Wondering how you can build backlinks for your ecommerce store? In this guide, I take a look at how you can establish a link building strategy for your store from the outset, how to optimise current strategies that you may already have in place, and the link building strategies that are moving the needle in 2025.
If you’d like to watch this guide, be sure to check out the video below:
Why build backlinks to your ecommerce store?
First of all, why would you actually want backlinks to your ecommerce website? Given the number of algorithm updates released by Google in the last 12 months alone, one thing is clear, search engines are constantly analysing how they judge authority, and backlinks have always been a huge part of how authority is judged.
And, with ChatGPT and AI search increasing in popularity, you’re still going to need to be considered as an authority so that you appear within roundups, AI search results, and listings wherever your potential audience are searching (with backlinks being a factor in this understanding of authority).
So, we have the authority requirement, particularly for competitive niches, where we need to be building quality backlinks to show that we’re a trusted source for a product (and are a reputable provider of said product).
But there’s also the ability to compete from an SEO perspective. Chances are, whatever niche you’re in, your competitors are also doing link building, and ecommerce SEO is no different. Let’s get into the approaches you can take.
How to build backlinks to your ecommerce website
1. Competitor Backlink Intersect
I would always recommended starting with a competitor link intersect. The main takeaway here is that we’re not trying to just get every single link our competitors have. We’re looking at the types of publications that we deem to be high authority, or those that are consistently linking out to competitors over time. And, it’s not the overall amount of links that matter either. We want to answer the questions of ‘what does good look like for the sector?’ And then, how can you start to approach these publications or these journalists to land similar types of links?
For example, if we’re an ecommerce store selling kitchen items, a site like Ideal Home would be a perfect one for us to focus on getting a link from, as it’s highly relevant as a niche website and competitors are likely to be reaping the authority and relevance benefits from the site if they’ve already got a link from it.
With this in mind, you can quickly see that it’s not just about building every single link that your competitors have got, or just getting more links than they do… It’s seeing what actually drives authority and is contextually relevant to your sector, and working backwards from that initial intersect data.
2. Press Loft
This is such a good platform for ecommerce websites specifically, especially if you’ve got products and you’re willing to send those out to journalists and publishers.
You don’t always have to send your products either. Sometimes, journalists are just looking at putting a good gift guide together and need quality imagery as part of it. Others will want to test the product before including it in their guide, so it all completely depends on what that specific publication is looking for.
Press Loft also has a new expert quote section, and you can respond to requests specifically from journalists and publishers, as well as submitting your own press releases and responding to journalist requirements based on what they want as part of an upcoming article or guide.
3. Statistics Pages
This is easily my most favourite form of passive building, and these types of pages are great for bringing organic traffic into a site too. Interestingly, some of the data pages that you might assume would have high competition often aren’t, even more so if you have your own data to share (but it’s not always a necessity).
In the example that I’ve shared in the video attached at the top of this guide, you can see that something broad like ‘marketing statistics’ is very high competition because of the niche, but ‘gardening statistics’ is relatively low competition, and is just as broad in another competitive niche. So, you need to do your research, but don’t assume that you’re not going to be able to compete at all. Your main focus should be on creating the absolute best data resources for journalists looking to find stats/data specific to the niche. Your job here isn’t to provide your own data (although, again, it can help), you’re just creating the ultimate data resource and you’re getting the links for providing that data in a succinct manner.
Journalists love data, and they’ll often search ‘Industry + Stats + Year’, and you’re creating the go-to resource for this. They’ll often link to you and not the original source of the data, because your page is the one they’ve found. It also means that, as new data is published, you can update the content throughout each year to keep it as fresh as possible (just ensure you’re referencing where you got the data from).
The plan then is to internally link to your product and category pages, so the links from these data pages drive internal authority naturally to the pages that are a commercial priority.
Just a final note on this too. Don’t add the year to the URL, otherwise you’ll have to change the URL each year and it becomes a brand new pages with an inevitable indexing delay.
4. Calculators
These aren’t necessarily like the passive link elements that statistics pages can offer, but they’re often highly contextual for your target audience and that can bring some decent traffic that is specific to who you’re trying to get in front of organically.
Sticking to the gardening example, there are calculators for things like shed base sizes, man cave floor space requirements, paint tin versus wall size requirements… whatever you’re selling, think of the questions your customers have and whether a simple calculator would make their life easier or at least prompt them to contact once getting an initial answer (you can also internally link to products or categories specific to the calculator type/products related to a solution that a calculator is being used for).
You can use plugins or premium tools to build calculators, or even use something like ChatGPT or Claude to make one for you. It’s actually really surprising just how well AI tools can build these types of lightweight interactive elements for your site. It takes a bit of tweaking, but it’s worth testing.
5. Journalist Requests
One of my favourite types of link building strategies for any website, and something that is really popular in the ecommerce space too. I would say a platform like Qwoted is probably the best for most sites, as you can sign up as an expert and slowly build relationships with journalists over time (and be featured in some huge publications).
If you don’t want to pay for a platform, using something like #journorequest on Twitter is another way to find these opportunities. I like to use If This Then That droplets to get emails whenever a journalist tweets a request that relates to the niche of a client, to then respond as soon as possible to their request. The most important thing here is that you actually are an expert and can prove that. Journalists are being inundated with AI profiles and fake experts, and they want to be able to vet your expertise. So, get your site ready for author bios, social proof, an about page, and links to socials and anything else that proves your expertise specific to your niche (and this is just good SEO too).
If you like this type of approach, reach out to see how I can help you with expert commentary campaigns and journalist request responses. My team are experts in these smaller campaigns, and we use a combination of proactive press releases, as well as responding on behalf of you/your experts to requests across platforms like Qwoted, Help a B2B Writer, SoS, Source Bottle and many more.
6. Proactive Expert Commentary
This is similar to journalist requests, but instead of waiting for the request to come to you, you’re taking the releases directly to relevant journalists. Like any digital PR approach or outreach to a journalist, it doesn’t work every time, but when it does it works really well.
Let’s say we’re in the fashion industry with a fashion-specific ecommerce site. We want to search things like “I’m a fashion expert” or “Fashion expert reveals” in the Google news tab, and see what has been covered over the last year or the last couple of months. Based on this, we can start to see evergreen commentary opportunities, trends to jump on, what worked well this time last year, and importantly, the journalists consistently covering these types of things.
For example, you could provide commentary on the royals and their seasonal fashion (always very topical), or couple-up data from TikTok to discuss emerging fashion trends, or the TikTok fashion trends that an expert thinks you should avoid (it’s these types of things that will also grab attention on social media that journalists are wanting to see).
I’ve put together a video on low-cost link building ideas too, so that you can take advantage of these types of campaigns:
7. Data League Tables
These types of broader league tables are fantastic, even if they are much more time-intensive than something like journalist requests or expert commentary campaigns.
Sticking with the fashion niche, we could scrape data to put together a league table of the ‘most fashionable UK cities’. This could be based on factors such as the number of high-end fashion stores and the number of fashion jobs per 100,000 residents.
The great thing about these campaigns is that is massively broadens your outreach scope.
If you have a top 10 list of cities, then you can outreach to all 10 of those cities and journalists in those cities. You can also do a national list to fashion publications in general, and then do a ‘the least fashionable UK cities’ list too for the bottom ten. As you can imagine, it takes more time to do these campaigns. based on the outreach prospecting alone, and you’re tweaking press release versions for each bucket of journalists, but the number of links that you can get increase based on each outreach batch (across regional and national publications).
You can also publish the findings on your blog, and take the same approach to building that internal ‘hub’ of authority like with the stats pages, although it’s not always necessary (as journalists are often happy with just quoting the table of data too and including that in their piece).
8. Blogger Outreach
When it comes to blogger outreach, my advice is to really take the time to look at the quality of the bloggers that you’re trying to work with. How’s their traffic? Do they link excessively to casino and forex websites? Are they just a PBN disguised as a hobby blogger?
Guest posting and blogger outreach still works well, but vetting is important, as is finding bloggers to work with in the first place. I like to approach it in two steps.
First, think of the type of things that people in your niche will be researching, and find bloggers that way. This means really digging into long-tail searches to find those who are consistently writing about niche topics related to your industry, and reach out to them directly regarding a collaboration.
The second is, once you’ve found a blogger, look at their outbound domains and see what other websites similar to yours that they’re linking-out to. Then, look at the websites that these competitors are also getting links from. This is like the link intersect approach, but you’re casting a wider net specific to those working on blogger outreach link building.
9. Gifting
This is such a good one in the ecommerce space. And, if you don’t want to use a platform like Press Loft, then that’s totally fine. You can search something like ‘Your Niche” “Gift Guide” “Year” e.g. ‘Wine” “Gift Guide” “2024”, and we can see who published a gift guide the previous year, and reach out to them to see whether they’re a) updating it for the following year or b) working on any new gift guides that they’d be happy to include you in.
Unlike Press Loft where journalists will outline whether they want a product sending, imagery, or both, it’s best to directly approach journalists or publishers here to say you’re happy to provide the gift, as it’s going to be cold outreach and you want to show you’re eager for inclusion and happy to send a product from the outset.
This is such a good way of getting into huge publications without sending press releases or creating data tables, and you’d be surprised at the types of websites (in terms of traffic and authority) that write gift guides specific to many different industries. You can even create your own on your blog, as these often can also rank well if you’re a recognised industry authority (meaning that you’re actually ranking your own product gift guide for seasonal-specific searches).
In Conclusion
When it comes down to it, I don’t think there’s any one specific way that you need to be approaching ecommerce link building. You want to set up your outreach and link building processes to cover multiple angles like those I’ve stated above, rather than just putting all of your eggs in one basket and sticking to just one approach.
That’s not how link building works, and you’ll lose out on so many opportunities if you don’t broaden your approaches and make the most of opportunities specific to your industry. Hopefully you can see too that you can do this on a relatively low budget, without having to spend tens of thousands on costly PR campaigns where the success of your efforts hinges on a single idea.
This is all about building links and authority steadily, focusing on context, relevance, and building on your expertise and the power of your brand as a trusted ecommerce store in your sector.
