One Egg Strategy Team
It’s the question every ecommerce operator asks at some point: do we keep building links to the pages already ranking and converting, or push the ones stuck at position 14? It’s also the wrong question. Both motions matter — they just serve different jobs, and the maths almost always favours the underbacked pages. The right answer is a roughly 70/30 split weighted to growth, with target selection driven by three layered data sources, not gut feel. Here’s how to actually decide.
Defensive and growth links serve different goals, and treating them as one budget is how most ecommerce SEO programmes leak ROI. Defensive links protect existing top-3 rankings on revenue-critical pages from competitor link velocity. Growth links push pages stuck at positions 8–18 onto page 1 — where the actual unclaimed traffic lives.
The economics aren’t close. Using First Page Sage’s May 2025 CTR curve (charted below), a page moving from position 10 (1.6% CTR) to position 4 (7.2%) roughly 4.5x’s its clicks. A page moving from position 3 (10.2%) to position 1 (39.8%) shows a similar multiplier on paper — but the cost is dramatically higher (defensive link-building has to outpace competitor velocity to hold the gain), and as the next section shows, post-AIO that position 1 number is no longer what it used to be. One motion makes the quarter; the other makes the spreadsheet look tidier.
For most ecommerce clients we work with, the working split is roughly 70% growth, 30% defensive. The exact ratio shifts with competitive intensity — saturated niches with aggressive competitor link velocity might push to 60/40, but very few sites should ever go higher than 50/50. Defensive is insurance, not a growth lever.
This isn’t a generic SEO observation. AI Overviews have fundamentally redistributed where SERP clicks land, and the redistribution actively favours growth-link strategy.
The data points all in the same direction:
If your audience now spends a meaningful share of its query time inside AI answers, AEO and GEO is the parallel motion to link-building — but the link work below is what gets you cited and clicked from the SERPs that still drive most ecommerce revenue.
Translation: the diminishing returns at the top, growing returns in the middle pattern is more true now than it has ever been. The middle of page 1 used to be a stepping stone to the top. Now it’s a destination — and a busier one than it was 24 months ago. If you’re still allocating link budget on the assumption that position 1 is the only place that pays, you’re optimising for a world that ended in 2024.
Don’t pick targets based on what feels like a winner. Cross-reference three data sources to find the actual highest-leverage page. Any one source in isolation will mislead you.
GSC tells you what’s already earning visibility but failing to convert it to clicks. This is your candidate pool.
In the Performance report, filter pages by average position 11–20 with high impressions. A page sitting at position 14 with 20,000 impressions per month is leaking traffic at scale — every click that page isn’t getting is going to a competitor at position 7. Sort by impression count, not position.
Inside each candidate page, drill into the queries. The queries you want are commercial-intent terms ranking just outside the top 10. Branded informational queries at position 14 don’t need links — they need internal linking and content depth. A category page at position 13 for “[product] [city]” is a different story. That’s a link target.
GSC tells you a page has visibility upside. GA4 tells you whether the visibility actually converts. The critical filter: Session default channel group = Organic Search.
Blended conversion data is misleading because organic visitors behave differently from paid, social, and direct visitors. A paid visitor is a click you bought after they saw an ad framing the offer. An organic visitor showed up cold from a query. They convert at different rates, and averaging them obscures both.
Look at three metrics at the landing-page level, organic-only:
A page with an 8% organic conversion rate and 22,000 monthly impressions at position 14 is wildly different from a page with a 0.4% organic conversion rate at the same position. The first is the link target. The second probably needs a content audit before any link earns its keep.
Pull live followed referring domains per page. Look for pages where the link count is dramatically lower than your top performers’. The gap is the lever.
One caveat worth flagging: link tools commonly miss 15–20% of actual links due to crawl gaps. If you’ve been actively building links — guest posts, digital PR, partnership placements — cross-reference your build records against the tool’s data. We’ve routinely found 20+ documented links missing from third-party crawls for clients with active programmes. Trust your records over the tool when they conflict.
A page with high impressions at positions 11–20, strong organic-only conversion economics, and a thin link profile is the single highest-leverage page on the site. Almost no one finds it because they look at one data source at a time. The cross-reference is the work.
A pattern we see in almost every ecommerce audit: the highest-converting organic page on the site has the fewest backlinks. The mechanics are predictable.
Founder builds the site. Early link-building energy goes to the broad category pages they think are most important — the homepage, the top-level “Shop All [Product]” page, the brand collection. Meanwhile, one specific sub-category quietly outperforms on conversion rate because it serves higher-intent visitors with a tighter use-case match. That sub-category is never explicitly built to. It’s overshadowed by the broader categories the founder has been telling agencies and writers to focus on for years.
Three years later, in the audits we’ve run for ecommerce clients with this profile, that sub-category is typically converting at 2–4x the site average from a fraction of the traffic, ranking around position 18, with two referring domains to its name.
The lesson isn’t that every site has a hidden goldmine page. It’s that you can’t see the page until you cross-reference organic-only conversion rate against position and link count. Once you do, the candidate is usually obvious. Sometimes it’s the page the operator already thinks should be linked. Often it isn’t.
Within a single site — controlling for content quality, internal linking, and technical SEO — backlink count tracks closely with position for category-level pages. It’s not a perfect correlation, but it’s strong enough to predict roughly how much link-building lift a page needs to crack page 1.
Run the test on your own data:
The pages with 10+ referring domains will cluster on page 1. The pages with 1–2 will cluster at positions 11–25. There will be exceptions — content quality, search intent mismatch, and internal link equity all move pages around — but the pattern will be strong enough to set realistic link-volume targets per page.
For context: Backlinko’s analysis of 11.8 million Google search results found the #1 ranking page has, on average, 3.8x more backlinks than positions 2–10 (Backlinko). That’s a between-sites correlation, but the within-site pattern usually holds tighter because so many other variables are controlled.
Anchor text is where most ecommerce link-building campaigns fail. The mistake is stacking exact-match commercial anchors on a page with a thin existing profile — the fastest way to attract a manual penalty or, more commonly, algorithmic suppression that quietly caps the page’s ranking.
Defaults that work:
If you’ve never looked at the anchor distribution of a page before building links to it, that’s the first thing to fix.
Five steps. Run them in this order:
That’s the 70/30 rule in operating form. Stop spending most of your link budget on the pages that already get most of your links.
If you’d like a second pair of eyes on the shortlist for your own site, we run audit calls with ecommerce founders and will flag the highest-leverage pages we’d build to first. Bring the GSC export and the Ahrefs export — we’ll handle the cross-reference. Or, if you’d rather hand the build off, our ecommerce link-building service runs the whole motion — target selection, outreach, anchor diversification, and reporting — under the same 70/30 framework.
For most ecommerce sites, roughly 70% growth links and 30% defensive links works. Growth links target underbacked pages stuck at positions 8–18, where moves to page 1 deliver 4–5x click increases. Defensive links protect revenue-critical top-3 pages from competitor link velocity. The exact split shifts with competitive intensity in your niche — saturated markets may need 60/40, but very few sites should run higher than 50/50.
AI Overviews have reduced position 1 CTR by roughly 32% (from around 28% to 19%), according to GrowthSRC’s 2025 study, while positions 6–10 gained 30.63% in clicks. As users scroll past AI-generated summaries to find source links, middle-of-page-1 results capture more traffic than they did pre-AIO. Pew Research found AI Overviews drop click-through to traditional results from 15% to 8%, redistributing those clicks down the page.
Cross-reference three data sources: Google Search Console (filter for pages at average position 11–20 with high impressions), GA4 (filter for Organic Search channel group, then look at conversion rate and revenue per session per landing page), and your backlink tool (live followed referring domains per page). The page with high impressions, strong organic-only conversion economics, and the thinnest link profile is your highest-leverage target.
Backlink tools commonly miss 15–20% of actual links due to crawl gaps. If you’ve been actively building links through guest posts, digital PR, or partnership placements, cross-reference your build records against the tool’s data. It’s common to find 20+ documented links missing from third-party crawls. Trust your records over the tool when they conflict.
Default to partial-match and branded anchors. Stacking exact-match commercial anchors on a page with a thin existing profile is the fastest way to trigger algorithmic suppression or a manual penalty. Mix four anchor types — partial-match, branded, generic/contextual, and naked URL — and audit the existing anchor distribution before adding more. Diversity matters more than any single anchor.
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