Selling online does not make a site link worthy. Ecommerce businesses need to engage in conversations naturally occurring around the web and provide content on site that answers questions and influencers customers. The average customer will use 11 resources before making a decision to purchase, ignoring content and targeted outreach eliminates your ability to influence your customers.

1. Attract Links & Influence
Buyers
By Matthew Jackson, Head of SEO Strategy
@M4Jackson

2. Apologies
≠

3. What are we talking about?
Ecommerce sites have a difficult task in the modern search
landscape.
Selling a product does not make you link-worthy
• How it has worked in the past
• How it works now
• What can we do to make you link-worthy?

4. Category Links Rankings
Ecommerce SEO In 2002-2011

5. It worked#1
Google is was stupid
Everybody was doing it
But mainly, it was cheap!
#2
#3
#4

6. This categorically does not
work anymore

7. If this is your strategy,
please STOP.

8. Unnatural Links
Bad Strategy
Penguin 2.0

9. But also because…..
• Disavow data
• Devaluation of other signals
• Network discovery
• Webmasters are more inclined to report

10. The current
CITATIONS
BUILD
CONVERSATIONS
NEWS
Sentiment
SOCIAL
Authority
Relevance
Freshness
is listening to…
DESIGN
CONTENT
BLOG
Engagement
Satisfaction
Structure
Quality

11. The Future (& present) of SEO

12. Google’s thoughts
Want to sell products?
- Adwords
- Google shopping
- AKA: You pay us for it
Want to rank organically?
- Add value
- Become a brand (the result people want)
- AKA: Pay someone else for it

14. Put your site at the centre of
Feeds the

15. This gives you two key benefits
#1 Gets you in the conversation
#2 Makes you worth talking about

16. You have to promote

17. Your new link strategy
• Create something to talk about
• Promote to a relevant audience
• Be a part of the conversation

18. Don’t worry about…
• Anchor text
• If the content is related to commercial products, the anchor text will
generate itself
• Keyword relevance
• Create content to be proud of sharing, not content to boost rankings
• Target pages (unless it’s based on link worthiness)
• Build your brand, build overall site authority, rankings will come

19. Biggest challenge for ecommerce
You need
a new
approach

20. Publishers are becoming retailers &
vice versa

21. A few tips…

22. Pay a popular writer#1

23. Paid media = Earned links#2

24. Work with the right people#3

25. Thank you!
Please email any questions to
matthew.jackson@branded3.com or get in
touch on Twitter: @Branded_3