As a growth-driven entrepreneur, you need the right growth strategies for your e-commerce website. Within these strategies, you will find powerful avenues to build strong brand authority, drive steady referral traffic, foster new relationships, as well as gain irresistible brand exposure and recognition.
So, where do you launch all this growth? Strong e-commerce backlinks
are a good starting point. Principally, a strong or high-quality backlink should
be natural, highly relevant, and highly reputable.
Emphasis is placed on strong backlinks because among other
things, they add value to your e-commerce SEO efforts and strategies. That
tells you quality backlinks are an integral part of your SEO backbone in
addition to creating high-quality content.
In other words, if you are trying to drive your e-commerce
rankings higher on search engines, you need to also strive to acquire some strong
backlinks for the site. Being a significant
ranking factor, strong backlinks carry an equally strong potential to
seduce popular search engines like Google into liking you.
Fortunately for you, you have come to the right place as
this article discusses in depth all you need to know about strong e-commerce backlinks.
Read ahead to learn how to analyze backlinks for your
website, whether to buy backlinks or rely on organic backlinks, and the backlinking
tools to use to identify potential backlinking opportunities.
What are the backlinking tools to use to acquire strong backlinks?
For a wholesome or holistic backlink strategy, you should look
beyond just manual link-building. In other words, you should seek to complement
your manual link-building efforts with the right backlinking tools.
Armed with such tools, you can stay on top of your backlink
inventory through regular checks and monitoring.
In discussing link-building tools, we can look at them in
terms of those that are good for outreach and those that are good for detecting
and removing spammy and toxic links.
What tools can help you find potential backlinks faster?
To sustain your link-building strategy, you should remain
intentional about frequently updating your backlink profile. However, building
organic links takes time, effort, and consistency.
So, you need a reliable tool to boost your backlink analysis
and help you identify backlinks that could potentially benefit or harm your
site.
Some of the most popular tools to level up your backlink
analysis include Ahrefs, Majestic, BuzzStream, BuzzSumo, and Diib.
Ahrefs
Boasting one of the largest backlink databases, Ahrefs offers incredible
link-building opportunities to boost your search engine rankings. In addition
to a host of profitable SEO features, the tool comes with advanced
link-building features that are also easy to use.
In addition to checking links pointing to your site, Ahrefs
also helps you find potential high-quality backlinks linking to your competitors
as well. To check out your competitors, you can leverage the “Link Intersect”
feature.
The feature lets you view the domains linking to your top
competitors but not you. While your competitor’s backlinks don’t necessarily
have to be yours too, if almost all your competitors share the same backlinks,
you should be concerned. You should then reach out to these domains and try to
solicit a backlink from them too.
With an Ahrefs dashboard, you can also keep track of new
backlinks as well as lost backlinks. Alerts of new backlinks afford you an
opportunity to reach out to the webmaster and forge a profitable relationship. In
the case of a lost backlink, the dashboard tells you the reason.
What’s more, the dashboard also displays any suspicious
backlinks allowing you to instantly disavow them before attracting a penalty.
Majestic SEO
Another powerful and intuitive link checker tool is Majestic SEO. While not as comprehensive as
Ahrefs, it is a lot cheaper yet still boasts an enormous database of backlinks.
Some of the popular features you can access with Majestic are the analysis of
anchor texts, backlink quantity, referring domains, and indexed URLs.
Moreover, you can also evaluate the quality of the domains
linking to your site through the “Topical Trust Flow” metric. Through this
metric, you can tell how many highly-trusted websites are linking to your
website or content.
You can as well extend your link investigation on Majestic
to include:
·
Finding the best websites to solicit backlinks
·
Tracking your favorite websites
·
Detecting nearby links and competitor links
·
Comparing different decisive metrics for URLs
and websites
BuzzStream
From the sound of the name, BuzzStream essentially serves as
a powerful outreach tool to boost
your link-building efforts without breaking a sweat. The tool helps you
identify high-quality or well-maintained active websites and reach out to their
webmasters for high-quality links.
BuzzStream automatically researches prospect lists as well as
obtains their contact information and other useful metrics to simplify your
link-building efforts. Your contacts can range from bloggers and high-authority
websites to popular social profiles all of which get added to your database as
you surf the web.
Within your prospect database, you can sort and filter your prospect
lists based on history, authority, or influence to effectively personalize your
outreach.
BuzzSumo
While primarily a content
marketing tool, BuzzSumo can as well go a long way in augmenting your
link-building efforts. However, since building links organically depends on great
content, you might end up hitting two birds with one stone with this tool
(high-quality content and link-building potential).
The tool leverages different link-building opportunities as
follows:
·
Discovery:
Lets you find and borrow insights from high-quality content to attract more
links, likes, and shares for your own content.
·
Influencers:
Lets you discover and connect with influential personalities to fuel your
brand campaign.
·
Monitoring:
Lets you keep track of popular trends and comments that you can instantly
respond to and attract link-building attention.
·
Research:
Lets you research what other marketers think is popular from a large pool of
articles and social posts.
Diib
The Diib backlink monitoring
software combines the best features of the aforementioned backlink checker
tools to provide a comprehensive user dashboard. From the intuitive dashboard,
you can begin the journey of building strong backlinks, track the backlinks of
your top 6 competitors, as well as get alerts of any suspicious backlink
activity.
That said, how is Diib a comprehensive backlink tool? With
Diib, you can achieve a holistic backlink strategy that incorporates:
·
Monitoring your technical SEO
·
A 404 checker for detecting broken pages
·
Backlink monitoring and repair
·
Backlink tracking tools
·
User experience optimization
In other words, with a Diib dashboard, you get more than
just backlink analysis. It is therefore an invaluable tool for checking your
overall website health. Way to stay ahead of search engine rankings!
When it comes to your link building, Diib can help you:
·
Flag, single out, and eliminate bad backlinks
from your profile
·
Correct old backlinks still pointing to deleted
web pages
·
Track your domain authority
·
Analyze the number of dofollow and nofollow
links tied to your site
·
Boost your domain authority through monthly
updates
In a nutshell, therefore, acquiring Diib software gives you
access to many invaluable resources under one roof. From SEO, content
marketing, link building, Google Analytics, WordPress, and social media, to
website UX, your website is sure to stay healthy always!
What tools are best for detecting toxic scores and spam scores?
In your backlink analysis, you can use a backlink checker
tool to measure toxic scores and spam scores within your backlink profile. From
both these scores, you can easily get a hint as to the overall health of your backlink
inventory and any red flags you should urgently fix.
The most popular backlink checker tools for this important
job are Moz Link Explorer and WebCEO Toxic Link Checker.
Moz Link Explorer
Moz provides two ways to check your spam score. You can either
check your score through their Link
Explorer tool or your Moz
Pro Campaign in the “Links” section.
A spam score does not necessarily mean your website is
spammy. Rather, it simply indicates potential spam signals drawn from
previously penalized or banned pages by Google. The signals are a function of
many things ranging from low-authority indicators to content indicators.
Therefore, a Moz spam score is only meant to help you
evaluate the quality of links pointing to your site. As you analyze them, the
signals can then guide you in launching further investigations into the links
and where necessary, get rid of them.
The Moz tool also lets you stack your spam scores against
those of your competitors. This will help you broaden your scope of backlink
investigation while learning what to look for in potentially harmful links.
So, before disavowing or disregarding a site because of a
high spam score, analyze its content and relevance in relation to your site and
make your verdict accordingly.
Generally, the Moz spam score adopts a percentage score
where:
·
High spam score ranges from 61% to 100%
·
Medium spam score ranges from 31% to 60%
·
Low spam score ranges from 1% to 30%
WebCEO Toxic Link Checker
This tool not only
helps you detect toxic links fast but also instantly get rid of them to protect
your search rankings. It is integrated with Majestic and Moz metrics to cover
the entire scope of your backlink profile.
Within the tool, you can generate an outline of all the
incoming links to your site. If the list is too enormous, you can apply sorting
filters to segment the backlinks and screen them separately. From there, you
can begin auditing the backlinks to determine whether their URLs are adding any
value to your site or not.
Your backlink audit will produce columns of good links and
toxic links along with the percentage of the different toxicity scores. Based
on the toxic scores, you can isolate the potentially spammy domains before
deciding the best course of action.
The toxic link checker audit reports highlight toxic links
in red making it easy to begin link removal either through initiating contact
with the affected webmasters or disavowing
the toxic links. WebCEO is integrated with the Google Disavow tool making the
whole process a breeze. Simply identify the toxic links, add them to your
disavow list, and then download the list before uploading it on Google.
Once you have cleansed your backlink profile, you can
activate the automatic toxic link alerts to notify you of new links pointing to
your site.
How should you analyze your e-commerce backlinks?
Having understood the right backlinking tools to use for
your e-commerce website, how can you correctly analyze strong e-commerce
backlinks for a successful link-building strategy?
Before delving into that, note that the basis of your
backlink analysis is a comprehensive backlink profile. Put simply, a backlink
profile details the collection of all the links pointing to your website or
driving referral traffic to your content.
Generally, your backlink profile will among other things
outline the:
·
Number of backlinks to your website
·
Types of links
·
Domain quality
·
Anchor text
·
Relevance
So, the stronger your backlink profile, the easier and
faster you can get to your SEO goals, that is, ranking higher on SERPs, driving
more referral traffic, boosting brand reputation, increasing content
visibility, and so on.
Now, shifting gears back to backlink analysis. How do you
tell you have a strong backlink profile? Below are the key indicators:
·
Multiple organic, high-authority links
·
Little to no low-quality or low-authority links
·
Diverse link types
·
Relevant backlinks without any spam anchor text
·
Backlinks from domains relevant to your niche or
topic
With that in mind, in your backlink analysis, you can tell a
backlink is high-quality if it is natural (not manipulated), reputable, and
relevant (both page relevance and domain relevance).
How should you build a strong backlink profile?
While having a strong backlink profile is to be yearned for,
you don’t have to act desperately to achieve one. That means you should never
think of engaging in unsavory tactics to earn backlinks.
So then, what are your options?
1.
Buy backlinks
If you have the means, you can buy strong backlinks.
However, you should only do that within Google’s
Webmaster Guidelines to avoid a site penalty. When effected, a site penalty
can significantly affect your search rankings and instantly drop your website
traffic!
While we are not discouraging buying links (if you know
where to find the legitimate or strong ones), you should know that paid links
generally attract a higher level of scrutiny by search engines. Moreover,
earning many backlinks so fast can potentially raise a red flag and again,
attract a penalty.
Thus, before you buy backlinks, you should have a solid
grounding. In other words, ensure you cultivate a strong backlink profile
comprising high-quality organic backlinks first. That means paid links should
never be the primary pillar for your backlink profile, rather, supplementary.
So, how do you go about finding the right paid links? Start
by:
·
Scrutinizing
websites keenly before buying links from them. Thoroughly vet your chosen
domains for anything that seems suspicious. What does the domain history say?
Is there any evidence of excessive spammy outbound links?
·
Developing
a goal-oriented link-building strategy. Avoid going on a shopping spree for
backlinks. Instead, go at it slowly and objectively while remaining
intentional. You can start with only a few paid links, say three or so, and
then build on that gradually with each passing month. As a rule of thumb,
ensure you keep your total paid links below 25% of your backlink profile.
·
Adding
diversity to your anchor text distribution. Ensure you vary your anchor text
across the different paid domains linking back to your site.
Additionally, to be on the safe side, avoid sitewide
links, link selling services, and suspicious websites (ad-heavy, carry a
penalty record, or turned into a link farm).
Having said that, it is imperative to keep tabs on your
backlink profile to flag any potentially harmful issues to your site rankings. For
instance, if your paid links start attracting a huge chunk of low-quality
links, you may be staring at a penalty risk.
2.
Organic backlinks
Alternatively, you can also leverage organic or natural backlinks
and still outrank the competition on search results. Not only are natural
backlinks free of charge (helping you to lower your link-building investment), but
they also naturally add value to your site or content, something search engines
love to see.
The value of organic links comes from the fact that you
receive the backlink based on the value of your website or content and not
necessarily based on some sort of partnership. If a high-authority site can
vouch for the quality of your website or content, search engines automatically
perceive your brand as valuable to internet users and rank it high above the
rest.
That said, the easiest and most important way to earn quality
organic backlinks is by creating valuable content or
resources (e.g. infographics) for both search engines and your e-commerce
website visitors.
Other ways include guest blogging, influencer outreach, leveraging
relevant online directories, and reporting broken links, among others.
Remember, whether you are leveraging paid links or acquiring
them organically, you have to constantly monitor the health of your backlink
profile. You can rely on a reputable backlink
checker tool to measure the overall impact of your links on your brand as
well as to flag and eliminate any low-quality links that would ultimately
affect your site negatively.
Over to you!
What can you do with this information? Well, for starters,
you can start building a rich backlink profile. Secondly, you can proceed to
launch a successful backlink analysis.
Armed with the right link-building tools, attaining both
these goals is easy. Besides, from the article, you already know what
constitutes a good link and a toxic link.
So, what are you waiting for? Start scaling your SEO efforts
backed by not only the right tools but also the right information.
Remember, a good SEO strategy bundled with a poor
link-building strategy is synonymous with an e-commerce digital marketing
vehicle that’s comfortable to ride in yet with the nagging itch of poor fuel
economy!
Even so, you can keep your vehicle in tip-top condition by
finding strong backlinks and getting your e-commerce website to its rightful
ranking destination.
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