Backlink Audit
Every site currently linking to your store, sorted: the ones that drive revenue, the ones that do nothing, and the ones that are putting you one Google update away from a manual penalty.
05. Growth
Link Building.
Authority you earn, not rent.
Editorial coverage in publications your buyers actually read, earned, not paid. No private blog networks, no link farms, no scaled-spam outreach that puts your store one Google update away from a manual penalty.
In plain words
Link building is the work of earning backlinks, citations from other websites that tell a search engine your store is worth trusting. Done right it's editorial: digital PR and data stories placed in publications your buyers actually read, plus guest posts, resource-page placements, and broken-link reclamation on sites relevant to your niche. That compounds your domain authority and lifts every page at once. Done wrong, it's bought placements and link farms that invite a manual penalty. We only do the first kind, and we point the equity at the product and category pages that earn revenue.
Target Publication List
The 50 publications your buyers actually read, scored by editorial fit and contact mapped. We chase the names that move trust, not the directory listings that don't.
Pitch Library
Story angles, expert quotes, and data hooks built specifically for your brand, ready to deploy. No mass-templated outreach that gets your store flagged.
Live Placement Pipeline
A real-time tracker of every conversation, every draft, every published link. So you know exactly what we're working on and what's about to land.
Anchor Text Strategy
How we describe your store in each link. Done right, it earns rankings. Done wrong (which is how most agencies do it), it triggers a penalty. We do it right.
Monthly Report
Domains we landed, traffic each link delivered, revenue attributed back. No vanity Domain Rating charts that don't tie to your P&L.
How it ships
- 01Week 1
Backlink profile audit
Referring domains, anchor text distribution, toxic link patterns, and the authority gap between you and the competitors outranking you.
- 02Week 2
Prospecting and story angles
Data stories, expert commentary, and product-led angles matched to publications with real organic traffic and topical relevance, not just Domain Rating.
- 03Weeks 3 to 12
Outreach and placements
Editorial outreach runs in continuous cycles, with earned links pointed at the category and product pages that make money, on natural anchors.
- 04Monthly
Authority measurement
Every placement logged with traffic, relevance, and the ranking movement of its target page, reported monthly in plain numbers.
Go deeper
Both produce backlinks. Only one produces rankings that survive the next Google update.
Digital PR and data stories
Journalists link to stories, not stores. We build data pieces, expert commentary, and product-led angles that earn coverage in the publications your buyers already read. Those editorial backlinks carry real referral traffic and the trust signals search engines and AI assistants both weigh. Before any of it, every target page has to be aimed at the right buyer, the work of ecommerce intent mapping.
The link types that actually work
Beyond digital PR, the durable tactics are guest posts on relevant sites, placements on the resource pages your category already maintains, broken link building that reclaims dead links pointing at competitors, and brand-mention reclamation that turns an unlinked mention into a backlink. Each one is earned on websites relevant to your niche, never bought from a marketplace.
Target pages and anchor text
A link is an investment in a specific page. We point earned authority at the category and product pages that make money, not just the homepage, with natural anchor text variation that strengthens relevance without tripping over-optimisation filters. Which pages deserve that earned authority is decided by ecommerce keyword research.
The metrics that actually matter
Domain Rating is a proxy, not a goal. We qualify every prospect on organic traffic, topical relevance, and whether real readers visit, because a high-DR site with no traffic moves nothing. Ten relevant links from trafficked pages outperform a hundred directory placements, and we report each one with the ranking movement it caused, not just a URL list.
Why ecommerce link building is different
Nobody links to a product page on purpose, and that is the core challenge. Ecommerce link building can't just chase links straight to money pages, so we earn them to the guides, data, and tools your store publishes, then route that authority down to the product and category pages through internal links. It's a content-led model, which is why link building and content work as one system.
Risk, penalties, and Google's guidelines
Paid link schemes and PBNs violate Google's guidelines and invite manual actions that cost more to recover from than the links ever earned. We audit your existing backlink profile for toxic patterns, disavow what's dangerous, and keep the link profile clean enough to survive every spam update Google ships.
FAQ
The ones that earn links rather than buy them: digital PR with original data, guest posts on sites relevant to your niche, resource-page placements, broken link building, and reclaiming unlinked brand mentions. The strategy that doesn't work is bulk outreach for low-quality links, the fastest route to a penalty. We focus on a smaller number of relevant, trafficked links pointed at the pages that make money.
Most link building targets content; ecommerce has to lift product and category pages that almost nobody links to naturally. So the model is indirect: we earn links to the guides, tools, and data your store publishes, then route that authority to the money pages through internal links. It also leans harder on product-led digital PR and brand mentions than a typical content site would.
We commit to ranges per tier, but we don't pad them. A guaranteed-volume promise forces an agency to buy junk when outreach runs cold. We'd rather land two links that move rankings than ten that exist for the report.
No. Paid placements and PBNs are how stores end up in manual-action recovery, which costs more than the links ever earned. Everything we build is earned editorially: real publications, real readers, real referral traffic.
Three things: topical relevance to what you sell, real organic traffic on the linking page, and editorial context rather than a paid footer. Domain Rating is a proxy. A relevant link from a trafficked page beats a high-DR directory every time.
The ones that make money. We point earned authority at category and product pages, supported by internal links from the content that naturally attracts coverage. Homepage-only link profiles waste most of their equity.
Where this fits
RUNS INSIDE
DTC SEO Agency
Runs inside our DTC SEO engagements, where all ten services compound as one system.
SEEN IN THE FIELDFinnish Sauna Store
$260K Organic-attributed revenue
Every service here is one moving part of the system we run at Search Offgrid.