Any advice for a bootstrap retail website trying to grow our backlinks?

[irishcelticjewellery]

Hi there,

Our online business https://www.irishcelticjewellery.com is based in Ireland but targets USA and European markets.

We have been heavily focused on Adwords as the primary traffic source, and a few months ago attempted to revamp and fine-tune this, which negative results. I believe we moved too fast and changed too many configurations too quickly.

Organic traffic has been neglected, and so has stayed flat at approx 10% of traffic, however analytics suggests that the majority of these visitors have less than 30% bounce rate, view more than 6 pages/visit, and have been the source of more than 50% of our sales over a 2 year period.

Based on this, I see a huge need to focus on organic now, and I'm wondering if you have any advice on building back-links. I have begun listing the website in as many relevant business directories as I can find, and we recently began pushing the website on social media as much as our budget allows.

I'm mainly considering targeting complimentary websites, asking them to link to us in exchange for a 4-5% of each sale originating from their backlinks to us. Is that a realistic approach to building backlinks? and do you think this kind of arrangement will be well-received generally? We're a small operation, with a tight budget.

Also, Is social worth pursuing?

Thanks in advance, any advice is much appreciated.

Alan

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[mcncl]

Hi Alan,

Firstly, do you have different variations of the site targeting different languages? Or by European do you mean English speaking nations, such as the UK and Germany (surprisingly most Germans browse in English). If the former, are you targeting them properly with href lang? From my initial scan it doesn't look like that is the case.

With regards to backlinks, it might be worth researching as to whether or not you could reach out to websites targeting Irish living abroad. For example, here in Australia we have IrishAroundOz, so an awareness in such a community could have positive effects (especially if they have a good reader base). I'm friends with a large number of Irish people and they'd all be more than willing to help out a fellow Irish person if they asked. Try and avoid paying any kind of fee for now, outreach to the right people should increase revenue without cost.

Social is worth pursuing and doesn't have to cost much/anything. Make sure you are targeting all platforms, but Instagram is a must these days and you'd be surprised at how quickly you can build a following and start converting.