The idea that you need a huge budget to compete with large e-commerce sites for the top spots in Google is nonsense.
If buying links was the number one ranking factor, the companies with the biggest budgets would win every time.
But, in my experience, that’s just not the case.
Don’t get me wrong, if you’ve got a high domain authority, that’s even better.
What I’m saying is that using my internal linking strategy, it’s 100% possible for you to rank above these sites.
I’ve never paid for a backlink (except for a few yearly memberships with some directories relevant to my industry).
So how do I get my ecommerce site to rank in Google?
How do I get my product and category pages to consistently rank in the top 3 positions in Google search results?
My theory is that it’s because of two things:
1) How I optimise my internal links.
2) The authority I’ve built in my very narrow niche.
If you don’t know what an internal link is, it’s a text link from one page on your website to another page on your website.
You know those links that are usually blue and underlined?
Yes, those links have helped me rank my little site with a domain authority of 13 (Ahrefs measurement for the authority of a site) ahead of brands with a DA in the 50-60 range!
I’m talking about huge brands, which I won’t name for now because I want to protect my rankings (sorry, I’ve gotta be one of those people who expects you to believe them without showing proof).
Now, enough of me waffling. Let’s get into it…
My ecommerce internal linking strategy
My ecommerce internal linking strategy is to create links from the pages on my website that have received the most links from other websites.
It’s that simple.
This is almost always your homepage.
So any link from your homepage is a powerful signal that the page it links to is important.
And because I’m in a tiny niche, focused on a tiny category of products, I can do that.
I only have 25 products in my store. This means I can link to every single product and category page from my homepage without damaging the user experience.
Here’s an example:
The website Pro Direct Soccer sells every product you can think of related to football.
Say, for example, I have a niche store where I only sell one specific brand of football boots. Let’s use Nike to demonstrate.
Nike football boots would be just one of the hundreds, if not thousands of categories in the Pro Direct Soccer catalogue.
They could never link to every product from their homepage, because they’d have thousands and thousands of links, which would look horrible from a user’s perspective!
With this in mind, can you see how one of your product pages could rank above a similar product sold on Amazon?
Amazon! One of the most trusted websites on earth.
And you can still rank higher than them because you use internal links and they don’t.
My internal linking process
Now that you understand my strategy, I’m going to show you my internal linking process.
Type your product name into a keyword tool. The two tools I use are Google Keyword Planner and Ahrefs.
See what keyword variations come up.
Example: men’s yoga pants
Variations – yoga pants for men, men’s yoga tights, male yoga pants, men’s yoga leggings
I’ve read articles and spoken to a few SEO experts who say you should vary your link text from exact match for some links, so Google doesn’t think you’re over-optimizing.
So you want to use the above keyword variations as the text for your links (which will also help you to rank for multiple keywords).
Now, choose the pages you want to link from.
I suggest linking from your most important pages, meaning homepage, collection pages, and product pages.
So you’d have a collection called Men’s Yoga Pants.
On my homepage, I would have a section of text where I say, “Check out our range of Men’s Yoga Pants”. Highlight it and link to the Men’s Yoga Pants collection page, using the exact match keyword.
Then, go to related category pages and add links saying check out our other items.
For example, you might have a larger collection called Men’s Yoga Clothing.
In the collection description, you could write something like, “Browse our full range of Men’s Yoga Clothing, including Men’s Yoga Pants, Men’s Yoga Tops, and Men’s Yoga Socks.”
Each keyword would have a link to a different collection page.
On each collection page, you could write “Check out our other men’s yoga products, like our Men’s Yoga Tops and Men’s Yoga Socks, or try our full collection of Men’s Yoga Clothing”.
Again linking to your other collection pages.
Then, go to each of your products in the collection, and write in the product description something like, “If you like our Men’s Yoga Pants, you’re going to LOVE our Men’s Yoga Socks”. And add a link to your Yoga Socks collection page.
Use some exact match and some keyword variations.
So in this case, you could use Men’s Yoga Socks and Yoga Socks for Men as your link text.
And that’s it.
Don’t forget to submit your sitemap again in Google Search Console so the crawlers pick up on your changes faster.
My next post is about How to Take Product Photos with iPhone and Rank Them in Google.