can seem overwhelming. Many eCommerce companies hire professional SEO experts to stay on top of the latest changes in the search algorithm. Once you’re more familiar with the basics of SEO, you can decide what approach is right for you.
