Improve Your SEO with a Linktree Alternative for your Shopify site
Linktree allows you to put together multiple links to your products and pages on one convenient page and hosts them for you, providing a hub for all the content you’d like your followers to see. This is how they got millions of social media website users (specifically Instagram) to direct all their traffic to a third-party website, effectively becoming a middleman between influencers, brands, and their fans.
Linktree is bad for your SEO
Whenever you use a third-party service to host your links, you are sending your audience to their territory. You are gifting (and, sometimes, even paying for this “privilege”) the entirety of your social media traffic to a website that does very little for you in return.
By using Linktree or other similar services, you are hurting your SEO in a few ways.
- By sending visitors from your Instagram profile to a Linktree-hosted page, people tend to get lost along the way. Any visitor would need to click twice just to get to your actual website. Search engines use the amount of traffic your site receives to rank the quality of it. Linktree is taking those “hits” for themselves, leaving your site less “valuable” in the eyes of Google.
- Traffic from Instagram is better than traffic from Linktree. It’s all about relevancy and Google tracks that. If your site is linked to from Instagram (from your profile that is clearly all about your specific industry), then it signals to Google that the link is relevant and that Instagram “recommends” visitors to view your site. But Linktree content is generic and has nothing to do with your site, so there’s much less relevancy, thus less ranking.
- The overall time spent on your site is much less. Because people first land on a Linktree-hosted page, it’s recorded as time spent on Linktree and not on your site. Google measures session duration which signals to them the quality of your content. The longer time spent on your site, the higher, and more relevant, is your content.
Linktree is no longer your best option!
Read more here on how to add this to your Shopify site.
