Visibility isn’t just nice to have – it’s essential for survival. Your beautiful product pages and seamless checkout experience mean nothing if customers can’t find you in the first place.

This is where strategic link building enters the picture. But not just any links will do. Ecommerce requires a specialized approach.

We’ve spent years watching online stores struggle with the same link building challenges. They invest in generic strategies that might work for blogs but fall flat for product-focused websites. Or worse, they fall prey to shady link vendors promising quick results that ultimately damage their search reputation.

Sound familiar?

In this guide, we’ll share 10 proven ecommerce link building strategies that actually drive traffic and sales in 2025. No fluff. No outdated tactics. Just practical approaches that work specifically for online stores.

Let’s transform your backlink profile from a weakness into a competitive advantage.

What Is Ecommerce Link Building?

Ecommerce link building is the strategic process of acquiring backlinks from other websites to your online store with the specific goal of improving search rankings, increasing referral traffic, and ultimately boosting sales.

Unlike content-focused websites, ecommerce stores face unique challenges:

• Your product pages typically lack the natural “linkability” of informational content
• Competition for commercial keywords is incredibly fierce
• Different page types (homepage, category pages, product pages) require different link building approaches
• You need to balance SEO objectives with conversion optimization

Think of backlinks as digital votes of confidence. When reputable sites link to yours, they’re telling search engines, “This ecommerce store is trustworthy and offers valuable products or information.”

But here’s where many online retailers get it wrong: they chase any link they can get.

We once worked with a kitchenware brand that had spent months acquiring hundreds of low-quality links from irrelevant forums and directories. Their rankings had barely budged. We replaced this scattershot approach with just 12 highly relevant, authoritative links from cooking blogs and food publications. Within weeks, their organic traffic increased by 34%.

Quality always trumps quantity in ecommerce link building. One link from a respected industry publication is worth more than dozens from random websites with no connection to your products or audience.

Why Ecommerce Backlinks Matter More Than Ever

“Do backlinks still matter in 2025?“

We get this question constantly from ecommerce clients, and the data provides a clear answer: absolutely yes.

Let’s look at the facts:

• Top-ranking product pages have 3.8x more backlinks than those on page 2 or lower
• There’s a direct correlation between quality backlinks and organic traffic to product category pages
• Ecommerce sites with strong backlink profiles recover faster from algorithm updates
• 92% of SEO experts believe that their competitors buy links (making it essential that you have a legitimate strategy)

The landscape has evolved, though. In 2025, it’s not just about having more links than your competitors. Google has become sophisticated at evaluating link quality, relevance, and acquisition patterns.

Consider the contrasting fates of two outdoor equipment retailers we consulted for:

Mountain Gear Express accumulated over 500 backlinks in three months through aggressive outreach. Initially, they saw ranking improvements, but then suddenly dropped during a core update. The problem? Their link velocity appeared unnatural, and many sources lacked topical relevance.

Meanwhile, Summit Outfitters built links gradually through product reviews, outdoor blogger relationships, and expert guides. Their 150 links drove more sustainable traffic growth because each came from sites that genuinely enhanced their authority in the outdoor space.

The takeaway? Modern ecommerce link building requires patience, relevance, and authenticity – but the rewards are substantial.

1. Leverage Link Building Marketplaces

2025 has introduced more efficient ways to connect with quality publishers, and link building marketplaces represent one of the most significant evolutions in acquiring backlinks for ecommerce sites.

These specialized platforms connect online retailers directly with pre-vetted publishers, eliminating much of the traditional outreach hassle while maintaining quality control.

Why are link building marketplaces particularly valuable for ecommerce businesses?

• Direct access to relevant, authoritative publishers across multiple niches
• Transparent pricing and clear expectations on both sides
• Streamlined communication through purpose-built interfaces
• Verification systems that confirm link placements and monitor longevity
• Time efficiency that allows internal teams to focus on other priorities

We recently helped a luxury watch retailer transition from traditional email outreach to a specialized link marketplace approach. Previously, their team spent approximately 15 hours securing each quality backlink through cold outreach. Using a curated marketplace, they reduced this to under 3 hours per link while maintaining comparable link quality.

The best link building marketplaces for ecommerce sites offer:

• Publishers categorized by industry relevance
• Domain quality metrics for informed decision-making
• Content creation services for seamless placement
• Performance tracking and reporting features
• Protection against link removal after payment

When selecting a link building marketplace, look beyond basic domain metrics. Consider contextual relevance to your products, the engagement of the publisher’s audience, and the natural placement of links within content. The most valuable marketplace links appear within articles that genuinely inform or help readers, not in obvious advertising content.

Remember that marketplace-acquired links should be just one component of a diverse link profile. Combining marketplace efficiency with other strategies in this guide will create the most natural and powerful backlink portfolio.

2. Create High-Quality, Link-Worthy Content

“But we sell products, not content!”

We understand this reaction from ecommerce business owners. However, content creation remains the foundation of effective link building for online stores. The key is creating the right type of content specifically engineered to attract links.

Consider the different content approaches for different objectives:

• Resource guides generate links from information-seekers and industry websites
• Original research and data attract links from publishers looking for credible sources
• Visual assets like infographics and innovative product photography earn links from visual-focused platforms
• Interactive tools related to your products build links from solution-seekers

Look at what Swedish furniture brand IKEA has done. Beyond selling furniture, they’ve created comprehensive home guides that address specific living challenges. Their “Small Space Living” guides have attracted thousands of backlinks from interior design blogs, lifestyle publications, and even real estate websites.

You don’t need IKEA’s budget to implement this strategy. A client selling eco-friendly cleaning products created a simple “Toxin Guide” outlining common household chemicals and their natural alternatives. This single piece of content generated 28 quality backlinks in its first two months – more than all their product pages combined.

Creating link-worthy content requires understanding what your audience and potential linkers value:

• What information gaps exist in your industry?
• What data do you have access to that others might find valuable?
• What problems do your customers regularly face that you can help solve?
• What unique expertise can you share beyond just selling products?

Remember that link-worthy content doesn’t need to directly sell your products. It builds your domain authority, which lifts all pages on your site, including commercial ones.

3. Leverage HARO for Media Coverage

Want to get featured in major publications without an expensive PR team? Help a Reporter Out (HARO) remains one of the most underutilized link building opportunities for ecommerce businesses in 2025.

HARO connects journalists seeking expert sources with businesses that can provide valuable insights. For online retailers, this creates a perfect opportunity to showcase your product expertise while earning powerful backlinks.

We’ve seen firsthand how effective this approach can be:

A client selling specialized cooking equipment received a HARO request from a lifestyle writer working on a kitchen organization article. The client provided thoughtful tips along with a mention of their space-saving products. The result? A backlink from a major publication with a domain authority of 86, driving both referral traffic and significant SEO value.

To succeed with HARO for ecommerce link building:

• Sign up for relevant categories (retail, business, lifestyle, etc.)
• Respond quickly to queries related to your product niche
• Provide genuinely valuable information first, with subtle product mentions
• Include your credentials that establish why you’re qualified to comment
• Keep responses concise, formatted, and quotable

The beauty of HARO is its scalability. With consistent participation, you can build relationships with journalists who may come directly to you for future stories.

One important tip: monitor HARO responses across multiple email accounts if you have different team members who can serve as subject matter experts. This increases your coverage potential while diversifying your backlink profile with different names and perspectives.

4. Launch Digital PR Campaigns

Digital PR represents the evolution of traditional public relations, specifically designed to generate online coverage and backlinks. For ecommerce businesses, the right PR campaign can deliver an explosion of high-authority links that would be nearly impossible to acquire through standard outreach.

What makes a successful ecommerce digital PR campaign?

• Newsworthiness: Creates a compelling story journalists want to cover
• Brand relevance: Maintains clear connection to your products or values
• Visual appeal: Includes striking imagery or video content for media use
• Data component: Features original statistics or findings to cite
• Emotional hook: Triggers sharing through humor, surprise, or inspiration

Let us share a real-world example that demonstrates the power of this approach:

A footwear ecommerce client was struggling to build links to their hiking boot category. Rather than sending generic product pitches, we created the “Trailblazers Survey” – documenting the physical and mental health benefits reported by 5,000 hikers across different demographics.

The resulting report included surprising findings about age groups, hiking frequencies, and wellness outcomes. We packaged this with professional infographics and expert commentary, then pitched to outdoor, health, and lifestyle publications.

The campaign generated:

• 76 backlinks from relevant publications
• Coverage in two national newspapers
• Over 4,000 social shares
• A 126% increase in organic traffic to hiking product pages

Digital PR campaigns require more investment than some other link building tactics, but their ROI can be exceptional when executed strategically.

Start small by identifying a unique angle related to your products. Could you survey your customers? Analyze interesting purchasing patterns? Create a visual index of industry trends? The most successful campaigns often highlight surprising insights that challenge common assumptions in your niche.

5. Cultivate Partner and Affiliate Relationships

Your business ecosystem represents a goldmine of link building opportunities that many ecommerce companies overlook. The brands and businesses you already work with are natural linking partners who can provide contextually relevant, high-quality backlinks.

Consider these potential link partners:

• Manufacturers whose products you sell
• Complementary retailers (non-competitors)
• Payment providers and ecommerce tools
• Industry associations and certifications
• Charitable organizations you support

This strategy works particularly well because it leverages existing relationships rather than cold outreach. The key is making it mutually beneficial.

We recently helped an electronics retailer implement this approach. We created dedicated “Brand Partner” pages highlighting the unique aspects of each manufacturer they carried, including brand history, manufacturing processes, and sustainability initiatives. These robust, informative pages went far beyond typical product descriptions.

We then reached out to each manufacturer with personalized emails showcasing their enhanced brand presentation. The result? 8 out of 11 manufacturers added backlinks to the retailer from their “Where to Buy” pages. Several even shared the pages on social media, creating additional traffic and engagement.

For affiliates specifically:

• Create dedicated resources that help them succeed (marketing guides, product information)
• Develop case studies featuring successful affiliates
• Offer exclusive content they can share with their audience
• Consider creating co-branded content that serves both audiences

Remember that affiliate links typically include nofollow attributes, but they still contribute to a natural, diverse backlink profile. More importantly, strong affiliate relationships often lead to additional linking opportunities beyond the affiliate links themselves.

6. Create Eye-Catching Visual Assets

In the increasingly visual online landscape, shareable images and infographics remain powerful link magnets for ecommerce businesses. Visual assets are shared 40x more frequently than text alone, creating natural link-building opportunities when properly optimized and distributed.

The key is creating visuals that serve a specific purpose beyond just looking attractive:

• Comparison infographics: Show differences between product types or solutions
• Process visualizations: Illustrate how products work or problems they solve
• Decision trees: Help customers choose the right product
• Statistical imagery: Present research findings or industry data
• Size/scale representations: Help customers understand physical dimensions

One of our favorite success stories comes from a furniture ecommerce client. They created a series of “Room Size Visualizers” – simple infographics showing how different furniture configurations would fit in various room dimensions.

These practical visuals addressed a common customer pain point: uncertainty about whether furniture would fit properly in their space. The guides were picked up by interior design blogs, real estate resources, and even apartment rental websites – generating 45+ quality backlinks in the first three months.

To maximize the link-building potential of your visual assets:

• Include your branding subtly but clearly
• Make the visuals easily shareable with embed codes
• Reach out to relevant websites that might benefit from your visuals
• Republish on visual platforms like Pinterest with proper links
• Consider creating multiple versions for different platforms

Visual assets also have longevity advantages. While written content can quickly become outdated, well-designed visuals often continue attracting links for years, especially when they address fundamental questions or challenges in your industry.

7. Implement Competitor Backlink Analysis

Why start from scratch when your competitors have already identified viable link sources? Analyzing competitor backlinks remains one of the most efficient ways to build a strategic link profile for your ecommerce store.

This approach isn’t about blindly copying your competitors but using their link profiles as a roadmap to opportunities you might otherwise miss.

We divide competitor backlink analysis into three categories:

Broken Link Opportunities

Broken links represent low-hanging fruit in your link building strategy. When a competitor changes URLs, removes pages, or shuts down, their backlinks become obsolete – creating perfect opportunities for you to offer replacement content.

A beauty product retailer we worked with discovered that one of their main competitors had recently migrated to a new platform, breaking dozens of inbound links to product category pages. We created similar (but improved) content on relevant topics and reached out to the linking sites with a helpful notification about the broken link and our alternative resource. This approach yielded a 38% success rate – far higher than typical cold outreach.

Lost Link Reclamation

Monitoring when competitors lose valuable backlinks can reveal opportunities where site owners might be open to linking to a better alternative.

Tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush allow you to filter for recently lost competitor backlinks. Look for patterns: Are certain types of content losing links? Are specific sites removing links to your competitors? These insights can inform your outreach strategy.

Link Gap Analysis

Identify sites linking to multiple competitors but not to you. These represent your highest-probability outreach targets since they’ve already demonstrated willingness to link to businesses in your space.

For best results with competitor backlink analysis:

• Focus on competitors closest to your business model and size
• Prioritize recently acquired competitor links (last 3-6 months)
• Look for patterns in the types of content attracting links
• Identify the specific team members conducting successful outreach
• Improve upon competitor content before reaching out

Remember that the goal isn’t just to match your competitors’ backlink profiles but to learn from them and build something stronger and more relevant to your specific offerings.

8. Develop Linkable Assets for Resource Pages

Resource pages are curated collections of useful links on specific topics, maintained by educational institutions, industry organizations, and authoritative websites. They represent perfect link building targets for ecommerce sites willing to create truly valuable content.

The key is understanding that resource pages link to helpful information, not commercial pages. Your strategy must include creating assets specifically designed for these opportunities.

A client in the outdoor equipment space executed this strategy brilliantly. Rather than trying to get links to product pages, they created a comprehensive “Hiking Safety Guide” addressing everything from weather preparation to emergency protocols. The guide incorporated expert advice and downloadable checklists without overtly promoting their products.

We then identified 75+ outdoor safety resource pages through advanced search operators like:

• “hiking resources” + “useful links”
• “outdoor safety” + “recommended reading”
• “hiking trails” + “helpful resources”

Our personalized outreach emphasized the guide’s educational value rather than commercial intent. The campaign secured 23 high-quality backlinks from extremely authoritative sites, including several .edu domains that would have been impossible to acquire through other methods.

To implement this strategy effectively:

• Research existing resource pages in your niche to understand content expectations
• Create comprehensive, genuinely useful content that fills information gaps
• Format content professionally with clear navigation and downloadable elements
• Include subtle branding without overtly promotional language
• Develop a personalized outreach approach for each resource page

Resource page link building requires patience and quality content investment, but the resulting links typically have exceptional longevity and authority – making them worth the effort for serious ecommerce businesses.

9. Reclaim Unlinked Brand Mentions

Here’s a surprising fact: your brand is likely already being mentioned across the web without linking to your site. These unlinked brand mentions represent one of the most straightforward link building opportunities for established ecommerce businesses.

We like to think of unlinked mentions as “half-finished backlinks” – the hard part (getting someone to reference your brand) is already done. You just need to convert that mention into a proper link.

The process is straightforward:

1. Monitor for brand mentions using tools like Google Alerts, Ahrefs, or BrandMentions
2. Identify mentions without hyperlinks to your site
3. Reach out with a friendly request to add the link
4. Track your success rate and refine your approach

A home goods retailer we consulted for discovered over 80 unlinked brand mentions across product reviews, listicles, and news articles. Our casual, appreciative outreach emails resulted in 47 of these mentions being converted to links – a 59% success rate without creating any new content.

To maximize your success with unlinked mention reclamation:

• Prioritize recent mentions (within the last 3-6 months)
• Focus on positive or neutral mentions (avoid trying to link negative references)
• Send personalized, concise emails that make adding the link easy
• Consider offering something in return, like social media promotion
• Track which types of sites and content are most responsive

This strategy works particularly well for ecommerce brands with established market presence or those who’ve received press coverage. It’s also one of the few link building tactics that can directly benefit your homepage and brand-focused pages rather than just informational content.

10. Launch Product Review Campaigns

Product reviews from bloggers, industry experts, and influencers generate some of the most powerful backlinks for ecommerce businesses. These links are contextually perfect – they appear within content directly related to your products and often include valuable commercial anchor text.

The challenge is approaching this strategy ethically and effectively without violating search engine guidelines about paid links.

Here’s how to implement a successful product review campaign:

1. Identify relevant content creators in your niche with engaged audiences
2. Approach them with a value proposition beyond just free products
3. Make it clear you’re offering products for honest review, not guaranteed positive coverage
4. Provide comprehensive information that makes reviewing easy
5. Follow up professionally without pressuring for links

We worked with a specialty food ecommerce store that executed this perfectly. They created a “Taste Tester Panel” program, inviting food bloggers to receive quarterly product samples in exchange for honest feedback. The program emphasized the exclusivity and expert curation of the products.

The review requests never mentioned backlinks, focusing instead on genuine product feedback. Yet naturally, over 70% of participants included links to products they enjoyed. These contextually relevant links from food authorities significantly boosted the store’s category page rankings.

For best results with product review campaigns:

• Select reviewers whose audience genuinely matches your customer base
• Provide a complete media kit with high-quality images and product information
• Include unique discount codes to track referral effectiveness
• Consider exclusive or pre-release products to increase interest
• Build long-term relationships rather than one-off reviews

Remember that while the primary goal is acquiring backlinks, authentic reviews also generate valuable user content, social proof, and direct referral traffic – making this a multi-benefit strategy for ecommerce businesses.

Measuring Your Ecommerce Link Building Success

Effective measurement separates strategic link building from aimless activity. For ecommerce businesses, tracking the right metrics ensures your link building efforts translate to actual business results.

When evaluating your link building campaign, look beyond simple link counts to assess:

• Link quality indicators: Domain authority, trust flow, website traffic
• Link relevance factors: Topical alignment, audience overlap, contextual placement
• Commercial impact: Ranking improvements for transactional keywords, not just informational ones
• Traffic patterns: Increases in referral and organic search visitors
• Conversion influence: Assisted conversions from link-driven traffic

We recommend creating a monthly link building scorecard that tracks:

• New links acquired (categorized by quality tiers)
• Ranking changes for priority keywords
• Organic traffic to commercial pages
• Conversion rates from link-referred traffic
• Link velocity compared to main competitors

A home furnishings retailer we worked with initially focused solely on acquiring high domain authority links. While impressive on paper, these links weren’t driving meaningful business results. By shifting focus to highly relevant industry links with strong contextual placement, they saw a 28% increase in organic traffic to product pages despite acquiring fewer links overall.

Remember that successful ecommerce link building isn’t about getting the most links or even the highest-authority links – it’s about building the right link profile for your specific business objectives.

Conclusion: Building a Sustainable Ecommerce Link Strategy

Link building for ecommerce isn’t a one-time project but an ongoing investment in your site’s authority and visibility. The most successful online retailers approach link building as an integrated component of their overall marketing strategy rather than an isolated SEO tactic.

As we move through 2025, several principles will continue to define effective ecommerce link building:

• Quality and relevance will always outperform quantity
• Diverse link sources create the most resilient profiles
• Content-driven approaches yield the most sustainable results
• Relationship-based links deliver compounding returns over time
• Measurement and adaptation separate leaders from followers

Start by implementing the strategies most aligned with your current resources and capabilities. A small business might begin with competitor analysis and unlinked mentions, while enterprises could invest in comprehensive digital PR campaigns and original research.

The key is consistency and strategic focus. Each quality link you build today creates a foundation for better rankings, increased traffic, and ultimately, more sales tomorrow.

Ready to transform your ecommerce site’s authority? The right backlinks aren’t just good for SEO – they’re the pathways new customers take to discover your products in an increasingly crowded digital marketplace.