Tips & Guides — 09 May 2023
SEO For Affiliate Marketing
Using SEO to boost your affiliate marketing is an essential part of today’s digital marketing strategy. You might own an affiliate website or you might just want to boost your revenue. Either way, SEO for affiliate marketing is a broad combination of SEO — search engine optimization — and affiliate marketing.
In terms of goals, both SEO and affiliate marketing are working towards the same thing: they’re types of digital marketing that aim to direct the right customers to a brand.
SEO defines where a website sits in a browser’s SERPs — search engine results pages. It’s imperative to get your landing pages on the first page of results for relevant keywords on Google search and other search engines. Ideally, you’ll be in the top three, especially if you can get Google to display a snippet from your site.
Affiliate marketing, on the other hand, implies a brand paying commissions to influencers and affiliate website owners for driving traffic from their sites or social media platforms to the brand’s website.
In combination, implementing SEO for affiliate marketing can turn into a powerful tool that will boost advertiser’s conversions and sales and, consequently, increase affiliates’ commissions and income.
Though SEO-driven affiliate marketing is a blend of the two disciplines, it’s still hugely important to have a solid general SEO strategy, and know the best practices for your site.
It’s particularly relevant in the eCommerce world, but useful elsewhere, too. In fact, even recruitment teams should be getting on board with marketing practices to ensure that they’re attracting the most high-quality candidates.
It can be helpful to start with a site audit to get an idea of how your SEO currently shapes up. You may employ one of the free SEO analyzing tools available online, such as SEO Analyzer from Neil Patel, the checker from Seobility, SEOptimer, and so on.
On average, such SEO checking tools analyze your website by multiple factors, such as on-page SEO, backlinks, usability, and more, and assess overall performance score. Apart from it, you may also access the detailed report about the SEO issues on your website.
Even if you’ve got a high score from SEO analyzing tools, there’s still room for improvement. Thus, after finishing the audit, go through the following tips to optimize your SEO strategy and integrate it with affiliate marketing.
Once you have your SEO marketing strategies in place, you can start to implement them for your affiliate marketing business. Affiliate marketing is loved by bloggers as a source of passive income. Once the great content is out there, they can continue to reap the benefits of affiliate links.
So, how best to leverage your SEO efforts to optimize for affiliate marketing?
SEO and content marketing are all about identifying your niche and playing to your strengths. Think about your target audience, and pinpoint keywords accordingly. You’ll need to do some keyword research, and fortunately there are plenty of keyword research tools on the market, like Google Keyword Planner.
You could rely solely on Google Ads and PPC (pay-per-click) advertising, in which you pay for a high position in the SERP. However, this is an expensive way to go about things.
Instead, focus on relevant search queries that your site can legitimately provide an answer or resource for.
This is where knowing your niche comes in handy. If you target keywords with a high search volume, it might put you in front of many eyes — if you get your SEO really on point, or pay a fortune in ad investment.
Even then, there are downfalls to that strategy. If you’re not providing exactly what people are looking for, they’ll bounce from your site quickly. This damages your SEO and means your ROI is terrible!
Instead, think about long-tail keywords. These are much more specific search queries, usually four- or five-word phrases. When you’re ranking top of the SERP for a really specific keyword, you’ll see a much higher conversion rate.
For example, searchers might Google “cloud software”, hoping to find a platform like Dropbox or Google Docs. If you’ve somehow managed to outrank these giants — which is unlikely — it’s likely that you’re not providing the service the customer is looking for anyway.
On the other hand, if you rank highly for “cloud VoIP”, providing that it’s exactly what your company deals in, you’ll get much better leads from your SEO.
It can be tempting to cater solely for the bots that crawl websites, stuffing a piece of content full of keywords and phrases that don’t flow well. These have the effect of making your content — whether it’s partner pages or blogs — feel stilted and difficult to read.
Crucially, Google’s algorithm, and those of other search engines, have the human consumers’ interests at heart. As well as how many keywords you use, they look at factors like how relevant people find your pages.
One of the ways this is calculated is based on your bounce rate: how likely people are to stay on the initial page they clicked on, and your site as a whole. Those looking for a commercial phone service, for example, don’t want to be directed to a page for personal SIM card deals.
An abundance of nonsensical keywords might look good to the robots, but it will drive humans away in droves, affecting both potential customers’ experience and your SEO.
Consequently, your content should be written with humans in mind. It should be interesting, informative, and position you as the authority on your subject. Case studies are always a good way to go. If you’re genuinely adding value to the conversation, you can’t go too far wrong.
Whilst you should be ensuring that you’re generating high-quality content, it’s also a good idea to bear in mind exactly how you label it.
Headings and subheadings not only make long pieces much easier to read, but they also signpost search engine bots to the most important parts of your content. These headings should use significant keywords, if possible. An article on VoIP services, for instance, might contain subheadings on how to set up VoIP, why VoIP is useful to businesses, etc.
Additionally, domain names play a part in how well your SEO does. You need something that properly communicates who you are, while also being unique enough that you stand out from competitors.
Then there’s meta descriptions: Snippets of your content that will show up on search engines. These are hugely useful both for organic traffic and PPC. They tell those browsing what to expect when they click on your link. Make sure these are relevant, as that will reduce the number of people who click wanting something else entirely.
Content management systems like WordPress often have a meta description plugin, allowing you to adjust the length and keywords to best effect.
Writing for the web isn’t ever a one-and-done situation. Not only does new and interesting content have the benefit of drawing new customers to your site, but it’s also rewarded by search engines.
Make sure you’re regularly updating your site. A blog can be an excellent way to incorporate new content if you’re happy with the information on the rest of your site. Do try to keep the information as up-to-date as possible, though. Remember that relevant content is king in SEO.
The great tactic is to update the content that is already bringing you traffic. Thus, take time to revise your best-performing pieces regularly. Add new more relevant keywords, change subtitles if needed, get rid of the outdated tips and data, and replace them with fresh and relevant information.
While focusing on the content of your site is excellent for SEO, you also need to ensure that the backend is working smoothly.
That means making sure your site loads quickly; even if you have to delay picture loading to ensure that content doesn’t take an age to appear. Just as you should run regular speed tests for your VoIP system, you should be running regular tests to ensure your site is optimized for users. Aim to keep your website loading speed under two seconds, and you’ll be able to to improve your bounce rate alongside search rankings.
Keep an eye out as well for coding glitches and broken or misdirected links. The latter is crucial on the stage where you combine SEO and affiliate marketing, as broken links may lead to loss of revenue for advertisers and decreased commissions for affiliates. To spot them, employ one of the free link checkers available on the Internet.
Backlinks are a key part of any SEO technique. Essentially, they’re links from other authoritative sites that let search engines know that your site’s content is worth reading.
When you’re working with backlinks, you need to ensure that the sources you’re being linked to are reputable, so as not to damage your SEO. A high-quality affiliate site can help with your link building goals, and you can take advantage of guest posts to point back to your site.
To make sure the sources are reputable, you may use one of the free checkers available on the Internet. The general rule of thumb to choose the domain is the higher the authority, the better results you get. However, you should take in consideration the average domain authority scores in your niche.
Internal links also work to some extent, though you will need some good external links to position your site as an authority in your niche, whether you’re a small business or a full-time blogger yourself.
Crucially, links from social media don’t count towards building your domain authority. Although the platforms themselves are large and knowledgeable, their users — the general public — have no authority to recommend you.
On the other hand, influencers with their own sites likely do count for a lot, which is why influencer marketing can be so beneficial to a good SEO strategy.
If you’re not achieving conversions, then it won’t matter how great your product, how successful your affiliate program, or how much traffic you’re getting. For the most effective results with using SEO for affiliate marketing, it’s important to optimize your website for conversion.
Combining SEO affiliate marketing with a good ecommerce conversion rate, for example, will mean that people are directed from Google to your site, then onwards towards a sale.
To improve the conversion rate of your website or landing page, consider following these tips:
A good strategy is to reproach forms if you have them on your website. Try to keep the number of fields as minimal as possible, as long forms intimidate users.
A key thing to note about SEO for affiliate marketing is that there is so much technology that can help nowadays.
Quite aside from the specific SEO tools like Ahrefs and Semrush, several platforms are designed to make a marketing team’s life easier.
SEO involves many tasks that need to be completed every day. Many businesses are implementing software RPA tools to automate time-consuming SEO tasks. These are little bots that automate SEO business processes like generating keywords, backlink building, backlink monitoring, and ranking monitoring. This gives your team more time to focus on other pressing tasks without compromising on the quality of your SEO and affiliate marketing.
Meanwhile, sites like Affise can help you to identify relevant partnerships in moments, building your network of backlinks whilst promoting your content to a wider audience. Once you’ve identified potential affiliate marketing partners, you can start building relationships to help promote each other’s products.
When it comes to SEO, there’s a whole lot of data involved. From keeping track of your keywords to analyzing website performance, you can consolidate all this information with a tool Affise BI integrations. These even make reporting on data simple—perfect for both established experts and beginners to the world of SEO.
Written by
Richard Conn is the Senior Director for Demand Generation at 8x8, a leading communication platform with integrated contact center, voice, video, and chat functionality. Richard is an analytical & results-driven digital marketing leader with a track record of achieving major ROI improvements in fast-paced, competitive B2B environments.
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