Link building is an important process to achieve your SEO goal. A common method is to focus on link building effort. However, it is wrong to assume that link building is the most essential. Some website owners and SEO professionals get too focused on building links that they forget other factors. As an example, for e-commerce websites, it’s also equally important to do other SEO tasks, such as optimizing new product pages, optimizing for long tail keywords, updating to latest e-commerce technology, eliminate duplicate product pages and write attractive, non-generic product descriptions. In fact, if you focus on improving the product catalogue, you will be able to attract genuine inbound links. In reality, there’s little or even no competition for many of your product pages.

Most of the time, your competitors have similar product pages, but they are often plagued by duplicate content issues. If your product pages have unique content, there’s a good chance that you will control the top positions. This is a lot better than artificially try to create inbound links that are essentially not genuine. In this case, you should avoid having a boilerplate link building strategy, which won’t benefit your business at all. Your website will benefit only from genuine inbound links. Publishing quality content is the most genuine way of attracting quality links, more genuine than the guest posting strategy. You shouldn’t waste resources by attracting low quality links that have little or no relevance to your SEO performance.

Instead of starting out with boilerplate SEO strategies, you should focus on establishing a decent-sized audience through publishing good content regularly. You will encourage them to naturally link to your website, resulting in high quality inbound links. Getting low quality inbound links can be quite damaging to your e-commerce brand. You shouldn’t immediately trust any SEO professional who argues that inbound link is the most essential factor in SEO. Instead of doing link building activity, you should do “link earning” instead. It means that for every single link that you have, you actually earn it. In order to succeed, your business need unique selling propositions and this applies in the online realm as well.

Another common advice in linkbuilding strategy is to check the link profile of successful competitors in the industry. Researching the competition should be an ideal marketing strategy and this applies in SEO as well. However, trying to copy the link profile of your competitors can be a losing strategy. Each website has unique characteristic and you need to have a unique link profile as well. Copying things that they did may earn you only limited traffic. If you want to emulate your successful competitors, you may learn from their long-term strategy, instead of duplicating technical details of their SEO strategy. In fact, you should look for things that can differentiate your business from others. If you are knowledgeable and experienced in the industry, it should be relatively easy to find ideas to differentiate yourself. SEO requires common sense and a proper skill set, so you shouldn’t immediately believe any common assumption.