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Building Backlinks Through PR

Almost 80% of the traffic on a website originates from search engines. Despite the popularity of social media and other forms of marketing, search engines are still the primary driver of traffic for almost all kind of businesses. Thus, no company can ignore search engine optimization if they want to succeed online. For e-commerce firms, search engine optimization is more of a business strategy than just an element of online marketing. E-commerce stores still get the best conversion rates and the highest ROI from search engine traffic. Therefore, a sound SEO strategy that helps you improve your site ranking is critical to your long-term success.

Generating high-quality backlinks is one of the most important tactics of an efficient SEO strategy. Google doesn’t treat all backlinks equally. From the SEO perspective, a link to your e-commerce store from Forbes or Mashable is considered as far more valuable than the link from 100 article directories that publish low-quality content. Also, a link which generates high referral traffic to your store is significantly more valuable than the links that are hardly clicked by users. Thus, high-quality links are the assets that you should carefully build over time.

A well thought PR campaign could meet both the goals of building backlinks – generating backlinks from high authority sites and driving relevant referral traffic to your website. Many business owners or marketers don’t go for PR as they perceive it to be expensive.

Here are three strategies to develop a PR campaign that meets the objective without creating a big hole in your pocket:

Give Something for Free
As I mentioned above, high-quality links are valuable assets. To acquire links from authority sites, you need to give something in return. I recommend interviews and primary research insights as major benefits that you can offer for free. Conduct interviews of influential media personalities and other relevant audience, publish it on your site and promote it extensively. Share the link to the interview with particular site owners including the guest and request them to post an excerpt on their site or quote from the interview.
Similarly, conduct primary research and gain insights or the new or latest trends which are not yet published online. You can also carry out an analysis of existing data to derive new meanings and knowledge out of it. Send the research for free to a relevant audience. Media houses, influencers, or other site owners in your industry will publish the quotes from the study or the statistic if they find it useful. In return, you will get not only backlinks but also significant referral traffic.

Contribute to high authority sites
Coverage in mainstream media may be expensive. However, as an expert, you can share your knowledge, experience or expertise with a wider audience on well-established publishers in your industry. Since they have a targeted audience base, your message will reach an audience which may also be interested in your products. Writing guest posts is helpful in generating massive traffic to your site as well as building backlinks. Many marketers just publish one or two blogs on a site and hunt for new sites to get as many links from multiple sites. While this strategy can help you get links from a large number of domains, you may not get the traffic and considerable SEO benefits. Thus, it is advisable to develop a genuine relationship with the audience by posting regular guest blogs on fewer high-quality sites.
Also, use HARO (Help a Reporter Out), Mashable Submit News and other platforms to directly submit newsworthy content to journalists and media houses. Whenever possible, bypass the media brokers and directly build rapport with the audience of large publishers.

Take Advantage of Micro-Influencers
Influencer marketing is a well-known technique to promote websites or blogs through celebrities in the industry. You will find plenty of articles online about how to do influencer marketing to promote your site. I recommend that as an e-commerce site owner, you should use the social communities such as ProductHunt, Reddit, and Hackernews to engage with micro-influencers. They may not have a large following on the social media. However, their reach will be enough for you to build relevant backlinks and drive significant SEO advantage at a low cost.
You can also search for the guest bloggers on various sites and build the relationship with them to promote your blog or store.

A personalized PR campaign can be useful for SEO of your e-commerce site. Of course, you need to be consistent and spend considerable time especially if you don’t want to spend a fortune on outsourcing the content marketing or PR campaigns. However, with the help of productivity and automation tools, you can execute PR campaigns flawlessly and significantly scale your link building efforts at a reasonable cost.

Anthony Bergs is a project manager at writers per hour . He always keeps an eye on the marketing sector to implement the best innovations into the strategies that he builds. He’s always open for new connections and partnerships.