Yes, You Can Outrank Amazon.com

Ever feel like you’re up against the “big boys” when trying to get your product pages ranked?

If you are willing to fight for your brand, there are two things you must know and take advantage of.

Amazon does not try to build links because they have built a brand

Amazon has approximately 106 million web pages indexed at Google and they capitalize on it with useful navigation and links on category and product pages. If that weren’t enough they have plenty of affiliate links pointing at specific product pages and they have massive brand name recognition. If Amazon ever wanted more links, they could simply pull a publicity stunt of some kind and the blogosphere, news and media would light up with links.

Someone recently asked if I would share how to build backlinks for online stores today. Here’s what I told him.

Focus more on building your brand than on building links.

1. Inspire and incentivize customers and prospects to share their experience about your brand.
2. Create a unique value proposition that is expressed through content that gets people to share and link to it.
3. Identify the influencers in your market and collaborate with them on key pieces of content that they want to share. Then create it.

Building a brand pays dividends year after year and tends to grow. An easy way to verify this is by tracking the search impressions of your branded keywords from Google Search Console.

Amazon isn’t that hard to beat for specific products

When huge sites like Amazon outrank other relevant sites and pages, it usually means those sites haven’t done much to start ranking for their keyword.

People assume that a big brand like Amazon has deeper pockets and able to outspend small businesses, but why give up before trying? Huge sites like Amazon, who sell thousands of products, are usually focused on their own products because they make a higher margin. They also have hundreds of other priorities rather than monitor rankings for specific product pages.

Build authority and brand name links. These brand name links tell search engines that your site is credible and an authority and they are usually the name of your business linked to your domain name. You can never have too many authority links, but you can definitely have too few.

Don’t think that Amazon and other huge product sites are automatically “blessed” by Google and get top rankings for their product pages. Take the fight to them and more than likely you will win!