Consumer packaged goods is an old industry that has long relied on traditional marketing. Today, many of these companies are also direct-to-consumer, selling directly from their websites.
If this sounds like you, leverage the power of links to get more buyers to your site and eyes on your products.
Go Long to Get Links
Links that go to product and category pages make sense. Of course you want those, but to maximize the benefits of links you need to be more creative. An indirect way to get links back to what you’re selling is to use long-form, informational content.
This means more than simply having a blog on your site. It’s a good start, but too many CPG companies just throw up a blog page and occasionally put some content there. To get links that are effective, you need to create more in-depth pieces that people really want to read and link to.
For a good example of companies doing this, check out the blogs at Republic of Tea and Bulletproof. They post regular, high-quality content that is valuable to people interested in tea and nutritional supplements. So how do you get links this way? Follow these steps:
- Create great content. The downside to this strategy is that you must invest time, money, and expertise in developing truly great content. It should be valuable, relevant, authoritative, and highly sharable. For ideas, use SEO tools to find competitor pages that are getting traffic and links. Create something similar but better than what they have.
- Find sites to link to your content. Start with those competitor pages getting links. Select the best referring domains and target them for outreach. Use your favorite SEO tool to research sites ranking for your keywords and to hunt down authors that write about similar content.
- Reach out for links. With a list of prospects in hand, reach out and ask for a link. Personalize the messages for the best results. Let each prospect know exactly why they should be interested in your link: you’re providing in-depth, valuable content their readers will enjoy.
- Link to your products. Once you have external links to your content pages, link those to your product and category pages to direct potential buyers.
Give Them Something to Talk About
As a direct-to-consumer site you have a great opportunity to build links through brand mentions. If you’re selling online, chances are other domains and pages have been talking about your brand or products, with or without a link. Find those unlinked brand mentions, and you have a great target for a new link.
It’s easy to find unlinked brand mentions with SEO tools you probably have. In Ahrefs Content Explorer, for example, enter: “your brand name” -site:yoursite.com. This will search for mentions of your brand that don’t include your actual site. Filter the results by domain authority and organic search to target only the best pages.
You can then export the list to another tool—Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider or Scrapebox’s free link checker tool—and find the mentions that have no links. Reach out to those sites, which are clearly interested in your brand, and offer to put in a link.
Leverage Distributors
You probably sell on other sites too, not just your own. These can be additional resources for links. Reach out to those distributor sites to ask for links. It benefits them as well as your business. One great way to do this is to propose a guest post. Offer some content their readers will like and include a link back to one of your target pages.
Try offering up a case study, a staple of marketing that can work to your advantage. It should be a story, not a boring writeup, about how someone benefitted from, or solved a problem with, your product.
You can find a subject for a case study by looking at customers who have bought your product and left positive, detailed reviews. For example, if you sell women’s shaving products, maybe someone left a review describing your razors and shaving creams. They struggled to find products that didn’t irritate their skin, and yours was different. Reach out to that customer and request details and permission to write up their story.
Let Brand Ambassadors Lend an Assist
Influencers in your niche are likely to provide links, so seek them out. Several SEO tools can help you find influencers. Use Google search operators to narrow down pages on social media sites by topic and number of followers, for instance. BuzzSumo also has a good search tool specifically for finding influencers.
When reaching out to influencers, have something to offer: a product sample they can use and review or a coupon code to share with followers. If you are providing a free sample, make sure they follow guidelines by marking the review as sponsored content. You can both get into trouble otherwise.
Diversify Your Links
There are many ways to get links back to your site. For the competitive CPG and D2C market, you need to get creative and diversify. Try all these strategies for placing links in a variety of locations for the best results.
