Link building is about creating strong, relevant recommendations for your webshop, so that Google and customers can clearly see the value of your content. In this article, you will gain an overall understanding of how links interact with technical SEO, platform, user experience, and conversions, so that you are not just chasing more links, but building long-term, strategic visibility that can actually impact your bottom line.
Link building
Link building is the discipline where you get other websites to link to yours. Not to trick Google, but because links still act as recommendations on the web. When a relevant industry site refers to you, it signals that your content provides value and deserves attention.
For most webshops, link building works best when the foundation is in place. This means having a technically sound site, clear landing pages, and content that makes it easy to say that this is worth sharing. At Mercive, we therefore see link building as part of a comprehensive effort where SEO, user experience, and business are interconnected.
Link building for online store
A webshop is not a blog, and therefore many fall into the same trap. They try to acquire links to product pages that change, disappear from the assortment, or get replaced. This is frustrating for both you and those who link, because the value typically decreases over time.
The smart choice is usually to build links to pages that can last long and match the search intent. This provides more stable link value and makes it easier to manage which pages should be boosted in organic visibility.
Which pages are often the most link-worthy?
When prioritizing link building for a webshop, you can often get far by starting with pages that are stable and make it easy for others to refer to you. These can typically be:
- Category and collection pages that cover a topic broader than a single product.
- Guides and explanatory pages about sizes, materials, and choices that help customers move forward.
- Cases and documentation of solutions that others can reference and learn from.
If you want to work more systematically with landing pages and core services, you can start with an overview of our services across e-commerce and SEO under Mercive services.
Link building in Shopify
Shopify makes it easy to run an online store, but link building still depends on the foundation. If you change the URL structure, migrate, or build a new theme without managing redirects, your link value can slowly leak away. This can lead to a drop in visibility, even if you are still acquiring new links.
When we work with Shopify webshops, we often start by ensuring that the platform supports our SEO efforts before ramping up outreach and content production. If you want to see how we typically think about platform and performance together, you can read about our Shopify approach and partnerships at Shopify Partners.
Link building strategy
Link building without a strategy quickly becomes an activity without direction. You can get links, but you won't necessarily get the right links to the right pages. A practical strategy is therefore about clear priorities and a realistic setup that your webshop can maintain over time.
A robust link building strategy can often be built on three choices that help you stay focused:
- Which commercial pages need to be enhanced, and which informational pages should support them?
- What types of websites are relevant in your niche, for example, media, associations, suppliers, and partners?
- What content can you provide that offers real value to link to?
If you're looking for a good place to start, case studies are often an underrated tool because they are concrete and easy to refer to. You can see examples of how we work with documentation and results at Mercive cases.
Link building and technical SEO
Links cannot save a slow or messy webshop. They can only bring more people to it. Therefore, link building is closely related to technical SEO, especially in e-commerce, where content, images, and scripts often grow rapidly over time.
The technical minimum before you go aggressively to the left.
If you want to avoid wasting a good link-building effort, you should ensure three things before scaling your outreach. It's about making sure that link value can be crawled, understood, and passed on to the pages that need to rank:
- Core Web Vitals and general performance, so users and crawlers encounter a fast site.
- Redirects when changing URLs and structure, so existing link value is not lost.
- Indexing and internal links, so authority can actually flow to your most important landing pages.
If you want to improve the foundation, you can read more about our work on speed and performance at speed optimization.
Link building and conversion optimization
The best SEO effect comes when traffic also translates into revenue. Link building can enhance visibility, but if the landing pages don't make it easy to purchase, you're essentially paying for more visitors who don't become customers.
Conversion optimization is not a one-time project, but ongoing improvements based on behavior, data, and testing. This is how you get more out of the traffic you have already worked to acquire.
What should you look for?
Start with friction, that is, the places where the user hesitates or gets stuck. This could be, for example:
- Unclear message and weak expectation alignment on the landing page
- Navigation and filtering that makes it difficult to find relevant products
- Heavy mobile experience and slow pages that cause the user to give up.
- Content that does not answer what people are actually looking for when they land from Google.
When you solve friction, link building becomes more valuable because the extra visibility often leads to sales. If you need advice on a strategy that ties together link building, technical SEO, and conversion, you can contact us at contact@mercive.com or call at+45 61 60 29 83.
