How to Monetise Content to Drive SEO- and Revenue-Building
SCENARIO
In 2024, a DTC skincare brand launches with a great product, a beautifully designed Shopify website, and a team of writers churning out two blog posts per week. A year later, website traffic is stagnant. The same five media sites and one big box retailer dominate their category keywords and are on the first page of every search. The solution, the team wants to tell you, is to produce even more content. It was authority. No-one was telling Google they were any good.
This is a common scenario for eCommerce brands of all stripes, from founder-led DTC brands to mid-market retailers. Most eCommerce brands' organic search problems are not content problems. It is a domain authority problem - and the only way to fix a domain authority problem is with a rigorous guest posting strategy that will build the external link profile their category competitors enjoy.
Guest posting for eCommerce brands is not the same as guest posting for publishers and software as a service (SaaS) brands. This is because the intended business purpose of the keywords they are targeting is so much more. The stakes are higher because the competition for branded search and product category pages is some of the most well-resourced in the industry. And the link from guest post to revenue is more straightforward than in any other industry.
This article has it all - what eCommerce guest posting can do, how it can work within an overall organic strategy, who to go after, and how to build a campaign that builds momentum rather than dying a death from the first outreach.
DEFINITION
eCommerce Guest Posting - What It Is
eCommerce brand guest posting is the process of writing editorial content for other websites to increase website authority, gain contextual links, and drive qualified referral traffic to support product sales. Unlike guest blogging in general, eCommerce guest posting is tuned to the commercial competitive landscape to acquire the link signals that will get product category, brand and product pages to rank better in competitive organic search engine result pages (SERPs). eCommerce guest posting is also a brand authority play that puts the brand's expertise in front of publications and audiences that potential customers read and trust.
eCommerce's Authority Problem in SEO is One that Content Can't Solve
eCommerce organic search in 2016 is highly tiered. The top of most category eCommerce search results are dominated by large department stores and marketplaces whose domain authority is earned over years of media coverage, links and brand mentions across the internet. They're followed by specialised vertical publications that have earned authority through content. There is little room between the top and bottom of page one for a mid-sized eCommerce brand with a good product but little external authority.
On-page optimisation of product descriptions, category organisation and schema markup for products and reviews is table stakes. All relevant players are doing it. On-page relevance is not what distinguishes the first page of Google from the third in most searches for product categories. The Ahrefs ranking factors analysis shows, time and again, that referring domain count (i.e. the number of different external domains linking to a site) is one of the highest-correlation signals with competitive organic traffic.
That's why eCommerce brands that focus solely on their own content development tend to stagnate. They are enhancing on-page relevance in the absence of external authority that signals relevance to search engines. Guest posting for eCommerce brands is the process that delivers this - every article published on a relevant, high-authority domain is an additional referring domain and a further boost to the link portfolio, which in turn moves the eCommerce web property's competitive position in the category.
Guest Posting vs. Other eCommerce Marketing Channels
eCommerce Channel
Primary SEO Benefit
Guest Posting Advantage
Product page optimisation
Keyword relevance (on-page)
None - guest posting is off-page
Blog content (own site)
Brand authority, long-tail search traffic
More when guest posts link to blog posts
Social media marketing
Brand exposure, referral traffic
Guest posting builds domain authority; social does not
Influencer collaborations
Brand awareness, consumer trust
Guest posting also builds link equity - influencer posts don't
eCommerce guest posting
Relevance, domain authority
Unique: increases authority and referral traffic from targeted visitors
Paid advertising (PPC)
Instant results, clicks
Guest posting is evergreen; paid advertising is not
Three things eCommerce guest posting does
The benefits of a guest post for an eCommerce brand aren't often monolithic. When the placement hits the right publisher, it tends to come with three things; and how they interact is one of the reasons for why guest posting accelerates rather than decelerates over time.
Domain Authority Accumulation
Backlinks are the engine of SEO. An editorial backlink from a topically relevant authority site sends a signal through to Google that the domain is trustworthy in a particular subject area. For an eCommerce site targeting a particular vertical - home goods, beauty, activewear, consumer electronics - backlinks from high-authority publications in that vertical are the quickest path to domain authority needed to compete for competitive product keywords. As Moz's research of Domain Authority (DA) shows, the quality and topical relevance of the referring domains is more important than the quantity. A dozen editorial links from DA 50+ relevant publishers will have a greater impact on rankings than 50 from non-relevant or low-quality publishers.
Qualified Referral Traffic
Unlike purely link building-focused backlinking strategies, eCommerce guest posting on the right publishers is a mechanism for delivering qualified referral traffic. A beauty product brand publishing on a beauty editorial site reaches an audience interested in the subject matter. A sports equipment brand guest posting on a health and performance publication targets prospective buyers at the point of purchase consideration - rather than the cold audience of an advertisement. Guest post referral traffic is never huge, but its conversion rate is often above average because the visitors are qualified audience members.
Brand Authority and Purchase Trust
In crowded eCommerce segments, brand trust signals generated outside of the company's digital and social presence play an ever greater role in the purchase decision. A direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand whose founders, buyers or specialists are often featured in industry publications is not seen in the same light by a shopper as a brand that only has a presence on its own website and social media platforms. Guest posting delivers an indelible record of brand expertise that's published across the internet, a record that supports both brand search volume growth and the trust-building that eases the path to conversion.
Publisher Targeting: An eCommerce Framework
The choice of publisher is where most eCommerce guest posting strategies are either successful or not prior to the first article being published. The temptation to reach for the publishers with the strongest domain authority is wrongheaded. An eCommerce brand needs a publisher with authority, topicality and user commercial intent - someone whose audience is looking to buy a product in your category.
The Three-Tier Publisher Model
An effective eCommerce guest posting campaign allocates resources among three tiers of publisher, each playing a role in the link portfolio.
Tier
DA / DR Range
Best For
Example Niches
Tier 1 — Authority
DA 60+
Domain authority, brand authority, credibility
National retail media, national trade publications, category leaders
Tier 1 placements shift domain authority metrics and have the greatest impact on rankings for competitive keywords in the category. They take the most editorial resources, the best hook and the most time. Tier 2 placements are consistently topical, and are the "bread and butter" of a successful campaign - accessible enough to ensure product velocity, but credible enough to provide link equity. Tier 3 placements are particularly useful for direct referral traffic and brand awareness in the reader's product category discovery process.
How to evaluate a publisher beyond DA
Moz's Domain Authority (DA) and Ahrefs's Domain Rating (DR) are invaluable tools but they are not the full story. A legitimate eCommerce guest post publisher should be showing growth in organic traffic, rather than flat or declining traffic, active user interaction and engagement rather than a dead audience built up from past activity, an editorial process that rejects more than 50% of what it receives, and a backlink profile that does not indicate link network membership.
A two-minute check of a target publisher's organic traffic growth in Ahrefs Site Explorer constantly turns up sites with high DA scores but no actual traffic; either the site is a zombie or recovering from a penalty. Guest posting to such a site will give the appearance of a DA score but none of the real ranking authority from being published editorially.
Content Strategy: What eCommerce Brands Should Write
The content problem for eCommerce brands in guest posting is an instinctive conflict between what they want to write - our product is the solution to this problem - and what editors and readers will tolerate and appreciate. This conflict is neatly resolved by writing from the perspective of the publisher's audience, rather than the brand's bottom line.
eCommerce brands' most consistently successful guest post formats are category expertise articles; articles that answer a question, decision making criteria, or knowledge gap in the product vertical without focusing on the brand. A home furnishings brand publishing an article about how to judge the quality of upholstery fabrics is not advertising; it is valuable content for the publisher's readers, and it places the brand in the position of expertise in exactly the area that readers want when making a purchase decision. The link back to the brand's category page, or to a category-specific product guide, confirms the author's expertise.
Trend and data articles work exceptionally well in eCommerce. Feeding in proprietary sales data, search trends, or original research studies creates material that other sites will refer to and backlink - creating secondary links that compound the value of the initial link. In 2026, with AI-generated content raising the bar for what constitutes valuable content, original data is one of the few things that eCommerce brands can bring to the guest post.
It's important to know what not to do. Guest posts that promote products in a salesy way, reference price comparisons, or are written as heavily disguised advertorials won't be published by quality publications, and they aren't worth the time and effort it takes to produce them because they won't deliver the editorial link equity that makes the programme worthwhile. The voice of the brand in a guest post should be the voice of a market expert, not the voice of a sales team.
Linking Strategy: Best Practices for Guest Post to eCommerce
The guest post link is the technical conduit through which the SEO benefit transfers, and the decision as to which page to link, with which anchor text, and to what type of page affects which pages in the eCommerce domain benefit from the guest post.
For most eCommerce brands, the most valuable link targets in the eCommerce domain are category pages - the URLs that group products together and target high volume/high intent category keywords. These pages are especially challenging to rank because they are commercial pages with little editorial content to support them. A guest post from a high-authority external source which links to a category page transfers authority to the URL that needs it for competitive success.
Category pages aren't the only suitable targets in an eCommerce environment: blog posts and other on-site editorial content can also be good targets, especially if the posts are targeting informational keywords and feeding the consideration phase of the purchase funnel. The link from a guest post to a high-quality on-site blog post or editorial article establishes a connection from the audience of the external publisher to the brand's content offering, a journey that precedes the sales pitch.
Anchor text tactics in eCommerce are as important as in any other domain. Variation in anchor text across a portfolio of guest posts (some branded, some partial-match category keywords and some descriptive phrases) creates a backlink footprint that appears natural. The over-use of exact-match commercial anchor text across a portfolio of guest posts is one of the most obvious signals that Google's algorithms pick up, especially in competitive eCommerce segments where Google's algorithms are primed to detect "spam".
Creating an eCommerce Guest Posting Programme
The only difference between eCommerce brands that benefit from regular organic link growth through guest posting and those that don't is programme discipline. An outstanding guest post on a high-authority publisher generates a short-lived ranking signal. A consistent four to eight editorial placements per month on a tiered list of publishers produces a snowball effect in authority that's hard to overcome.
The starting block of a programme is a publisher list targeted to the brand's category. The sites its competitors in the category are guest posting on - an easy task using Ahrefs' Site Explorer to look at the competitors' backlink profiles and filter by link type - is a pre-vetted list of publications that accept placements from brands in the category. These sites are already relevant and interested in accepting guest content - a major reason why pitch acceptance rates are so much higher than cold pitching.
Speed is as important as quality over the long haul. An eCommerce brand that pitches two high-quality placements per week will close more than one that pitches ten low-quality placements, but the one that pitches two excellent placements per week every week for a year will have a different backlink profile to the one that engages in a "spray and pray" campaign. Consistency is the key to turning placements into a snowball.
Guest posting platforms such as GuestPost Software give eCommerce brands access to a verified publisher database of more than 50,000 sites, categorised by niche, domain authority and traffic, reducing the amount of time needed to conduct publisher research for publisher lists. Access to the platform combined with a consistent in-house or agency-based outreach process is the most efficient way to scale eCommerce guest posting at significant volumes.
Guest Posting is a Lagging Indicator of Brand Health
A large part of the reason why eCommerce brands don't invest in guest posting is that the impact is seen as hard to quantify. But it is not. It just requires that we track the right things over the right period.
Domain authority indicators - such as Moz Domain Authority and Ahrefs Domain Rating - are lagging and slow-moving indicators of cumulative changes to a link profile. They are good indicators to monitor annual performance improvements but not monthly programme performance. The count of referring domains (tracked monthly in either tool) is a more immediate indicator of whether the guest posting programme is creating the breadth of profile that is associated with improved organic performance.
Organic traffic to target pages - the category pages, blogs and product pages that are the link targets of your guest posts - is the most important metric from a business perspective. Separating the organic traffic to these pages from their pre-guest post traffic trendline (the history of traffic to these pages for the 12 months prior to the guest posting campaign) shows the true value of the guest post strategy in building visibility. Google Search Console, filtered by the URLs targeted by the guest post links, reveals changes in impression and ranking that lead traffic movement by a month or more.
The direct user benefit of guest posting can be seen in referral traffic from guest post sources in Google Analytics 4 under the Acquisition report with source filtered for guest post domains. For e-commerce businesses, adding a conversion rate and revenue view to the referral segment shows whether guest posting traffic is directly translating into sales.
Guest Posting for eCommerce
The beauty company in the earlier example had a problem. Not a content problem. Not a product problem. A domain authority problem brought about by building in, when you needed to build out. The answer, an eCommerce guest posting strategy that targets relevant authority publishers with editorial value, is slow, but it is enduring. Each link earned compounds. Each publisher relationship matures. Each publication is added to the brand's external category authority profile.
For eCommerce brands operating in a category where the top page of organic search represents a significant source of revenue, it is not strategy. It is the foundation for organic growth. The brands that develop it one category at a time and one placement at a time are the ones that stop spending money to acquire every customer, and begin making money doing so.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is eCommerce guest posting?
eCommerce guest posting is writing guest editorial articles for third-party publishers on the behalf of an eCommerce brand to build domain authority, acquire backlinks to the brand's commerce pages, and drive relevant referrals to the site. It's different to other forms of guest blogging in that the link-building strategy focuses on product category and transactional pages, and the publisher criteria include a focus on outlets that have an audience that matches the brand's target buyer profile.
Is guest posting good for eCommerce?
Yes, significantly. Domain authority, which is built mainly through the organic gain of editorial backlinks from relevant, high quality referring domains, is one of the most important factors in competitive organic product category search rankings. Ahrefs' ranking factor studies repeatedly demonstrate that the number of referring domains is one of the best predictors of organic traffic. Guest posting is the most scalable type of editorial link-building activity that doesn't attract the ire of Google's link schemes algorithm.
Who can benefit from guest posting?
All eCommerce brands that compete for organic search rankings in a highly competitive world benefit from guest posting, but the tactic has the greatest relative impact on DTC brands, category specialists and niche retailers whose domain authority is weaker than their larger competitors. They may have the best products and best on-page optimisation but not enough external links to outrank the larger retailers for high-intent category keywords. Guest posting meets that need.
What content should an eCommerce brand create for a guest post?
The best type of content for eCommerce brands is category expertise pieces that fill a gap in knowledge in the product vertical, trend (and data) articles that offer original analysis or proprietary data and educational content that caters to the purchase consideration stage without focusing on the brand itself. The rule of thumb is to write for the audience, not the brand. The backlink to the eCommerce site should be naturally editorial in tone.
Where can I guest post for eCommerce brands?
The quickest way to find guest posting opportunities is to examine the backlinks of your category competitors in Ahrefs or Moz to find publishers that have published guest posts from brands in your category. This can be complemented with Google searches of "write for us" + your product category terms to find other options. Tools such as GuestPost Software offer lists of pre-vetted publishers grouped by category and authority metrics, greatly simplifying the effort required to sustain outreach for guest posting.
How many guest posts are needed by an eCommerce brand?
This varies according to the authority of the placements, the competitiveness of the keywords targeted and the current domain authority. To provide a rule of thumb, on a domain in a moderately competitive eCommerce category, we can expect to see significant movement (50% or more) in target page rankings within three to five months of six to ten editorial placements per month from relevant DA 40+ publishers. Highly competitive eCommerce categories such as consumer electronics, fashion, health and beauty need high-authority placements and sustained efforts for competitive keyword movement.
Should eCommerce guest posts link to products or posts?
Yes, for different purposes. The best value for money for competitive keyword rankings is category pages. Blogs and other editorial content within the eCommerce site are good link targets when the focus is on topical authority building or referral traffic to the consideration stage. The optimal link-building program strikes a balance between the two targets, with anchor text and URL determined by the specific keywords that the brand is targeting to rank for, rather than by template.
Does an eCommerce brand need an agency for guest posting?
Yes. The basic ingredients are a publisher list, outreach and the ability to produce quality editorial content. Small eCommerce brands with content teams can sustain a process of two to four submissions per month on their own, especially when working with a verified publisher list to speed up the discovery process. For brands that must go faster than that, or that don't have the editorial capacity for an ongoing outreach process, working with an agency or managed service provider provides the framework for the higher pitch velocity needed in competitive markets.
References
Ahrefs. (2024). Backlinks and Referring Domains: Ranking Factor Research. ahrefs.com/blog/seo-statistics
Ahrefs. (2024). How to Do an SEO Competitor Analysis.
Moz. (2024). Domain Authority and Link Equity. moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority
Moz. (2024). Backlinko.
Google Search Central. (2024). Google's Spam Policies - Link Schemes. developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies#link-spam
Google Search Central. (2024). E-E-A-T and Quality Rater Guidelines. developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content
Shopify. (2025). Everything you need to know about eCommerce SEO. shopify.com/blog/ecommerce-seo
