Whitehat link building for eCommerce (E158)

• Jeff Oxford
• Founder and CEO of 180 Marketing

Show Notes

• eCommerce SEO is a different scale and size
• Link build strategies
  • Product Reviews
  • HARO – Help a reporter
  • Guest Posts
    • Reach out, send your bio
    • Top blog lists
• Budget
  • < $100 per link – Bad
  • $200-300 – More common whitehat links
    • Send examples of past links
    • Ask if they own the blogs

Sponsors:

• Prisync
• Spark Shipping

Links:

• https://www.180marketing.com/
• https://linkhunter.com/

Transcript:

Charles (00:00):

In this episode of the Business eCommerce I talk with Jeff Oxford about whitehat link building for e-commerce. This is a business of eCommerce episode 156.

Charles (00:20):

Welcome to the business of e-commerce the show that helps e-commerce retailers start launch and grow their e-commerce business. I’m your host, Charles Palleschi with Jeff Oxford. Jeff is the CEO and founder of one 80 marketing and SEO company focused exclusively on SEO and content marketing for e-commerce businesses. As Jeff on the show today, talk about link building specifically for e-commerce businesses. There’s definitely some nuances that make link building different when it comes to e-commerce. So I think he really digs into that and this is his focus. So he brings some great tips that I think really everyone should listen to. It’s something that link building isn’t talked about that often it’s something that I think a lot of folks kind of focus more on the on-page more and some, some other factors when it comes to SEO. But I think link building really is one of the keys to making your SEO strategy work.

Charles (01:14):

And Jeff really goes deep and specific when it comes to e-commerce link building. So I think you should watch the entire show. He gives three strategies on how to build links and some concepts on budget. And we should be looking at if you’re thinking of getting into us. So let’s get into the show and listen right to the end. He also talks about his product which I think is actually great. You should check out I’ll link to in the show notes. So let’s get into the show. Hey Jeff, how are you doing today? I

Jeff (01:42):

Am doing great. Charles, how about yourself?

Charles (01:45):

Doing good. Thanks for coming on the show. I’ve had a few guests there in the past. Talk about SEO, but kind of more of a focus on link building. I feel like that’s not something I’ve touched upon at least here in the past. So I’m kind of excited to get into that aspect of it real quick. First one, any marketing you’re the founder, how you’ve been doing SEO for, for how long

Jeff (02:07):

I would do an SEO for about a decade now, mainly on e-commerce sites. So I’m little side stories. I’ve built my own in the past, back in like 2012, built my own e-commerce sites, drop shipping sites had success there and then decided just to kind of pursue the e-commerce marketing side of it and focus less on the operations.

Charles (02:27):

How would you say? So when you say you focus on e-commerce, how is e-commerce SEO different than, you know, if I’m a SAS or whatever any other sort of company, how has e-commerce SEO different?

Jeff (02:40):

I’d say the bit, one of the biggest differences is just the scale and size. I mean, of course you can have a small e-commerce site. That’s just selling a few products. Maybe they have like a small catalog under 10 products. In which case that’s going to be pretty similar to how you’d approach SEO for a SAS or your typical brochure website. We, when you start having a website with, you know, hundreds of thousands of products and dozens or hundreds of categories, it’s a whole nother, separate set of challenges. And the biggest difference is just prioritization. Prioritization is super critical. You know, you don’t have all the resources in the world to make, you know, optimize every change perfectly. So you have to prioritize, you know, apply the 80 20 rule, which products and categories can bring the most results and traffic. Start there, you can’t build links to every single page. So you’ve got to choose which pages can benefit most LinkedIn links. It’s a lot of strategy analysis. Then there’s also some nuances that come with shopping cards, like there’s [inaudible] issues with category pages. If a product is going to be a multiple categories, is it going to be a duplicate content issue there? So there’s also some technical issues that you got to look out for with e-commerce SEO.

Charles (03:45):

Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, you used to probably folks doing like a brochure site, right? They might be yeah. 10 page five pages, 10 pages, and you can pretty much build links, optimize all of them, like in one go around versus e-commerce you can be talking a hundred thousand pages. That’s not even, that’s not even abnormal. Right. And some e-commerce sites, especially when you’re talking drop shipping. So how do you, how do you decide? So first, like building, we’ll get into that a moment, but it’s relatively it’s not cheap to do, right? Like in time or dollars, like it takes effort, it takes work. And if you had 10 pages, you could just hit all of them and you’re done. But if you have a hundred thousand, you’re not going to build links to a hundred thousand pages. Exactly. So you’re going to figure out where to even start off, like, how do you even, what’s the framework to even start thinking about, like, where do you build your links though?

Jeff (04:36):

This is a really good question and I wish more e-commerce sites would ask it because a lot of times, if you’re focused on the wrong, like let’s say building links to the page, you think you need to be building links to, but it’s not. You’re wasting those times and resources and link building will, you know, we’ll talk about this more later is the most complicated time consuming, expensive part of SEO. So you want to make sure every dollar that goes into link building is maximized. Typically what I w I, we, my self and my team would do is we go to a tool like H refs or Moz or SCM rush export, every single ranking on the website. Then you know, now we have all the keywords. We have the search volume for each of the keywords and the ranking. From there we put into like a pivot table, so we can see which pages are ranking the best, which ones have the most opportunity.

Jeff (05:20):

And then from there, we’d want to pull in some more data, like go to Google analytics. You can export they, it’s hard to find this as e-commerce tab on most reports and in Google analytics where you can actually see the average order value, conversion rate per session value. And first, what per session value does is it tells you, okay, let’s say a thousand people come to the page and you made $5,000 in revenue. Well, the per session value is $5 per visitor. So basically what it’s saying is for every visitor to that page, you’re getting X dollars. So we want to get that metric because it’s showing the conversion potential and how much money you can for each pa