Content
Backlinks for Shopify: How to Build a Strong Link Profile for Your Stores
November 12, 2024
10 mins.
Do backlinks still matter in SEO? Will link building benefit my Shopify store? How to build backlinks for Shopify?
The answers to these burning questions are an essential part of SEO campaigns given the rising competition on Shopify as a highly competitive eCommerce platform. This is to say that top Shopify websites own backlink profiles, which is super important for search engines like Google to lift their rankings.
In today’s SEO blog post, we will dive deeper into crafting a link building strategy for Shopify stores. Promodo backlink experts share invaluable insights into improving your backlink profile on Shopify, growing search traffic, and overshadowing your closest rivals.
We’ll start now with a brief link-building ABC:
A backlink is an incoming link from another website used to reference or provide additional information on a topic. Backlinks add value to your site by signaling trust from other websites, indicating that they find your content credible. When search engines crawl the web, backlinks help establish your site as a trusted source of information and boost your SEO and search rankings.
Backlinks (inbound links) are the links from other websites pointing to your website pages.
Link building entails acquiring backlinks from other websites to improve a site’s SEO and ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Backlinks are among the most important SEO elements because Google relies on backlink quantity and quality as a major ranking factor.
Simply put, with more high-quality backlinks, eCommerce businesses boost their site visibility on search engines. Therefore, competitive Shopify players leverage link building campaigns as a structured effort to increase the quantity and quality of their backlinks.
DISCOVER MORE LINK BUILDING OPPORTUNITIES
Search engines determine the most relevant website content for users browsing for specific keywords. While relevance to search intent is the key, it is crucial to optimize your Shopify site to the most frequent search queries used by your target audience.
It is vital to comprehend that backlinks are not equal to search engines. While they are meant to serve as a vote of confidence from another site, they won’t always boost the quality of your site rating.
In the most general sense, there are dofollow and nofollow backlinks:
Dofollow backlinks are the links that pass authority from one webpage to another. They signal search engines that the linked site is trustworthy. In SEO terms, these backlinks are highly valuable because they help improve a website’s domain authority and search engine rankings.
Nofollow backlinks fail to pass authority. The nofollow attribute, therefore, tells search engines not to follow the link or count it as a vote of confidence for the linked site. While nofollow links don’t directly impact SEO, they generate traffic and may enhance visibility by driving visitors to your site.
Overall, there are three types of links to consider in your Shopify SEO strategy:
In our SEO practice, we’ve defined the following backlink types to rank sites higher in search results:
Editorial backlinks are among the most valuable types of backlinks. They occur when your content, such as articles or infographics, is referenced as a source or when your business is quoted or featured in relevant, high-quality content.
Backlinks from guest blogging are an effective means of building valuable links. To boost your SEO, contribute guest articles to established websites.
Backlinks in business profiles come from creating digital profiles on business listing sites like Google Business Profile and Yelp to name a few, social networks, industry directories, and review platforms. These profiles allow you to link back to your website, while search engines view them as evidence of your site's credibility and longevity. Most importantly, building these backlinks signals the trust and authority of your website.
Guest post bio links are another valuable backlinking source. Even if a site doesn't allow backlinks within the main article, it typically permits links in the author bio section. While these links may not be tied to editorial content, they still impact SEO. This is because guest bloggers often write for sites with higher viewership, which can drive traffic and improve your site’s visibility.
Comment backlinks occur when you leave genuine comments on high-quality blog posts, often including a link back to your site. While spammy comments can harm SEO, thoughtful, relevant comments on reputable blogs, on the other hand, will drive traffic and boost your brand visibility.
UGC (user-generated content) links come from content created by users or customers and should include the rel="ugc" attribute. These links indicate active community engagement and can enhance SEO by showing your site has a vibrant user base.
Sponsored links are paid links that should be marked with the rel="sponsored" attribute to disclose to search engines that they are paid. While they can improve SEO, transparency is key to complying with search engine guidelines.
Spammy links are harmful backlinks created by unethical SEO practices, where sites try to manipulate search rankings by acquiring links without earning trust. Common types include blog comment spam and links from link farms — the websites that exist solely to provide backlinks without genuine content or audience. Search engine algorithms detect these practices and penalize websites that use them, as they violate guidelines and harm the quality of search results.
As you’ve already guessed, backlinks are important to promote your store on Shopify and gain higher domain authority, which directly impacts your search engine rankings. Backlinks Shopify formula is pretty simple: the higher your domain authority, the more likely your store will appear at the top of search results.
Along with other automated software programs, Google’s crawlers are reading the anchor text on your website. To explore new pages and content, crawlers follow links in the anchor text, after which the search engine indexes the pages. This is how crawlers provide Google with the data on the quantity and quality of backlinks referring to your site. Most importantly, crawlers determine how far these backlinks are relevant to specific search queries of your targeted users.
And that’s how you’ll get more traffic:
Backlinks improve visibility in SERPs to help your store rank higher and attract more potential customers, especially those looking for niched products or services.
Backlinks generate referral traffic. Quality backlinks from other websites will help you drive direct visitors to your site. That’s how you’ll boost your brand awareness and expand your market reach.
Backlinks establish credibility by showing that reliable sources trust and recommend your Shopify store to help you build customer trust and loyalty.
Backlinks will help you beat competitors. By focusing on high-quality link-building efforts and building relationships with industry influencers, you can gain a competitive edge over stores that aren't prioritizing backlinks.
An effective external link profile is crucial for improving a website's visibility and ranking in Google search results. The process involves acquiring backlinks from trustworthy, authoritative sites, which helps drive more targeted traffic to the site.
In one of our SEO case studies, the client's previous SEO team flooded the Apple Parts website with numerous poor-quality links, which adversely affected the site during the Google updates. As a result of cooperating with Promodo, our SEO experts eliminated poor-quality backlinks and acquired 137 outreach links and 154 crowd links.
With much of the backlink explanation underway, the core question remains open: “How to add backlinks to Shopify?”
The total purpose of your Shopify strategy is to climb higher in search rankings. In this pursuit, we suggest developing and maintaining a consistent link-building approach.
Let’s now tailor a few strategic backlink approaches for your Shopify store:
Among the best ways to get links back to your Shopify site is to craft valuable content that would attract links organically. Your strategic task here is to emphasize content that is both relevant and useful to the needs and interests shared by your target audience. In this vein, we suggest leveraging blog posts, guides, infographics, and videos. Users are likely to share and link to educational and entertaining content.
It is always a win-win strategy to establish close-knit relationships with industry influencers, bloggers, or even customers who enjoy a strong online presence. Be sure to ask them to link to your Shopify store. In return, offer content or value relevant to the immediate needs of their audiences. That’s how you’ll build consistent and solid cooperation.
It sounds great to make customers share reviews about your Shopify products or services on their blogs, social media, or other platforms where they reach the right audience. These reviews are the spots that’ll include backlinks to your product pages or Shopify website. That is how you’ll gradually build social proof.
Guest posting is a time-tested way of getting high-quality backlinks. Your homework here is to spot relevant blogs across your niche accepting guest posts. Pitch topics that would align with their audience’s interests and are relevant to your Shopify store’s offerings. Including one to two do-follow links back to your site in the post is an average benefit.
For the US brand of 3D construction, we targeted niche-related websites. We further selected product review sites and engaged in social media discussions to get more quality links for the client. We managed to post 6-10 guest post links and 10-15 links a month through forum posts, comments, and reviews. Our link building strategy solidified the site’s link profile and advanced its search engine rankings.
Getting in touch with relevant eCommerce and industry-specific communities throughout Reddit, Quora, Facebook, and LinkedIn is a way to contribute insightful content and link back readers to your Shopify store. This approach will help you acquire valuable backlinks and expose your Shoipify brand name.
Another beneficial backlinking approach is to monitor the web for mentions of your Shopify store or products lacking a link. You are free to leverage Google Alerts or Mention to track unlinked mentions. Reach out to the authors of these sources and ask them to link back to your Shopify site.
In addition to promoting products and services on your Shopify website, consider sharing freely downloadable tools or resources. Free-to-download offers like guides, recommendation tools, calculators, and templates related to your niche will highly resonate with your audience. People like free practical tools and are likely to link to them, which means driving more traffic to your Shopify web store.
Beyond external backlinking, do not overlook the potential of internal linking. For SEO, it is crucial to ensure a fair amount of links throughout pages and blog posts on your Shopify website. These will help you better guide users and search engines through your site.
Our final advice today is to look for niche-related websites with broken links. You may re-direct those futile links back to your Shopify store. The available tools like Broken Link Checker will help you spot broken links and streamline the outreach process.
Now, you may still wonder about how to measure your Shopify backlinks effectively. The first thing you should beware of is that it is a long-term investment. The effort requires persistent experimentation and tracking of the effectiveness of your link building efforts to understand what’s working best.
Be sure to monitor the following metrics:
For our client Aris Pack, we enhanced the website’s domain authority and trustworthiness with credible backlinks, which boosted its rankings for commercial search queries.
In the SEO context, quality backlinks are invaluable for your Shopify store. They emerge whenever external links refer to your site and indicate a site’s high-quality content for Google.
Effective backlinks are a key tool to increase your Shopify store’s visibility in search results and attract more potential customers.
At Promodo, we emphasize less high-quality links instead of more poor-quality backlinks.
Streamline your website’s off-page SEO with our first-hand link building experience:
We recommend following the best practices of the highest-performing backlink profiles on Shopify that mix link types. Here, your task is to check every backlink for quality. Spammy or nofollow links will not bring you traffic and not pass any ranking credit by search engines. Further, use Ahref’s domain rating to check the backlink profile of the site that provides you with the link. Overall, the higher the domain rating, the higher the link quality.
Contact Promodo experts to get quality backlinks for Shopify store and achieve impressive results.
Content Marketing Manager at Promodo
Taras has 16 years of hands-on copywriting experience overseas with 3000+ unique copies.
Accredited with Certificate of Proficiency in English (C2 level) by Cambridge University. Studied at Writing Launch Academy (United States) and owns an Academic Writing Certificate from Oregon University. Author of 12 dictionaries with Apriori Publishers.
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