Getting links naturally will decrease your manual link building efforts
In a recent webinar, Rand from Moz, talked about the importance of being link-worthy and likable.
The process of link building today has reversed.
You don’t build links anymore; you earn links naturally.
If you can't earn links naturally, not only can you not get links fast enough and not get good ones. You also are probably earning links that Google doesn't even want to
count or may even penalize you for. It's nearly
impossible to earn links with just good, unique content.
Rand Fishkin “Why Good Unique Content Needs to Die.”
To earn links naturally you must create content that’s 10x better than the competition, says Rand.
The 10x concept is not something new.
In his latest lecture “Competition is for losers”, Peter Thiel (founder of Paypal) said that to conquer a market, you must be 10x better:
My sort of crazy, somewhat arbitrary rule of thumb is
you want to have a technology that's an order of
magnitude better than the next best thing. So Amazon
had over ten times as many books, it may not have been
that high tech, but you figure oh well it can sell ten times
as many books and be more efficient along the way.
Peter Thiel
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_0dVHMpJlo&t=20m0s
For MenGear, we hired a junior copywriter to write unique product descriptions for every product on the site. Because the products we sell are hard to find on the local market, it was easy to create unique product descriptions.
The least words per product copy were 300 words. That way we had over 200 hundred web pages of unique product copy.
We still have to work on achieving the 10x effect!
Before creating your link building campaign you should ask yourself:
- Are my product pages 10x better than my closest competitor?
- Are my product descriptions 10x better than my closest competitor?
- Is my product photography 10x better than my next best competitor?
- Is my store genuinely useful for my customers?
- Is the UX of my online store 10x better than my competition’s store?
Being useful gets you backlinks and makes your store grow. Products don’t.
In this case, is link building dead?
While I had my best results with off-page SEO, a more increasing trend is improving your site’s user experience.
How to measure UX when it comes to SEO?
- CTR (click-through rate) - what % of people click on your store on the search engine results page (SERP). CTR indicates how relevant are your pages to the people searching for a particular term.
With online stores, people usually search about a product. They either are looking for information about the product or are using a long-tail keyword when they have a buying intent.
- Time on site - your visitors should stay on your site for more than a minute.
Include interlinking sections like “Relevant products”, “Product reviews”, “Users also bought”, etc. These sections can increase customers’ time on your site and general engagement with your products. Amazon is an excellent example of this. They are pretty good at making you spend more time (and money) on their site:
- Bounce rate - In your Google Analytics go to Acquisition > All traffic > Source/medium and select Organic. What’s your bounce rate?
Personal experience note: When we raised our product prices, we had a major increase in the organic traffic’s bounce rate (as you can see).
Why?
Because our prices didn’t meet the peoples’ expectations. People could see the price discrepancy when comparing our products prices to the prices of other stores they found on the SERP. Our prices were way off!
As Neil Patel puts it in this post about UX:
What’s best for users is best for Google
See:
I still believe off-page link building will get you lots of traffic and sales bud don’t abandon your on-page
UX metrics.
Also, make sure to get your pricing right.
That way your search engine rankings will certainly improve.
Okay, your product pages are in check, and you’re confident with the UX you deliver on your store.
What’s next?
Choosing a goal for your link building campaign
Before you dive deep into designing the link building campaign for your online store, you must decide on your primary goal.
Choosing a goal for your campaign will allow you to be more analytical and track the right metrics for your link building efforts.
Example goals could be:
Getting more online sales
What to measure on your online store?
1. Number of orders made through Google organic
traffic.
2. Revenue from Google organic traffic.
3. The conversion rate for that traffic channel - what number of people that came from Google bought a product.
For points 1 and 2 I’d like to use an easy to use analytical software for eCommerce called Metrilo. Metrilo integrates with your online store and allows you to see an overview of your top revenue and order sources in a neatly manner:
If you don’t fancy paying $59/month a free alternative (although not as simple and detailed as Metrilo) is setting up a goal in Google Analytics.
What to measure on the SERP (Search Engine Rankings Page)?
- Your search rankings for a particular converting keyword. That usually is a long-tail key term that lands the searcher on one of your product pages.
I like this little free tool that shows your SERP position based on a keyword and domain:
- Increase of converting search traffic.
Increasing your store’s authority and trustworthiness
You can improve your eCommerce authority by getting links from sites that have already earned trust and proven authority to the public and search engines.
Although SERP impact is significant, in this case, a strong side-benefit is your online store’s increased value in the market.
Imagine you sell geek gadgets, and your store gets a positive review on another geek blog. It’s likely that your online store will receive some healthy referral traffic and site engagement.
What to measure on your online store?
- Increase in referral traffic.
- Conversion rate increase for referral traffic channel.
- Increase of newsletter/other opt-in subscriptions.
- Increase of product reviews, blog comments, and
other site engagement metrics.
- Decrease of bounce rate. Notice how small is the bounce rate for our referral traffic result of the link building campaign:
- Increase of other sites actively suggesting your products
What to measure on your SERP?
- Increase of branded searches.
- Increase in your search engine rankings.
Once you know what your primary goal is and how to measure it, it’s time to get your hands dirty and build your link building eCommerce campaign.