I was working on various SEO tasks for an ecommerce store selling knives. One of the tasks was to share link building strategies. I did some research and came up with the following 9 strategies for this Shopify store.
1.Videos
Most of your competitors are very active on Youtube. Some are running two separate Youtube channels. So, We should be there. Also, we need to break the same video into small clips and post them into Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, and other social media to repurpose a single piece of content.
One competitor Bladehq shared a chart of total views from the single video they created. Please see the screenshot.
Youtube card, endscreen and description section are great to add specific product links and drive customers to the website. We should try these features to increase our chances of improving conversions.
Knifecenter and Bladehq are already using these features. Please see the screenshots below.
2. Knife Finder Tools
A free tool around knives or knife blades would be excellent to acquire customers and get backlinks. Companies like Philips, Energizer, Walmart are using relevant tools to attract potential buyers.
Some knife finder tools already available, but there are rooms to provide a better version to the users.
3. People Powered Forum
User-generated content mediums are a powerful way to engage users. It is an excellent source for search engines to pick up content. We should consider a forum and make it an authoritative source of our organic SEO presence.
We could also turn an individual product page into a forum by adding an option like “ask a question”.
Reddit is one of the top 10 most visited sites in the US. Competitors like Bladehq, SMKW and Knifecenter are frequently being mentioned and it proves their strong presence.
Reddit demands creative approaches to get mentioned as a company. Sub-Reddits like r/knifeclub, r/knives, and r/balisong have thousands of contributors. So, It totally makes sense for us to be there.
Creating a Slack or Discord community for knife enthusiasts would be another source to drive traffic to the site.
It looks like competitors are not very active on Slack, so we definitely should tap into that opportunity as soon as possible.
4. Holiday Pages
Holidays deals are obvious, but if we can create something newsworthy ahead of time it will increase our chances to get attention and earn backlinks.
We can get some ideas from Overstock, Wayfair, and Target’s Black Friday page. Knifecenter is already earning backlink using this technique.
5. Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter
Knifecenter, Bladehq, SMKW are active on Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter. All are among the top 20 most visited sites in the US, so we should be more active there to increase our brand presence and drive traffic.
6. Surveys
Knife-depot has a decent amount of traffic to run surveys. The team needs to invest time in choosing an exciting and demanding topic to run the survey. And then collect and present the data through different channels to drive traffic and acquire backlinks.
Companies like Litmus, Akamai already tried and getting results from this method.
7. Location Tool to Dispose & Sharpen Knife
We could create a tool to guide people to find their nearest knife disposal and sharpening location. It will help people and probably will help us to get some rich backlinks
Energizer USA site has created something similar to find battery recycling location by zip code.
8. Knife Manufacturers and Brand Experts
We need to seek opportunities to create high-quality content and videos teaming up with knife manufacturers and brand experts.
This is a smart way to get mentioned by the manufacturers and their users.
9. Expand Content Creation and PR Outreach
We need to do extensive research to create more link-worthy content. It should be a combination of evergreen and seasonal content. More articles around how-to guides, product comparison, best category knives, brand, and type specific knife safety will definitely help us. We should also invest time in updating old content.
Our PR outreach needs to be better as well. Knifecenter probably is doing some good jobs there. Please see the screenshot below.
And, that’s it. You probably will find some of these link building ideas are useful for SEO. Thank you!
2023 © russell huq.