Article's Content
Article's Content
In the fiercely competitive ecommerce landscape, Yotpo has distinguished itself through a robust content strategy grounded in social proof and a clear value proposition.
Leveraging customer testimonials and a well-defined value proposition, Yotpo has crafted a unique niche in the market. Its strategy extends beyond content, delving deep into SEO optimization, including a masterful approach to backlinking and long-tail keyword domination.
Join us as we unpack Yotpo’s multi-layered strategy, a blueprint for success in the digital marketing sphere, and explore the strategies that have propelled the company to industry leadership.
Yotpo: Ecommerce Leaders
Yotpo is a platform for ecommerce companies to acquire, convert, retain, and understand customers more accurately. It offers a wide range of services to its clients, including user-generated content, loyalty programs, and more.
Founded in 2011 by Tomer Tagrin and Omri Cohen, Yotpo’s growth has been nothing short of meteoric. The company has raised over $100 million in funding to date and serves over 200,000 brands worldwide. With clients like Steve Madden, BB Dakota, and Staples, Yotpo has demonstrated its value to the ecommerce market.
But ecommerce is a crowded space with a lot of competitive products. In order to stand out, Yotpo needed to implement a multi-pronged content strategy that made it clear the company is truly unique.
Yotpo’s Social Proof
Social proof is when companies use the opinions or actions of others to prove the value of their brand or product. It is a powerful tool for building trust and credibility, especially in digital marketing, where you can’t touch the product in person. It can mean showing who your current customers are or showing reviews from satisfied buyers.
As a company that helps its customers use social proof themselves, it makes sense that it would play a key role in Yotpo’s strategy. But Yotpo’s emphasis on social proof goes above and beyond what you’d expect.
I defy you to find a B2B SaaS brand that features social proof more prominently on its homepage than Yotpo. Just check this out:
Not only is most of that page covered in customers’ logos, but the second tab you can click on is just for more detailed social proof!
Clearly, social proof plays a key role in Yotpo’s content strategy. That means the company has invested significant resources into making that social proof section of its website as effective as possible. That includes case studies (as you might expect) but also an “inspiration gallery” of how other customers are using Yotpo right now.
The inspiration gallery is especially valuable because it gives potential buyers actionable advice on how to implement the tool. While it’s common for many ecommerce companies to show a few examples of how customers have used their products, this gallery shows how more than 80 brands used Yotpo.
Of course, you can click on any of those to get more detailed information and be prompted with one simple, straight-to-the-point question: Want this on your website?
That’s the real point of the gallery. It gives you the same feeling you get shopping for clothes online, seeing how they fit the beautiful models and thinking, “I want to look like that too.” This excellent tool fits these beautiful web pages perfectly—don’t you want that on your website, too?
That’s the power of social proof.
Clear Value Propositions
But Yotpo doesn’t just rely on you looking at what others have done to see the value. They state their value loudly, clearly, and in as many ways as possible.
That’s called a value proposition, where you explain to a potential customer what your value to them is. It’s where a lot of B2B SaaS companies struggle the most. Don’t believe me? Here’s a value proposition from one of Yotpo’s leading competitors:
“[Product] is the only, AI powered all-in-one reputation and customer experience platform for local brands and businesses of all sizes.”
First of all, they’ve misplaced a comma and are missing a hyphen. But worse than that, they’ve jammed their value proposition so full of technical jargon that it’s hard to read through! On top of it all, they’ve failed to articulate the actual value of the product—what it does for those local brands and businesses of all sizes.
Compare that to the brilliant way that Yotpo integrates compelling value propositions for all of its various tools into its homepage:
Each of its products gets its own value proposition, and it’s instantly understandable. With its referral platform, Yotpo helps you turn one-time shoppers into loyal customers. Its reviews help you turn those shoppers into brand advocates, etc.
Yotpo even integrates this focus on value propositions into its social proof! At the top of every page, its case studies highlight all of the metrics that Yotpo helped its customers boost. That has clear benefits since it keeps readers focused on the outcomes they actually want, not the technical details that are easy to get bogged down in.
Every Customer Is a Backlink
We all know backlinks matter. If you follow backlinking best practices, you can skyrocket a page to the front of dozens of SERPs right away. For proof, just read about how we did exactly that. However, companies often struggle to find creative ways to build up backlinks.
Not Yotpo.
Yotpo’s backlink strategy is as unique as it is successful. But first, let’s talk about why that matters.
Why Backlinks Matter (Really)
I’m sure you already know why backlinks matter, but it’s worth a quick review here to be sure we’re focused on what’s important. Research from companies like Ahrefs consistently finds that the number of backlinks going to a website is correlated with that site’s articles ranking higher in the SERPs.
It appears that backlinks are used as a signal of “trust,” showing that others think of your site as an authority that they can rely on. That’s why Ahrefs incorporates backlinks into the equation it uses for sites’ Domain Ratings (DR). Just check out Ahrefs’ profile for its own URL:
Pretty nice; I have to say that we wouldn’t mind those numbers. Now, what does Ahrefs have to say about Yotpo’s backlinks and DR?
Yotpo gets even more backlinks, but from a smaller pool of websites. But it looks like fewer of them are do-follow links. What does all of this mean? Let’s break it down.
Yotpo’s Backlink Army
Yotpo didn’t get those backlinks by accident. They’re carefully earned with a simple but effective strategy: integrating them into the product. There are a couple of ways that Yotpo does this, and they’re both so sneaky you’ll miss them if you aren’t looking.
First, Yotpo builds a little “Powered by Yotpo” button into its reviews. Now that you know about this, you might notice it the next time you’re looking at product reviews on your favorite ecommerce site.
As you can see, it’s pretty inconspicuous. But that doesn’t matter to Google! What matters is that it links back to Yotpo’s homepage and boosts the ranking of every subdomain on yotpo.com.
Next, Yotpo has an even sneakier way of getting customers to link back to its site:
See that URL? It’s what came up in the bottom-left corner of my web browser when I hovered over a review link on the website of one of Yotpo’s customers. Clicking on it just brought me to a page on the customer’s site, so it looks like Yotpo is forwarding traffic through that customer’s site, to its own, and then finally to the intended page.
The result is that Yotpo gains a backlink as a built-in part of acquiring a new customer. Not only that, but every single page that customer uses Yotpo’s products on has its own backlink. That explains how they have over six million backlinks with only about 33,000 referring domains! Every one of Yotpo’s customers is a member of its backlink army.
No-Follow vs. Do-Follow Backlinks
One important distinction I mentioned earlier is between “no-follow” and “do-follow” backlinks. Those terms basically mean whether Google follows the link and counts it as a backlink (do-follow) or does not (no-follow).
That difference means that many marketers basically think that no-follow links are without value. I can’t blame them—they’re certainly not worth the same amount as a do-follow link. But no-follow links do have their own value.
That’s because a person can still click on a no-follow link and end up at your website! So a person interested in what’s powering the reviews on an ecommerce site just might notice Yotpo’s little button and become its next customer.
But it’s even better than that. Research like this has shown that no-follow links might actually help you build domain authority! That’s because Google knows that no-follow links are still citations, and its opaque algorithm might still be weighing the value of these real links. So, even though only 25% of Yotpo’s backlinks are do-follows, they’re probably still helping the site’s domain authority.
Leveraging Free Tools to Engage Visitors
Don’t think that’s the end of where Yotpo succeeds. The company uses a great SEO tool: tools!
Tools are useful because they attract high-value backlinks and attention from others. They might not get the most volume of backlinks, but the people linking to your tools are likely to be exactly who you want linking back to your site. They can also accomplish other goals, like building trust with customers by providing them with useful resources.
Specifically, Yotpo provides tools that do things like evaluate your SMS marketing messages’ effectiveness and help you envision what a loyalty campaign would look like on your website. Those tools create immediate demand for Yotpo’s products since they help solve problems related to both of those.
Yotpo also uses these tools as lead-capture pages, or pages where leads submit their contact information in exchange for access to the tool. These allow Yotpo to reach out to the people who have used their tools and see if they want to try the product out.
But that’s not all! After you generate a report on something like the ROI of using Yotpo for loyalty rewards, you’re prompted to share the report with others, creating user-generated content in Yotpo’s favor.
To summarize, Yotpo’s tools generate high-value backlinks, build trust with users, create demand for its products, capture lead data, and create user-generated content. That’s a whole lot of value out of a pretty simple campaign.
Custom Chat Help Prompts
At the bottom-right corner of many B2B SaaS websites, you’ll see a little bubble you can click on to open a chat. That chat can be a great lead-capture tool for those companies’ marketing teams, but they need to convince people to click on the bubble.
Yotpo has a great way of convincing website visitors to click on the bubble: customizing the chat prompt to the page you’re visiting.
For example, when I was researching the part about tools earlier and I was on Yotpo’s page for its loyalty program creation tool, I got the following prompt from its chat bubble:
That’s a highly customized marketing program—I don’t know how many prompts the company has, but Yotpo’s site has over a thousand pages to make relevant prompts for.
But it’s a compelling pitch: If I’m using Yotpo’s loyalty program creation tool, it would certainly help to envision what a loyalty program would actually look like on my website. These prompts lead by offering value to the user, as any good pitch should.
Dominating Long-Tail Keywords
Ecommerce tools are highly competitive, and Yotpo’s swimming in a large ocean full of big fish. So, how does it compete on the SERPs, even with millions of backlinks?
It’s tough, but one great way to do it is by targeting long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are basically longer search queries. These tend to have a lower volume of searches and are, therefore, easier to target. They also let you target people looking for something more specific to what you can offer them.
The vast majority of keywords for which Yotpo ranks highly are long-tail keywords with a search volume under 100. But together, they can add up to a high volume of searches.
For example, Yotpo ranks highly for 28 long-tail keywords containing the phrase “consumer decision-making.” Together, they have a cumulative search volume of 2,460, although none of them are especially difficult to rank for. A keyword with a volume like that would typically be tough to target in Yotpo’s industry, but because of Yotpo’s long-tail strategy, the company can do it without too much effort.
Comparison Keywords
Some long-tail keywords are especially useful for ranking near the top. These include low-volume but high-value terms related to potential customers who are near the bottom of the sales funnel—close to making a purchase but unsure who they should buy from.
These potential customers will often search for comparisons between two products they’re deciding between. That’s why having dedicated comparison pages can be a useful investment, especially for B2B SaaS companies that rely on high-value, low-volume sales.
Look at all of the comparison keywords related to Yotpo, and pay attention to how highly Yotpo’s pages rank for them:
Yotpo ranks number one for all but four of them. In fact, it’s never outside of the top two! It’s even better with the word order reversed—with “yotpo vs,” Yotpo ranks number one for every single term.
Remember, Yotpo isn’t just competing with its direct competitors to rank for this term. Review sites like G2 are also angling to be at the top of these searches. But, likely because of its domain authority gained through backlinks, Yotpo can easily dominate the SERPs for all of these terms and control the narrative comparing its product with others.
What to Learn from Yotpo
Yotpo’s innovative approach to digital marketing, leveraging of social proof, clear value propositions, and unique backlink strategy has set the company apart in the competitive ecommerce landscape. The company’s meticulous focus on SEO, which includes dominating long-tail keywords and creating comparison content, has enabled it to control the narrative and rank highly on SERPs.
Yotpo’s method of integrating backlinks into its products and utilizing free tools for engagement exemplifies a multifaceted strategy that other businesses can learn from. This deep dive into Yotpo’s content strategy reveals a blueprint for success, demonstrating how a well-rounded approach can lead to significant business growth and industry leadership. For those looking to elevate their digital marketing game, Yotpo’s journey offers valuable insights and actionable takeaways.
