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Originally Posted On: https://darrelwilson.com/complete-ecommerce-seo-guide-how-to-build-more-backlinks-to-your-product-pages/

 

If your product pages are ranking low in the search results, perhaps they need more backlinks. Product pages typically target commercial keywords. While commercial keywords can yield sales, they are often competitive. There may be dozens of other e-commerce stores trying to rank for the same commercial keywords as your e-commerce store.

You can outrank the competition, however, by building more backlinks to your product pages. Backlinks directly affect search engine optimization (SEO). By increasing the quantity and quality of your product pages’ backlinks, you should experience higher rankings while knocking out your competitors in the process.

Offer Free Products in Exchange for a Review

You can build more backlinks to your product pages by offering free products in exchange for a review. Bloggers, social media influencers, and other webmasters may gladly review free products. Just search for websites and blogs that publish reviews of third-party products. You can then contact these websites and blogs to see if they are interested in reviewing one of your e-commerce store’s products.

Here’s a good example:

Links in incentivized reviews such as these should be given the nofollow tag or the sponsored tag. Without either of these tags, search engines may flag them for manipulation. Search engines may consider the links to be a form of manipulation, in which case they may penalize your online store and the websites that published the links.

According to Google Search Central, paid and incentivized links that pass PageRank are considered link schemes. The nofollow and sponsored tags prevent PageRank from passing from the referring website to the linked website. Therefore, you can offer free products in exchange for a review as long as the included link uses one of these tags.

Upload Tutorial Videos (On Your Products)

You can use tutorial videos to build more backlinks to your product pages. Tutorial videos are exactly what they sound like: explainer-style videos that show how to use a given product. If a product page has few or no backlinks, try uploading a tutorial video to it. The tutorial video should reveal how to use the featured product.

 

Tutorial videos attract backlinks. Other website operators may want to share them with their own visitors. Unlike text descriptions, tutorial videos don’t just explain how to use a product; they show the product in action. Uploading them to your product pages will typically result in more backlinks to those pages.

Youtube has become the second largest search engine on the planet. When you post tutorials on youtube, theres a good chance it may show up on the google search results

 

Here is an example of how youtube videos are appearing on the front page of google. With this strategy, you can promote your products and with good content can rank to the front page with no SEO work.

In addition to attracting backlinks, tutorial videos compel visitors to spend more time on your e-commerce store. Most tutorial videos are about two to five minutes long. If a visitor watches a tutorial video until the end, he or she will spend up to five additional minutes on your e-commerce store.

Start Guest Blogging

 

Guest blogging can provide your product pages with more backlinks. This content marketing strategy requires the creation of blog posts. You’ll need to create unique blog posts for relevant blogs. Thousands of blogs accept these guest posts. By partnering with the right blogs, you can build more backlinks to your product pages.

There are several benefits to guest posting

• Boost your DA for your website
• Expose yourself to new audiences
• Make good relations with websites
• Boost your website SEO rankings

Guest blogging isn’t the same as freelance blogging. With freelance blogging, you’ll make money by selling blog posts to another blog. With guest blogging, you won’t receive any monetary compensation. Compensation from guest blogging comes in the form of exposure and a link.

Blogs will typically allow you to display a custom author bio at the bottom of your guest blog posts. In this author bio, you can explain who you are while also linking back to one of your product pages.

Before creating a guest blog post, read the guidelines. Blogs that have a guest blogging program will often publish guidelines. Some of them may only accept guest blog posts on pre approved topics, whereas others may require a minimum number of words. If you don’t follow the guidelines, they may reject your submissions. You’ll only score backlinks on approved submissions that blogs publish.

Backlinks can drive higher organic rankings for all pages, and product pages are no exception. They signal authority. The more backlinks a product page has, the more search engines will trust it. Some of the best ways to build backlinks to product pages include the promo code method, offering free products in exchange for a review, uploading tutorial videos, adding social network sharing buttons, and guest blogging.

Submit Your Products To Google Merchant Center For Free 

 

Submitting your website to the google merchant center is a great free way on how to list your products on google without paying any money.

This is how it works, google will try and expose your products “sometimes” based on what the user is searching for. Sometimes google does not  have enough paid advertisers to promote products on their search platform and when this does happen, your products will appear in order to help keep the google search more relevant.

 

Here is an example of how users are getting their products listed for free by using the google merchant center. Of course, there is an option to have paid advertising but this is optional.

 

Here is an example of how we started a new ecommerce website and are now getting free impressions and backlinks to our products.

If you are trying to get more backlinks to promote your products you should consider the google merchant center to help build more backlinks to your products.

Submit for a Paid Promotion or Review

 

When starting out there are various websites with larvae traffic that  can offer paid promotion and reviews on your specific products. These websites have high domain authority (usually) and can appear higher in the search results making it easier for people to find your products.

For paid promotion I would always go with a blog post vs a quick advertisement. Blog posts will stay on the Internet as long as the website stays online and will continually get traffic over the long term. However,  keep in mind blog posts reviews are usually a little bit more expensive for paid product promotion.

Alternatively you can buy a banner space. Banner space works great for branding, just don’t expect massive sales from it because the ROI from banner space is generally lower than one percent.

Consider A Marketplace

 

Adding your product to marketplaces can always help increase your exposure. This is not necessarily building backlinks to your products on your website but it is helping you build your brand which is very helpful. By adding your products to marketplaces you can increase the exposure visibility and possibly traffic to your website.

However, there are some pros and cons to adding your products to market places. Here are a few

Cons

• You can be banned at any time for any reason
• Market places take a good percentage of the product sales ranging from 5% to 30%
• It’s very difficult to start the product uploading process
• It’s time consuming
• You are not allowed to self promote your website whatsoever.
• You have no real control over your products

Pros

• Market places have high traffic for quick and easy exposure.
• People trust marketplace is more than individual e-commerce websites
• All the SEO work and technical stuff is done by the marketplace

With that said it’s important to add a variety of different ways to promote your products. I personally am not the biggest fan of marketplaces but it’s a great place to start to build your brand. The traffic marketplaces have compared to single websites is incomparable. A majority of the marketplace websites have huge traffic compared to standalone e-commerce websites which can really help boost sales.

One of the most challenging parts of marketplaces is the uploading process and getting the products live on the website, you’ll come to find it’s very time-consuming and tedious with very specific requirements.

Here’s a list of 20 websites that you can upload your products to.

20 of the best websites to sell your products online

Add Social Network Sharing Buttons To Product Pages

The first method to build more backlinks to your product pages is to add social network sharing buttons to them. Social networks allow users to share links. If a user finds a product page interesting, he or she may share a link to it. Users can always share links by visiting the social network directly and logging in to their profiles. Alternatively, they can click a social network sharing button.

 

Social network sharing buttons are interactive website buttons that visitors can click to instantly share a page with their network of followers. They allow visitors to share pages without leaving your e-commerce store. Visitors can click a social network sharing button on one of your product pages to share that page on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or other social networks.

Each time a visitor clicks a social network sharing button, you’ll score a backlink. Like incentivized backlinks, they’ll typically have the nofollow tag, so they won’t pass PageRank. Nonetheless, backlinks from social media networks can still increase traffic to your product pages.

Use the Promo Code Method

 

Promo codes are mutually beneficial to your e-commerce store and your customers. Customers can save money on their orders by entering an eligible promo code during checkout. While your e-commerce store may earn less revenue by offering them, you can use the promo code link-building method to improve your product pages’ SEO.

The promo code link-building method involves offering promo codes and then submitting them to coupon and deal-finder websites. When you submit a promo code, you can enter information about it. Many coupon and deal-finder websites even allow you to include a relevant link in your submissions. If a promo code only works for a specific product, you can include a link to that product page when submitting it.

Make sure to have an SEO plugin with product schema

On page seo optimization is very important. An seo plug-in will index your websites with the Google search console, create a robots.txt file, and enhances your website search visibility in the Google search results

There are a variety of SCO plug-ins to choose from like: yoast or rankmath. I do also have a tutorial on the specific plug-in to help you rank your products

You Can Watch It Here

Final Thoughts

It’s always good to diversify methods on how to build backlinks to your products. Building backlinks to your product to be one of the most challenging tedious things you may come across when owning an e-commerce website. You may want to consider hiring a virtual assistant or an SEO  company to help you maintain this work because it can be overwhelming for one person. With that said just follow these steps, be consistent and you’ll be on your way to make money in no time.