Really stuck guys. how do you earn links for an ecommerce site?
-
Hi seomoz guys
So I read a lot on seomoz and other sites, and see a lot of info about earning links, but this all seems to be aimed at blogs and brochure sites.
Being blunt, we sell stuff. Our competitors sell the same stuff. We are limited on what we can do product description content wise as our suppliers expect us to use the content they supply. We are now putting together q and a pages based on a great article in the seomoz blog.
Does anyone have any great ideas for developing link bait or just getting links to an eCommerce site?
We know our service is good, and our product is good, but that's not enough to convince someone to link to us.
Help
Thanks
Paul
-
Hi LIttlesthobo
We did run a competition/giveaway for around 2 years. What we found though was that we got the same people entering the competition all the time. i.e. professional compers.
Are you saying that your competitions give you continued social interactions and are generating back links for you?
Thanks
Paul
-
So now we are looking to build a Q&A, but I don't need to tell you how much of an investment that will be. And with our experiences its difficult to walk down that path not knowing if it will make any difference, and what ROI we can expect.
I would do this for some of your very best products. See how it works. My ROI might not match yours and it is very possible that magazines do not have the same potential that exists for hobby, tool, craft, construction and other industries.
-
I run an ecommerce site and definitely agree about the giveaways.
I notice that you are in the UK - me too. On the site I run monthly competitions - easy question stuff and the prize value is worth upto £20 per month max. I run an 'answer this question' in the blog comments and a winner will be chosen at random. Also, if you think you can get away with it, get them to like, share, tweet or whatever. I then publish that on various competiton sites such as loquax, uk competition sites - there are quite a few. A good one is HotUK deals, but you cant add your own. Somebody has to innocently add it for you. Once these professional compers get hold of it, they'll tweet and like it like crazy. Make sure the offer is attached to a page on your site so it gets all the social signals.
It depends on your product, but you could hire a good PR person to see if they can tap into some contacts and get you some press about any events. A contact of mine occasionally manages a couple of celebrity endorsements on twitter, but to be honest I find them a bit embarrassing and I doubt they've done any good!
-
Hi Egol
Thanks for your assistance. We are looking at building more content through Q&A sections, video etc. As you say this is a significant investment. How do you gauge the ROI on a content writing project like this? At the end of the day we are in this to generate revenue, or otherwise we might as well put on our coats and go home.
Something we did try in the last 12 months was adding more detail to our products. Ok, let's be specific. We sell Magazine Subscriptions, so we started adding details to the magazines about the target audience, if a kids magazine we listed what the target age is. We listed the ISSN numbers, as schools and libraries search by these. We added a whole raft of information bits to the magazines. The net effect, we dropped in the search results. This is probably down to other factors.
So now we are looking to build a Q&A, but I don't need to tell you how much of an investment that will be. And with our experiences its difficult to walk down that path not knowing if it will make any difference, and what ROI we can expect.
What makes it even tougher is a competitor of ours who does very little in the way of content marketing, and does nothing more than add a magazine to their site, gets ranked far higher than us.
So we work our socks off going backwards, and this competitor simply adds product and does fantastically well. There seems to be something amiss there.
I am waffling on now so I will end that there
Thanks for your help
Paul
-
I work for a site in the ecommerce space, here are some link building tactics I can give away
- Competitor analysis. Where are your competitors getting links from? That can be a good place to start.
- Start a blog if you don't already have one.
- Giveaways. This one is huge. Either hold contests where you give away free stuff or give free stuff to prominent bloggers and have them review it for you. The former can get you a lot of traffic and social media buzz, the latter gets you a solid link.
- Charities and student groups. Find groups that have pages set up for their sponsors, and become one of their sponsors.
- Get in the news. Hold a local event and then get it covered by local media.
- Job postings websites, internships, job pages for universities.
- Microsites. Tumblr meme sites are my favorite.
That should get you started. If you want more, check out this link and see which ones fit your business:
-
Once again Egol hit the nail on the head. The only thing to add is giving incentives does help out the generation of user content. Such as: Add a product review/image/video for a chance to win a gift card.
-
I approach this problem by building an information site with a store.
That requires a huge writing investment to produce articles, photos and videos on how to select the products, how to use them, how to fix them, etc. However, every article/video that you create starts pulling in traffic and over time your long tail keyword reach becomes enormous. Your site will be EVERYWHERE in the SERPs.
If you do a good job lots of people will share your content, link to it from forums. Manufacturers might link to it if your content is better than theirs. Trade associations, clubs, professional groups, bloggers, forum posters might link to you. People will share on facebook if you have great content.
Over time, if you track the entry page of your conversions you will learn the types of content that pulls in sales and that will inform future content development.
This method is slow work and really expensive but has a great payback over time, in my opinion.
Make your site the "go to place" for anybody anywhere who wants to learn about products, how to use them, how to select them. Other people in your niche have probably not done this and people will buy from you because you are the widget man.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Recently migrated to https version of volusion site. 301 redirect link chain question
I recently migrated to a https version of a volusion site. They have some type of internal 301 redirect method to accommodate for the entire site. I have also used the 301 redirect manager to redirect categories and pages which I have changed. The question is if I have changed a page internally in the redirect manager from say source. /bluewidget to say. target. /superbluewidget is it wiser or even possible to do it this way to reduce the redirect chain from 3 to 2 steps source. /bluewidget to. target https://www.example/superbluewidget can a relative link be targeted to a full url to reduce steps in a 301 redirect link chain. Thanks
Technical SEO | | mrkingsley0 -
301'd site, but new site is not getting picked up in google.
Hi I'm having big issues! Any help would be greatly appreciated This is the 3rd time this happened. Every time I switch my old site greatcleanjokes.com to the new design of chokeonajoke.com traffic goes almost completely down (I even tried out the new design on greatcleanjokes [to see if it was a 301 issue] and traffic also went down.) What can possibly be wrong with this new site that google just doesn't like it ?! I was ranking high up for many big phrase like joke of the day, corny jokes, clean jokes, short jokes. Now It's all gone. I also think it's strange that when I search for site:chokeonajoke.com the post pages show up before the category pages!? Here is the old site http://web.archive.org/web/20140406214615/http://www.greatcleanjokes.com/ Here is the new one http://chokeonajoke.com/ If you can't figure out anything do you know of anyone I can hire who may be able to figure it out?
Technical SEO | | Nickys22111 -
Find all old links from a site to 301
We worked on this site a while ago - http://www.electric-heatingsupplies.co.uk/ Whilst we did a big 301 redirect exercise, I wanted to check that we "got" all of them. Is there a historical way I can check all the old indexed links to make sure they correlate to the new links? Thanks!!
Technical SEO | | lauratagdigital0 -
To many links on page. Big or small issue for eCommerce
On my site I have around 3k pages and about 90 categories. Most of which have a sensible number of products but some have only a few products and some have loads. if I have say 40 links on the page ignoring the producand is it a big problem if I have more than 60 products on the page? Assuming a link limit per page of 100 user wise we have filters and sorts for thme to find what they breed without issue. But simply from an seo point of view how damaging would I be to have the 23 "to many links on page issues? Worth fixing by making two categories and splitting out products even tho it would hinder the user.
Technical SEO | | mark_baird0 -
Googlebot cannot access your site
"At the end of July I received a message in my Google webmaster tools saying "Googlebot can't access your site" We checked our robots.txt file and removed a line break in it, and then I had Google Fetch the file again. I have not received any more messages since then. When we created the website I wrote all of the content and optimized each page for about 1 local keyword. A few weeks after I checked my keywords and did have a few on the first page of google. Since then almost all of them have completely disappeared. Because we had not link building effort I would not expect to still be on the first page, but I should definitely be seeing them before the 5th or even 10th page of Google. The address is http://www.tile-pompanobeach.com I'm not sure if these horrible results have something to do with the message from Google or something else. The problem is this client now wants to sign a contract with us for SEO and I really have no Idea what happened and if I will be able to figure it out. The main keyword for my home page is tile pompano beach and I aslo was using Pompano Beach Tile store for the About page which was previously on the first page of Google. Does anyone have some input?
Technical SEO | | DTOSI0 -
Added data to links
Hello I am in the process of cleaning a site and getting less pages cached. it is a magento site and I was wondering what is your advice fo pages that get this padded to the link ?material=139&price=10%2C12 accept the obvious canonical? thanks
Technical SEO | | ciznerguy0 -
What are the best Free Press release sites to gain free links
Hi I am trying to find some good free press release sites that allow you to have a link with your press release to help drive traffic to your site but all the ones that i have found do not have links within them. The only ones i can find where you can have links in them are paid ones. Does anyone use press release sites to gain links to their sites and if so could you let me know which ones they are please and how important you feel they are.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Value of Twitter Links
Let's ignore the "social metric" value of Twitter links and mentions and look at it from the pure link juice point of view. Twitter accounts such as http://twitter.com/randfish used to have their own PageRank and were treated as separate URLs. Twitter changed that to http://twitter.com/#!/randfish consolidating all their content to a single URL. When I search for "randfish" in Google, however, the result is the first URL version. Some clarification on this matter would be much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Dan-Petrovic0