Resolved: Backlinks for Your Shopify Store in 5 Easy Steps
Purchasing the right backlinks for a Shopify Store is not as easy as it sounds.
The Christmas season has passed and you may feel like having more time on your hands to make your Shopify website rank better on Google.
But buying backlinks is an entirely new topic to you and the research isn’t easy and even annoying at times.
The big question is: which type of backlink is the right one to help you? What is the best strategy to buy them? How many links do you need?
The fact that you’re reading this shows you’re on the right track: Links and OffPage SEO make up for as much as 75% of a good SEO strategy according to an Xpand Digital study.
Let me look into this with you and find out what could work best for your Shopify Store…
What Are Backlinks?
Backlinks are one of the leading factors to rank better on Google.
What many people don’t know is that the idea Google was founded on is related to backlink references. It’s part of it’s DNA.
The initial idea of Google, before it was started by Larry Page and Sergey Brin as a search engine, was to digitalise references in academic works. Saying this I believe that backlinks will be a very important SEO ranking factor for the time to come.
You will find more infographics at StatistaWhy are Backlinks Important for Shopify?
Highly successful webshops have tons of backlinks targeting their website. How many backlinks you need to be ranked on page 1 of Google with your Shopify webshop depends on your niche, your content and a few other key factors.
Most pages ranking on page one for any competitive search on Google.com have a minimum of 20-50 backlinks. To reach position 1 on Google you need an average of 3,8x more backlinks than your competitors on positions 2-10 according to this study.
Another important factor apart from the sheer quantity of authority backlinks is the timing of when they are built. A page with far less backlinks could outperform another page with much more backlinks, if it recently received a lot of additional backlinks while the other one did not.
Depending on where you start right now building so many strong backlinks will need time.
You probably already have a few backlinks and some of them are even high quality. What’s the best strategy now for your shopify webshop to build the link foundation for ranking on Google page 1 or even in top 3 of organic results?
Which Backlinks Could Harm Your Webshop?
There are tons of different types of backlinks like forum links, bulk text links, dofollow and nofollow links, sitewide links, bookmark links, local SEO links, blogpost links and many many more.
Stay with me! I know that’s a lot of information…
So which type of backlink is right for your Shopify store rankings? And equally important: which are potentially harmful links that could hurt your SEO efforts? Let’s look into that first.
If you buy a nofollow link for your Shopify store, you tell Google not to take that link into account. The result is… no result. Nofollow still has an importance, as a link profile with only dofollow links would not be authentic. But that’s about it.
Another type of backlink you don’t want to have is a sitewide link. This concept simply means that a website is linking to your shop from all its pages. Even from their contact page. You’ll get up to 2000 or 5000 links from one single website, e.g. from their footer on each page.
This technique is dangerous because Google might set a link fraud penalty, which you will see in your Google Search Console.
A third type of backlink you don’t want to have is an irrelevant bookmark link or text link.
If Google sees that link is just added without any relevant context to your Spotify webshop it won’t give so much importance to it. And again, you are at risk on Google Search Console. Text links are easily discovered as unnatural.
Two Dependable Rules For Great Backlinks
What are the most important factors of good backlinks that actually help your webshop to rank higher? And not increasing the risk of bringing any damage? There are several factors involved for different situations and niches, but the following two rules are always true:
Rule #1
The more authority the backlink source has, the more positive effect it has on your ranking.
The backlink source is the website and it’s particular page which links to you. An example for a highly authoritative link source would be Forbes.com.
A good measure to find out about the authority of a site is the search metric value MOZ Domain Authority and similar values from Ahrefs, Majestic or Semrush.
Rule #2
Another super important rule for the right backlinks is about context relevance on keyword level:
The more relevant the linking domain is and the more relevant the linking page is the better.
When I say relevant, I mean the topic- and keyword-relevancy in respect to the topic and keyword you want to rank for. A common example is “Buy red shoes”.
Backlinks That Actually Help Your Shopify Store
The most efficient type of backlinks for your shopify store to rank better on Google are…
(you already know that from the 2 general rules!)
… backlinks coming from high authority websites, being placed on highly relevant pages and in highly relevant contexts. They also shouldn’t be marked with “nofollow” tags, which would make them irrelevant.
This very promising and reliable type of backlink is called editorial backlink or article backlink. The linking domain can be a blog, digital magazine, or a news site.
The backlink to your webshop is placed inside a uniquely written blog- or news-article. This article needs to be unique because Google can easily spot duplicate content and would not give any credit to such articles or your integrated link.
Such unique articles should have a minimum length of 300 words but can also have 1500 words. The article should be relevant to your product, written in the language of your Shopify store and of course a good read. Statistics, video, images and any other engaging content will help as well.
The anchor should be related to your keyword in a natural and authentic way.
How to Get Editorial Article Backlinks?
Understanding the mechanisms of Link Building so far, you’ll ask yourself now how you can build such powerful backlinks? What is the easy way or best practice?
During the 2000’s many SEOs used Blogger Outreach campaigns to get editorial backlinks from blogs for free. That worked when the blogging space was rather a hobby and not so professional as it is today. Many influencers blog for a living and make a big share of their revenue with publishing blog posts with backlinks.
Today such Blogger Outreach campaigns are in most cases not worth the effort. Only unknown, low quality blogs would accept to publish the content. They do that because they can’t or don’t want to create quality content by themselves, which is not a good sign for a business partner.
At the same time high quality blogs are difficult to convince to publish your content. They often make a living out of blogging and ask for high rates from new customers.
That’s why the vehicle of choice of many SEOs is to buy links. But going this way might be expensive. SEOs have to create concepts and lists, unique articles have to be written, the bloggers want to be paid for publishing and SEOs add their often immense margins to the price.
At Link Guru, we saw this problem and strived to make this process easier and much better priced for our users. As a first step, we established strong connections with more than 10,000 high authority blogs, digital magazines and news sites from around the world.
We packaged highly authoritative editorial backlinks for eCommerce and other SEO-relevant sectors, different niches, budgets and strategies. All our links are editorial article backlinks, relevant to our customers’ niche. We make these packages available to you and other clients for the best price we can. Our rates for such high-DA backlinks are among the lowest in the United States.
5 Steps to Have a Great Backlink Profile for Your Shopify Store
This is the season that gives you time to look into SEO and link building. You might want to have this topic solved before the Easter season begins and your sales consume most of your time.
Step 1: Check Your Backlink Profile
Check your current backlink profile with providers like Ahrefs, to see how many backlinks you already have and from where. If you have Google Search Console set up, go to “Links” in the left navigation to see your external links.
This is what you’re looking for:
Your number is probably lower than this example, but you now know the number of backlinks you already have.
As stated, the influence of your rankings depends on the quality and quantity of your backlinks and their contexts, but also on your niche and focus keywords.
The best way to understand how many backlinks you need, is to check your competitors’ link profiles. Make sure you compare yourself with those competitors which rank high for your desired SEO keywords.
Step 2: Decide on Your Budget
When you decide on your link building budget, it’s best to have a monthly budget or a yearly budget that can be split into tranches. This brings continuity and makes more sense than doing a planless link purchase here and there.
Considering your budget and the link need, you can make a clear decision on your link building plan.
Step 3: Make a Link Building Plan
Knowing how many backlinks you have, and how much budget is available, you can make a plan of how many backlinks you can buy per week, month or quarter.
Make sure you focus on buying editorial dofollow links from relevant websites with high authority.
Step 4: Monitor
After your decision is made stick to the plan and you will see monthly or even weekly differences in your rankings. Link Building is not a one-time, but a steady effort.
For monitoring your rankings, there are good paid solutions from Ubersuggest, Ahrefs and quite a few others. If you prefer a free solution you can try Serprobot.
Step 5: Stick to What Works
By monitoring for a while, you’ll get an idea on which of your link building efforts actually rank your Shopify store higher. Stick to this strategy, as it is already successful for you in your particular niche and situation.
Conclusion
In this article I showed you how to get strong backlinks for your shopify store.
I explained which backlinks are the risky ones to avoid at all cost and which ones will actually help your Shopify webshop to rank higher.
By using my step-by-step guide, you learned how to efficiently get a very good backlink profile in only 5 steps. This will be a major advantage for your SEO rankings over your competition.
If you dedicate your efforts to extend your link profile and focus on high authority, highly relevant backlinks for your Shopify store, there is no other way than rankings to go up.