Inbound links are crucial to any ecommerce business because every link to the online store is a potential sale.

Our friends at WooRank recently conducted some in-depth research to see if these inbound links were actually sending users to the correct pages. After analyzing nearly 1 million backlinks from eCommerce websites, WooRank’s team found that 18% of backlinks provide users with a poor link experience.

What do we mean by poor link experience? Simply put, the link will bring a user to a page they don’t expect, like the homepage or a 404 page. For an online business, sending users to pages they don’t want to visit could impact sales (even if it’s not the business owner’s fault).

This infographic shows WooRank’s findings from the extensive link analysis of 1000 eCommerce websites. Check out the full research here.

The WooRank team posed a question in early 2018: how much of an issue are 404 backlinks in the ecommerce space?

Since almost one million of the more than 22 million websites we review is an ecommerce site, we wondered how many potential conversions these sites were leaving on the table because of these bad links.

We looked at 1,000 ecommerce sites with Alexa ranks between 150,000 and 200,000 who also had between 1,000-1,500 product pages. Next, we took a look at their backlinks using Majestic’s API. Finally, we used WooRank’s Site Crawl to follow these backlinks.

According to our research, almost 20% of ecommerce inbound links​ don’t send users where they expect to go.

“For an online business, making sure your pages match a user’s expectation when they clicked the link is a big deal. Sending potential customers to pages they didn’t want to visit will impact sales.” – Adam Lynch, WooRank CMO

By having links that send users to error pages or the homepage, retailers could be losing $0.71 per click​, based on average Google Shopping CPC.

“The points are presented well with solid supporting data from WooRank. Links are a very important element in any SEO strategy and making sure our audience gets the best experience out of them is crucial.” -Sean Si, SEO-Hacker ​

About the Author

Courtney McGhee is a Digital Marketer at WooRank.

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