By Arjun Rajkumar in Shopify —

SEO Ecommerce link building Strategy

Introduction

In this blog we are going to analyze the backlinks of Shopify/e-commerce websites that are ranking well on Google, to understand how/why they are ranking. Studying these well performing websites, will give you a better idea on how to build links to your store.

While doing my research for this post, I came across a small brand that started ranking for relevant keywords on Google, often outcompeting bigger brands like Amazon for their keywords. Below if the traffic to their website for the last two years.

As you can see they have been consistently getting around 10K visitors from Google to their website every month.

On further research I noticed that their strategy is to only target long tail keywords. They have identified hundreds of long tail keywords and are then targeting those keywords with Shopify's collection pages, product page or via blog pages. Below are a few of the keyword - you can see that they rank well for almost all of them.

Even thought the volume for each of these keywords is very small, because they target hundreds of these keywords, the are able to get ~10K visitors from Google via this strategy.

I studied their backlinks and noticed that they are mainly following one way to build backlinks every month.

Getting bloggers to promote their brand in blogs:

They are working with around 15 bloggers that are in the fashion e-commerce space, and are getting these bloggers to consistently mention their brand and products in the bloggers blogs. They either work with the bloggers to write guest blogs, or more commonly ask the bloggers to mention their products or their brand in blogs related to fashion, footwear, style etc. By doing this they are building really relevant links to their Shopify store every month.

They have built around 8K backlinks from around 1400 websites. As you can see from the image below, they have built around 2756 backlinks in the last 12 months - i.e. around 200 backlinks a month.

Below are a few blogs they have been working with in the last 12 months. It is important to note that not all the blogs they work with are high traffic blogs. Infact most of the backlinks are from blogs that hardly have any traffic and have a descent authority score. So, if you are replicating this strategy, make sure to mix up your backlinks from low, medium and high traffic blogs - and also build links consistently every month. Break down the total number of links you need to build over a 6 month period, and consistently build links every month.

Blog Authority Score Traffic/mo Backlinks
Style Me Pretty 66 36K 2.4M
Junebug Weddings 61 100K 559K
Fashionisto 62 33K 2.1M
Under One Ceiling 26 171 4K
Health Me Care 18 0 54

Next steps: If your Shopify store is in a similar niche, you could partner with the same bloggers and work with them to build your backlinks. Else, make a list of blogs that are popular with your target market and contact them to add your product when appropriate. This is a paid activity, and the bigger the blog, more the charge for product placement.

Tula.com, a fashion ecommerce store gets around 207,000 visitors per month to their website from Google from around 20,000 keywords.

They have around 26,500 backlinks pointing to their website from just ~3000 websites. Their home page is the most linked to page, followed by the 'collections/all' page, followed by a few product pages.

Today let's looks at the different ways Tula is creatively building backlinks to their Shopify store from other websites.

1. Partnerships with other brands.

Tula, a skin-care e-commerce shop creatively partners with brands in other industries to create unique products. For example they have collaborated with Magnolia Bakery, and created a unique product.

Magnolia Bakery now has an incentive to promote the page, getting them more sales, plus creating backlink to Tula in the process. Because the product is unique, many other e-commerce related websites also have shared the product. This one product page alone has 21 other websites pointing to it.

Next Steps: Similar to this, what other brands can you partner with creatively? Make a list of all the possible partnerships, and see which of them makes the most sense to create.

2. Create coupons/discounts.

There are many coupon/discount related websites that will promote your product/store if you have discounts going on. Tula, does this a lot, creating store-wide discounts for their products.

Next steps: Create discounts for a few of your products, and promote them on coupon/discount related websites.

Tula partners with many millennial focussed blogs, and promotes their products to the blogs readers. Besides getting more visibility for their products, they are also getting many backlinks by doing this.

Next steps: Make a list of blogs that are popular with your target market and contact them to add your product when appropriate. This is a paid activity, and the bigger the blog, more the charge for product placement.

4. Partnering with blogging influencers.

Tula has partnered with many blogging influencers and created partnership codes for each influencer. Influencers now have an added incentive to send as many people as they can to the Tula website. The more people that buy via their link, the more commissions the influencers get. Example here.

Next steps: Make a list of personal bloggers that you can partner with. The bigger the bloggers reach, the more visits you will get to your store. However, with regards to backlinks it is not necessary to partner with only high traffic blogs. Instead you can partner with new or smaller bloggers also. As long as the blog has some traffic and a decent domain authority, the backlink will be useful.