One of the most popular ways webmasters monetize their websites is affiliate marketing. Even better: With a couple of SEO tips for affiliate marketing you can generate targeted traffic without paying for expensive ads.
Unlike the conventional way of hanging some AdSense banners on your website, affiliate marketing allows you to promote products you believe in.
Affiliate marketing refers to the act of promoting someone else’s services or products with the benefit of having commissions earned when your audience purchases the product or service, clicks on a particular link or performs the desired action.
It is pretty easy to get into affiliate marketing, thanks to the fact that there are numerous affiliate networks available. On the other hand, affiliate marketing success is largely dependent on SEO for affiliate marketing because search engines are key referral traffic drivers to these websites.
As such, this article focuses on giving you SEO tips for affiliate marketing to help you blend affiliate marketing and SEO strategies in the most effective way.
Contents
#1: Pick the right niche for your SEO affiliate marketing journey
Choosing the right niche will help you win half the battle even before you lay out any other marketing strategy. Selecting a niche that you are passionate about is a great starting point.
This is because you will never run out of quality content to present to your audience. If you pick a niche you’re not interested in – it’ll be difficult to stay motivated and produce content.
However, this is not necessarily enough to thrive in this industry. You also need to find out whether there is a huge demand for what you want to market.
A great way to find the right niche is to carry out keyword volume research. If you find out that there are minimal searches on a particular keyword, that means it isn’t a profitable niche. Work only with niches that are in demand but don’t have too much competition either.
#2: Choose an Appropriate Domain Name
This is a huge factor when it comes to SEO for affiliate marketing because it can determine the success or failure of your website. The basic principle here is usually to have a domain name that is easy to remember.
Besides, you can opt to go with a domain name you make a brand out of, or even a keyword specific domain name. Each option has the potential to earn money and also has its own advantages. The benefit of building a so-called authority site (main website)is that you can always work on it to get good returns in the long run.
If you opt for a niche keyword specific domain, you can make cash much faster. However, in case the market trends change and the keyword demand fizzles out; this can kick you out of business.
The bottom line here is that there is no right or wrong way. It all depends on what you want to achieve in the long run and in the short term.
Besides that Google can penalize you if you choose the keyword you want to rank for as your domain name. Over-optimizing isn’t the right strategy, your approach should look natural.
Also, take a look at the terms of your affiliate company. A lot of them don’t allow to piggyback on their brand. So choose a domain name that’s relevant but not exactly the keyword.
#3: Before optimizing for search engines, create Quality Content
This is one of the best SEO tips for affiliate marketing you will ever come across because SEO is all about content. Creating content on a regular basis that is sprinkled with a mix of the right keywords is a safe way to attract more organic search traffic.
When it comes to affiliate websites, the best ways to build strong page content is through blog posts and landing pages.
To optimize your landing pages a solution-based approach is recommended. This includes having the product name on the page title and key features of the product in the description section. Testimonials and reviews also add value to your content.
Blog posts should focus on answering some of the questions your prospects might be having. Moreover, you can link the relevant product landing page to a specific blog post to increase conversions.
Up to date content is also a significant signal for Google search algorithm. Thus, it is important to publish content on a regular basis and also update the old content.
Quality over Quantity! Even though it’s hard to update and post your content regularly you should not just publish something to publish. Or duplicate.
The myth that creating as much content as possible doesn’t help your rankings when you’re publishing some 300-word articles. Especially when they’re not helpful for your audience or even worse duplicated. This can even hurt your ranking position in the long run.
#4: Use The Right Keywords
Keyword research is an important part of SEO for affiliate marketing.
Affiliates that are eager to make a quick buck should focus on using the long-tail buyer keywords. This is also a key tip to your success.
You will never rank for just one specific keyword with a high search volume, at least not in the beginning and not for a decent buyer intent keyword. Your competition is just too strong.
Instead try to go for longtail keywords and phrases, such as questions with more than three words.
Though these keywords don’t bring tons of traffic, they funnel more targeted traffic that easily converts. It is also much easier to rank higher for these keywords. With time you will build authority for your niche and rank for more and more keywords and phrases. As a result, the traffic will add up until a stately size.
There are a couple of sites out there to research keywords. You can use the google keyword planner and keywordtool.io for example but if you want to save a ton of time and effort researching longtail buyer intent keywords I would strongly recommend taking a look at keysearch.
Keysearch is a software that helps you find the right keywords and analyze the competition, so you know if you will be able to rank for certain keywords. There are other sites like moz or majestic, but they are pretty costly.
You can try Keysearch by just clicking the button below.
To counter the effect of low traffic on LSI keywords, you should publish content regularly using different but related LSI keywords on your niche to widen the net.
In any case: Be careful with keyword stuffing. There was a time when frivolous online marketers published content where every sentence was oozing with different keywords.
The Google algorithm does not tolerate those practices anymore.
Instead, you should try to spread relevant keywords all over your articles that actually fit in. Because that is what search engines nowadays look for: Relevance.
#5: Backlinks are important but…
you should do without cheap spam automated backlinks. They do not add value to your ranking because search engines can easily detect them. They are simply a waste of time. Focus more on earning quality backlinks from reputable and relevant websites.
The best way to get such backlinks is to create quality content that people naturally want to share and talk about. Adding the social share buttons on your website will also get your content shared on social media.
Though the social links don’t directly influence your SEO success, they do increase traffic to your website and hence higher chances of getting external links.
You can as well reach out to bloggers and webmasters who create content related to your niche and request them to link back to your website.
Another great opportunity when it comes to other bloggers is guest blogging. Guest blogging can help you achieve quality backlinks through the blog of someone else.
As always: Be careful. The blog or website of this someone should be related to your niche at least somehow.
However, the bottom line is that even though backlinks are important they are just a small fraction of other 200+ SEO metrics. Thus, you don’t have to go out of your way to build backlinks. Quality content will help you build backlinks naturally.
Nevertheless, the software money robot is a very useful SEO tip for affiliate marketing, that can create mid-quality backlinks for your first layer of backlinks.
Meaning you can boost up your backlinks (like web 2.0’s) with a second layer of backlinks. But you need to learn how to handle the software.
#6: Focus on Branding
Established brands thrive because they have built a good and consistent reputation. You too should focus on employing similar marketing strategies and tactics used by such brands in your affiliate marketing.
Create profiles for your brand on popular social media platforms, and keep your audience engaged just as you do on your website.
Work with quality content writers to not only craft exceptional content for your blog but also for your social media accounts, which is part of off-page SEO.
Learn the art of content curation to keep your audience engaged. Fail to do proper branding and proper SEO will have a counter effect on your business.
All you will reap is bad ratings, diminished product image, and failure in your venture.
#7: Have a Responsive Website
The mobile search traffic constitutes about 50% of the total Google searches. With this figure growing each day, the search engines have included mobile responsiveness as a factor in its ranking signal.
In easy terms that means, that your content should look beautiful and readable, regardless of which device, desktop, tablet, and mobile phones.
Another Google update on its ranking factor lays more emphasis on the mobile-page loading speed. Google is basically prioritizing the mobile user experience by including it as a ranking signal and so should affiliate marketers.
Affiliate marketers should focus on creating mobile-friendly websites and also optimizing their page loading speed by using the readily available tools in order to rank higher.
Also read: Affiliate Marketing Side Hustle – 2 Beginners Guides
#8: Bonus Video Build Backlinks
The more competitive your niche is, the more important linkbuilding becomes. Here’s a great video from Julian Goldie on proper outreach for guest posts.
Conclusion: SEO Tips for Affiliate Marketing…Give It Time
Just like any other kind of SEO, it takes time to reap the benefits of SEO for affiliate marketing. If you have done everything right, give it about 6 months to start reaping the benefits.
It can take more or less time than this depending on the niche, the type of keywords you are using and the effectiveness of your SEO strategies.
Nonetheless, it should be the base of your affiliate marketing business because SEO can create a consistent stream of targeted traffic for your offer.
When you start to get traffic, set up a landing page and email software to collect leads and build a list.
Of course, Google can change their algorithms from time to time and maybe you won’t rank as high as you were used to, but that doesn’t mean the end of your business. You just need to improve your rankings again.
These are some of the top SEO tips for affiliate marketing that can help both the beginners and established marketers earn more from the organic traffic from search engines.
If you adopt these practices and strategies with a long-term disciplined approach you are going to reap huge benefits over time!
In online marketing, especially affiliate marketing, you are nothing without prospects. Your prospects are the main source for your income generation.
that is so true, no income without customers
Hence aids to get targeted traffic from search engines.