Off-Page SEO for Ecommerce: Link Building & Authority Building Strategies

1. Why Off-Page SEO Matters for Ecommerce

Off-page SEO encompasses every signal that search engines use to evaluate your site's authority and trustworthiness that exists outside your own domain. While on-page SEO determines what your pages are about, off-page SEO determines how much Google trusts your pages to be the best result for a given query. For ecommerce stores competing for high-value commercial keywords, this trust signal is often the deciding factor.

Consider the search results for "best wireless headphones." Google returns a mix of review sites, major retailers, and brand pages. All of these pages have strong on-page optimization. What separates position 1 from position 10 is primarily the quantity and quality of backlinks pointing to those pages and domains. The page with the strongest link profile, combined with relevant content, wins.

The ecommerce link building challenge

Ecommerce stores face a unique link building challenge compared to content-driven sites. Nobody naturally links to a product page. Bloggers, journalists, and website owners link to content that informs, entertains, or helps their audience. A product listing, no matter how well-optimized, does not provide that kind of value to external sites.

This means ecommerce link building requires a fundamentally different approach than what works for blogs or SaaS companies. You need strategies that create linkable value beyond your products, leverage your existing business relationships for link opportunities, and build authority at the domain level that flows down to your commercial pages through internal linking.

• Domain authority matters more than page authority: Building links to your homepage and content pages raises your entire domain's authority, which helps every product and category page rank better.
• Relevance amplifies impact: A link from a niche blog in your industry is worth more than a link from a generic high-authority site. Google evaluates the topical relevance of linking domains.
• Diversity signals naturalness: A healthy backlink profile includes links from different types of sites (blogs, news, directories, forums), different anchor text distributions, and different page targets. An unnatural profile concentrated on exact-match anchors to product pages is a red flag.

2. Competitor Backlink Analysis

Before building a single link, you need to understand what your competitors have already built. Competitor backlink analysis reveals the types of links that work in your niche, identifies specific opportunities you can replicate, and sets realistic expectations for the effort required to compete.

Running a competitor backlink audit

Use Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz to pull the backlink profiles of your top 5-10 competitors. Focus on the sites that rank on page one for your most important keywords. For each competitor, analyze:

• Total referring domains: This gives you a benchmark for the domain authority you need to build. If the average top-ranking competitor has 500 referring domains and you have 50, you know the gap you need to close.
• Link velocity: How many new referring domains are competitors gaining per month? This tells you the pace of link building you need to maintain to keep up and eventually overtake them.
• Top-linked pages: Which pages on their site attract the most links? These are the content types and topics that earn links in your niche. If every competitor's most-linked page is a buying guide or a comparison tool, that tells you exactly what content to create.
• Link sources by type: Categorize their links by source: editorial mentions in publications, product reviews, resource pages, directories, guest posts, supplier pages, and social profiles. This reveals which link building strategies are most productive in your industry.
• Anchor text distribution: Analyze the anchor text profile for natural patterns. A healthy profile is dominated by branded anchors (company name, domain), with a smaller proportion of keyword-rich and generic anchors.

Finding replicable link opportunities

The most actionable output of competitor analysis is a list of specific pages that link to your competitors but not to you. In Ahrefs, use the "Link Intersect" tool to find domains that link to two or more competitors but not to your site. These domains have demonstrated willingness to link to sites in your niche, making them warm outreach targets.

Categorize these opportunities by difficulty and potential impact. Resource pages that list multiple industry tools or stores are relatively easy to get listed on. Editorial mentions in publications require a story angle or relationship. Product reviews require sending product samples and building a relationship with the reviewer. Prioritize opportunities that combine high domain authority with topical relevance to your store.

3. Digital PR for Ecommerce

Digital PR is the highest-ROI link building strategy for ecommerce stores because it generates links from high-authority news sites and publications that would never link to a product page through traditional outreach. A single feature in a major publication can deliver a DR 80+ backlink and drive significant referral traffic simultaneously.

Creating newsworthy stories from your data

Every ecommerce store sits on data that journalists find interesting. Your sales data, customer behavior patterns, and industry expertise can all be packaged into compelling stories:

• Trend reports: Analyze your sales data to identify trending products, seasonal patterns, or shifts in consumer behavior. "Sales of sustainable fashion increased 340% year-over-year" is a story that fashion and sustainability journalists want to cover.
• Consumer surveys: Commission a survey related to your industry and publish the findings. "67% of consumers would pay more for products with transparent supply chains" generates coverage across business, retail, and sustainability publications.
• Price index reports: Track pricing trends in your product category and publish periodic reports. Price data is inherently newsworthy because it directly affects consumers.
• Expert commentary: Position your founder or product experts as sources for journalists writing about your industry. Use HARO (Help a Reporter Out), Qwoted, or direct pitches to relevant beat reporters. Every quote that includes a link back to your site is a high-quality editorial backlink.

Pitching to journalists

Effective PR pitches for ecommerce are concise, data-driven, and clearly relevant to the journalist's beat. Your pitch should lead with the headline-worthy finding or angle, include one or two supporting data points, explain why their specific audience would care, and offer exclusivity or early access if possible.

Build a targeted media list of 50-100 journalists who cover your industry, retail trends, or consumer behavior. Follow them on social media, engage with their articles, and understand what they write about before pitching. A personalized pitch to 20 relevant journalists outperforms a mass blast to 500 irrelevant contacts every time.

4. Product Review Outreach

Product reviews are one of the most natural and effective link building channels for ecommerce. When a blogger or publication reviews your product, they almost always link to your product page or homepage—and the link comes with the implicit endorsement of their review, making it one of the highest-quality link types you can earn.

Identifying review targets

Search Google for "[your product category] review," "best [product category] 2025," and "[competitor product] review" to find bloggers and publications that actively review products in your space. Use Ahrefs Content Explorer to find pages that mention your competitors' products and have high organic traffic. These are proven review targets with audiences that match your customer profile.

Categorize potential reviewers by reach and relevance:

• Tier 1 — Major publications: Sites like Wirecutter, TechRadar, Good Housekeeping, and industry-specific authorities. These have the highest domain authority and traffic but are hardest to secure. They typically require a genuinely differentiated product and a professional PR pitch.
• Tier 2 — Mid-size niche blogs: Blogs with 10,000-100,000 monthly visitors that focus on your product category. These are often run by enthusiasts who are genuinely interested in reviewing new products. They are more accessible and their audiences are highly targeted.
• Tier 3 — Micro-influencers and small blogs: Sites with under 10,000 monthly visitors but strong topical focus. While each individual link has less authority, these are easiest to secure and the cumulative effect of 20-30 niche reviews is substantial.

The outreach process

Effective review outreach is a relationship, not a transaction. Start by following the reviewer's content, engaging genuinely with their posts, and understanding what products they typically cover. Then reach out with a personalized email that references their previous reviews, explains why your product would interest their audience, and offers to send a free sample for an honest, no-strings-attached review.

Never ask for a specific anchor text or link placement. Let the reviewer write their honest assessment and link naturally. Forced or manipulated reviews violate Google's guidelines and will damage your relationship with the reviewer. The best product review links come from genuine enthusiasm—reviewers who actually like your product will create more compelling content and link more generously than those doing you a favor.

5. Supplier and Manufacturer Link Building

Your existing business relationships are an underutilized link building goldmine. The brands, manufacturers, and suppliers you work with already have websites with pages that could link to your store. These links are highly relevant, completely natural, and often available just by asking.

Authorized retailer and stockist pages

Many manufacturers maintain a "Where to Buy," "Authorized Retailers," or "Stockists" page on their website that lists approved sellers. If you sell their products, you have a legitimate reason to be listed. These links are particularly valuable because they come from authoritative brand domains and are contextually relevant to your product pages.

Audit every brand you carry and check their website for a retailer directory. If one exists, contact the brand's marketing team and request inclusion. If one doesn't exist, suggest it—many brands are receptive because a retailer directory helps their customers find purchase options.

Supplier relationship leverage

Beyond retailer directories, suppliers offer several other link opportunities:

• Case studies: If you are a significant customer of a supplier or technology platform, offer to participate in a case study. Most B2B companies actively seek customer success stories for their marketing, and these case studies include prominent backlinks.
• Partner pages: Some suppliers maintain partner or distributor pages. If you have a formal partnership, request a listing with a link to your store.
• Co-branded content: Collaborate with suppliers on content that serves both audiences. A joint buying guide, a co-hosted webinar, or a collaborative blog post generates links from the supplier's domain and provides genuine value to both customer bases.
• Testimonials: Offer to provide a testimonial for your supplier's product or service. Many companies display customer testimonials on their website with a link to the customer's business.

Platform and tool partnerships

The ecommerce platform, payment processor, shipping provider, and marketing tools you use all have websites with opportunities for backlinks. Check for partner directories, app store listings, integration pages, and customer showcase sections. Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce, and other platforms all feature successful stores in various ways. Make sure your store is listed and linked wherever your technology partners feature customers.

6. Influencer Collaborations for Links

Influencer marketing and link building intersect when collaborations produce content on the influencer's own website or blog, not just social media posts. A sponsored Instagram post provides brand visibility but no SEO value. A detailed product review published on an influencer's blog with a dofollow link provides both visibility and a quality backlink.

Structuring SEO-friendly influencer deals

When negotiating influencer collaborations, structure the deal to include blog content in addition to social posts. The most SEO-valuable influencer content types are:

• Detailed product reviews on their blog: A 1,000+ word review with product photos, personal experience, and an honest assessment. This generates a contextual, high-quality backlink and often ranks for long-tail product review keywords.
• Gift guides and roundups: Inclusion in a "Best [Product Category] for [Occasion/Audience]" post. These pages rank well for seasonal and gift-related keywords and provide contextual product links.
• Tutorial or styling content: How-to posts or styling guides that feature your products. "5 Ways to Style a Capsule Wardrobe" featuring your clothing creates natural product mentions and links within genuinely useful content.
• Comparison posts: An honest comparison of your product against competitors. These rank well for "[product A] vs [product B]" keywords and provide strong purchase-intent traffic.

Finding the right influencers for link building

Not every influencer is valuable for link building. Prioritize influencers who have a blog or website with meaningful domain authority (DR 30+), publish written content regularly (not just social media), have an audience that matches your customer demographics, and create content that ranks in Google for relevant keywords.

Use tools like Ahrefs to evaluate an influencer's blog. Check their domain rating, organic traffic, and the types of pages that rank. An influencer with 500,000 Instagram followers but a blog with DR 15 and 200 monthly organic visitors provides less SEO value than an influencer with 20,000 followers and a blog with DR 50 and 15,000 monthly organic visitors.

7. Content-Based Link Acquisition

The most sustainable link building strategy for ecommerce is creating content that naturally attracts links over time. This requires investing in content assets that provide genuine value to your industry—not just thinly veiled product promotions, but resources that people reference, share, and cite in their own content.

Linkable content types for ecommerce

Based on what consistently earns links for ecommerce brands, these content formats have the highest link acquisition potential:

• Comprehensive buying guides: In-depth guides that help consumers make informed purchase decisions. "The Complete Guide to Choosing a Mattress" or "How to Choose the Right Running Shoe for Your Gait" are reference content that other sites link to when writing about those topics.
• Original research and data studies: Analyze your sales data, customer surveys, or industry data to produce original findings. Data that does not exist anywhere else is inherently linkable because it is the only source.
• Interactive tools and calculators: Tools like a "Paint Coverage Calculator," "Ring Size Guide," or "Nutrition Calculator" provide utility that earns links from forums, blog posts, and resource pages. These are expensive to build but generate links passively for years.
• Visual assets: Infographics, comparison charts, and product photography that others want to embed or reference. Ensure you include an embed code with a source link for easy attribution.
• Industry glossaries and encyclopedias: Comprehensive reference content for your product category. A "Complete Guide to Coffee Brewing Methods" for a coffee equipment store becomes a reference that coffee blogs and forums link to regularly.

Promoting linkable content

Creating great content is only half the battle. You need to actively promote it to the people most likely to link to it. After publishing a linkable content asset:

• Email outreach to linkers: Identify sites that have linked to similar content (use Ahrefs to find pages linking to competing content on the same topic). Email them to let them know about your resource as a better or more current alternative.
• Community seeding: Share your content in relevant communities (Reddit, niche forums, Facebook groups, Slack communities) where your target audience and potential linkers participate. Do not spam—contribute the content where it genuinely adds value to the conversation.
• Social amplification: Promote on your social channels and ask industry connections to share. Social shares themselves do not build SEO links, but they increase the content's visibility to people who do create links.
• Paid promotion: Use paid social or content discovery platforms to drive initial traffic to your linkable content. The goal is not direct ROI from the paid spend but exposure to an audience that includes bloggers, journalists, and website owners who may link to it.

8. Brand Mentions and Social Signals

Not every off-page SEO signal is a traditional backlink. Brand mentions (references to your brand name without a hyperlink), social engagement, and customer-generated content all contribute to how search engines perceive your brand's authority and relevance.

Converting unlinked brand mentions to links

Your brand is likely mentioned on the web more often than you realize—in forum discussions, blog posts, social media, and news articles. Many of these mentions do not include a hyperlink. Converting unlinked mentions to linked mentions is one of the easiest and highest-converting link building tactics available.

Set up brand monitoring using Google Alerts, Mention, or Ahrefs Alerts to track new mentions of your brand name, product names, and founder name. When you find an unlinked mention, reach out to the author with a friendly email thanking them for the mention and asking if they would be willing to add a hyperlink for their readers' convenience. This has a high success rate because the author has already chosen to reference your brand—adding a link is a small, natural ask.

Social signals and their SEO impact

Google has stated that social signals (likes, shares, followers) are not a direct ranking factor. However, social media impacts SEO indirectly through several mechanisms:

• Content discovery: Social sharing exposes your content to audiences that include bloggers and journalists who may link to it. Viral social content frequently earns editorial links from publications covering the viral trend.
• Brand search volume: Active social media presence increases brand awareness, which leads to more branded searches. Brand search volume is a positive signal that indicates authority and relevance to search engines.
• Indexed social profiles: Your social media profiles rank for branded searches and occupy SERP real estate, improving your overall brand presence in search results.
• Customer reviews and UGC: Social platforms where customers share product experiences create content that Google can associate with your brand, reinforcing your entity profile.

Building your brand entity in Google

Google's Knowledge Graph associates brands with attributes like products, founders, locations, and industry categories. A strong brand entity helps Google understand what your business is and what it is relevant for, which can influence rankings for related queries.

Strengthen your brand entity by maintaining consistent NAP (name, address, phone) information across the web, claiming and optimizing your Google Business Profile, getting listed in relevant industry directories and business databases, earning mentions in Wikipedia (if your brand is notable enough), and building a presence on authoritative platforms like Crunchbase, LinkedIn, and industry-specific directories.

9. Measuring Link Building ROI

Link building is one of the most resource-intensive SEO activities, so measuring its return on investment is critical for justifying continued effort and budget. The challenge is that link building's impact on revenue is indirect—links improve rankings, rankings improve traffic, and traffic drives revenue. Attributing revenue directly to a specific link is nearly impossible, but you can build a measurement framework that tracks the full pipeline.

Link building metrics that matter

• New referring domains per month: The most important link building metric. Track the total number of unique domains linking to your site and the rate of growth. A healthy ecommerce link building program adds 10-50 new referring domains per month depending on effort level and niche.
• Average domain rating of new links: Quality matters more than quantity. Track the average DR (Domain Rating) of domains that link to you each month. An upward trend in average DR indicates your link building is reaching more authoritative sites.
• Link placement context: Not all links are equal. An editorial link within a relevant article carries more weight than a link in a sidebar widget, author bio, or footer. Track where your links are placed on linking pages.
• Anchor text distribution: Monitor your anchor text profile to ensure it remains natural. If more than 5-10% of your anchors use exact-match commercial keywords, you may be triggering algorithmic penalties.
• Referral traffic from backlinks: Track how much traffic each backlink sends using Google Analytics referral reports. Links that drive meaningful referral traffic are the highest-value links in your profile.

Connecting links to revenue

Build a pipeline model that connects your link building effort to business outcomes:

• Step 1: Track new referring domains acquired per month and the cost of acquisition (team time, content creation, outreach tools, product samples).
• Step 2: Monitor keyword ranking changes for your target keywords. Correlate ranking improvements with periods of active link building.
• Step 3: Track organic traffic to the pages targeted by your link building efforts. Measure the incremental traffic gain attributable to ranking improvements.
• Step 4: Apply your site's organic traffic conversion rate and average order value to calculate the revenue impact of the incremental traffic.
• Step 5: Calculate ROI by comparing the revenue impact against the total cost of your link building program. Most well-executed ecommerce link building programs achieve 300-800% ROI over a 12-month period.

Setting realistic expectations

Link building is a long-term investment, not a quick fix. Expect minimal measurable impact in the first 1-2 months as new links are discovered and evaluated by Google. Ranking improvements typically begin appearing in months 2-4. Significant traffic and revenue impact compounds in months 4-8 as your improved domain authority lifts rankings across your entire site, not just the pages that received direct links.

The biggest mistake ecommerce stores make with link building is stopping too early. Three months of link building followed by three months of inactivity wastes the momentum you built. Consistent, sustained link building over 12+ months produces compounding results that can transform your organic channel from an afterthought into your primary revenue driver.

Building Sustainable Off-Page Authority for Your Store

Off-page SEO for ecommerce is not about gaming Google with manipulative link schemes. It is about systematically building your store's authority and trust through genuine relationships, valuable content, and strategic outreach. The strategies in this guide—competitor analysis, digital PR, product review outreach, supplier relationships, influencer collaborations, content-based link acquisition, and brand building—work because they create real value for the linking sites, not just for your SEO.

Start by analyzing your competitors' backlink profiles to understand what it takes to rank in your specific market. Then audit your existing relationships—suppliers, manufacturers, and technology partners—for quick-win link opportunities. Build a content engine that produces linkable assets on a regular cadence. And invest in digital PR and product review outreach for high-authority links that move the needle on competitive keywords.

The ecommerce stores that dominate organic search are the ones that invest consistently in off-page SEO month after month. They do not build 50 links in a sprint and then stop. They build 10-20 quality links per month, every month, for years. That compounding effort is what separates stores with 50% of revenue from organic search from those still dependent on paid acquisition for every sale.