Ecommerce: Looking to improve our SEO

[serrahmiles]

I work for an Ecommerce company, we’re a small marketing team, we sell the same products as other websites at different prices, and different shipping rates.

We’re getting a lot of SEO competition from Amazon, so looking to improve our rankings with link building to improve our rankings

Our on page SEO is good - we have many developers on the team who can make changes to the website. Our Site Speed is also quite good. We’re also improving our conversion rate using tools such as Visual Website Optimiser

We’re also looking to improve or possibly outsource our SEO, however we’re not sure if the ROI will be there - as we’re already doing the following link building steps below according to our research

* FINDING UNLINKED BRAND MENTIONS
We’re using SEMRush to find this information. We’ve been actively sending outreach emails to websites that have unlinked mentions of our brand.. So far, only 1 link is approved after many months of sending emails. Some are also asking for payment for the link.

So far:
39 Requests Sent to convert mentions to backlinks
1 Approved Active

* FORUM/BLOG POSTING ON WEBSITES IN OUR INDUSTRY
We’ve been posting to forum/blogging websites related to our business, links are mostly no follow. This method is straightforward, with a high success rate

So far:
174 Blog/forum posts created
131 Approved Active

* REDDIT POSTS AND REDDIT REPLIES
We’re finding existing posts that mention categories that we sell in, and reply. We are still building up our karma on Reddit so we can initially insert our link. We’re using the same account/email address to create these, so we feel that there’s some risk here if our account gets banned

So far:
5 Reddit Posts and Replies

* QUESTION & ANSWER WEBSITES - EG. QUORA
We use Q&A sites like Quora to diversify our backlink profile and drive traffic. Links are mostly nofollow, we stick to questions that are in our industry. We’re using the same Quora account, and feel our account could be shut down

So far:
33 Q/A Posts (mostly Quora)

* BUSINESS DIRECTORY LISTINGS
We tried to stick to local listings (same country as our store) this looked like a no brainer, we've completed 69 listings so far, with about 80% approval rate. No payments have been required

So far:
69 Listings
57 Active (approx)

* GUEST POSTING
We don’t haven’t done any guest posting yet, we don’t have good writing resources. We’re open to ideas here

So far:
0 listings

We feel we're too dependent on these strategies, however from reading various forums, we still feel that active link building is the most proactive way to build rankings. What other strategies do you recommend for our link building that will effectively ramp up our rankings? Thanks in advance for your help!

[jawadsatti]

Guest Posting Best way to market Your site also its good for SEO if you don't have good writing skill hire some one for writing and start posting your guest post on relevant blogs lot of blogger allow free guest post some blogger charge some $.

[JanviArora]

Hi @serrahmiles,

Guest posting, forum posting, Q/A, reddit these offpage activities are really good to improve your keyword performance, but your link building success ratio is not that much. I would like to suggest you keep doing these activities continue with using keyword variation technique.

Aprat from these activities, I reccomend you product listing (Search list on Search Engine), competitor's link building (use Ahrefs tool), and contetextual link (Medium, Tumblr, wordpress etc.). Make sure your anchor text for your money keyword and their defferent variation, also use anchor text for relevant question based keywords (Use answer the public tool to find out the question based keywords).

[SEO.Ninja]

1. Keyword research to find the types of keywords customers are searching.
2. Site architecture based on your keyword research.
3. On-Page SEO through strategic keyword optimization in meta tags and content.
4. Technical SEO to help ensure search engines can crawl your site efficiently.

[mariajonas]

What about social sharing? What about working for brand popularity? The activities that you already do are common for every niche. To get ROI, you have to work an extra mile and see what works best for you. At the beginning, you may try PPC Ads to see user's response too. You may start with Facebook Marketing too.

As you have mentioned, your competition is with Amazon, you already know how tough the competition is.

[John - Smith]

@serrahmiles
can you share those business listing sites? and make sure the on-page is optimized!

[John - Smith]

still waiting for your response @OP!