A few years ago, I picked up a client who sold saltwater aquarium supplies. Real store, real products, the kind of thing hobbyists pour an alarming amount of money into. He came to me with a simple ask. He wanted links pointing at his category pages, the ones for protein skimmers and reef lighting, because those were the pages he needed to rank.
So we tried. I found relevant blogs and forums, wrote the outreach, pitched the pages. Nobody bit. Not one person wanted to link to a page that existed to sell them a $400 skimmer, and honestly, why would they? A category page is a storefront. People link to things that help them, and a storefront doesn't help anyone who isn't already shopping.
That took me longer to accept than I'd like to admit. The pages you most want links to are usually the pages no one has any reason to link to.
Once I stopped fighting that, the work got easier. We quit chasing links to money pages and started building the pages people actually reference, then used internal links to pass that authority down to the products. That's most of the strategy right there. Everything below is a variation on it.
Build the reference page your niche is missing
Here's where I'd spend the bulk of my effort if I were starting an ecommerce link campaign today.
Every niche has a question people ask constantly and answer badly. For the aquarium store it was cycling a new tank, the weeks-long process of getting the water chemistry right before you add fish. Beginners get it wrong, kill their fish, and feel terrible. There were forum threads about it going back a decade, but no single clear, calm, thorough guide that a person could send to a friend.
So we made one. A real reference, long and specific, with the mistakes people make and how to sidestep them. It took genuine time to write and it read like someone who'd actually done it, because I interviewed the client until it did.
That page earned more links in six months than every product page combined. Other hobby sites linked to it. A couple of forum moderators pinned it. One university extension program cited it. And every one of those pages linked internally to the skimmers and test kits a person would need to actually do the thing, which is how the ranking value found its way to the products anyway.
The trick is simple. Find the thing your customers need to understand before they buy, and make the best explanation of it that exists. Patient and genuinely useful. Those pages age well, and people keep pointing at them for years.
Use the data you're already sitting on
Ecommerce stores generate data constantly, and most of them never do anything with it.
You know what sold, what got returned, what people searched for on your site, which regions buy what, how your prices drifted over a year. Journalists and bloggers love that kind of thing because they can't get it anywhere else. A quick post along the lines of "we looked at 12,000 orders and here's what people actually buy for their first reef tank" is the sort of original angle a writer will happily credit you for.
You don't need a research department. You need one honest number nobody else has, and a clear writeup of what it means. I've watched a single modest data post out-earn months of ordinary outreach, because it gives other people something to say.
Get the easy links you're ignoring
Some of the simplest links in ecommerce are sitting in your own supply chain.
If you stock other brands, a lot of those manufacturers keep "where to buy" or authorized retailer pages, and they'll list you if you ask. Suppliers, trade associations, local business groups, the makers whose products you carry. These won't move mountains, but they're relevant, they're real, and most stores never bother to claim them. Send the emails. It's an afternoon of unglamorous work that quietly pays off.
Be a quotable source
The old HARO era is over. Cision shut it down at the end of 2024, then the brand came back under Featured, and the whole thing splintered into a handful of tools like Qwoted and Source of Sources. The tactic survived the shakeup, though. Reporters still need experts on deadline, and they still credit those experts with links.
If your client or their team actually knows the niche, they can answer relevant queries and land links from publications you could never pitch cold. The wins go to whoever replies fast, leads with a specific quote a writer can drop straight in, and skips the filler. For a store owner with real expertise, it's some of the highest-authority linking you can get for the price of a few thoughtful emails a week.
What I stopped doing
I'll save you the money I wasted. Mass guest-post placements on sites that exist only to sell links did nothing that lasted. Buying "niche edits" was worse. Blasting resource-page requests to 300 addresses got me a 1% response rate and a bad taste in my mouth. The stuff that worked was slower and more human, and it kept working long after the shortcuts stopped.
If I had to compress all of it into one sentence, it's this. Make things worth linking to, then make sure your product pages are one internal click away. The rest is just outreach and patience.
What's the most useful non-commercial page on your store right now? If you can't name one, that's probably where I'd start.
