Affiliate Marketing SEO: Why Not Combine These Powerful Strategies?

The Advantages of Combining Your SEO & Affiliate Marketing Strategies

Combining search engine optimization (SEO) with affiliate marketing is an excellent strategy. You can use SEO to get more organic traffic. However, you can focus on search terms that people would use when they're looking to become affiliates to join your program.

Digital marketers can also target potential customers with more informational content. You may not get the highest conversion rates from these posts. However, you can funnel readers into the sales funnel as part of your overall digital marketing strategy.

Compared to paid search ads, a good SEO strategy can help keep your marketing budget low. That way, you can reach your marketing goals and grow your business.

SEO is crucial for affiliate marketing specifically for a few reasons. The free nature of SEO can help increase the return on your investment as you build an affiliate program. That way, you can make the most of your marketing efforts.

You can create content for every stage of the sales funnel, from awareness to conversion. Then, you can target various keywords based on where people are in the funnel. If someone isn't ready to buy yet, you can get them to join your email list or become an affiliate.

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How To Combine SEO & Affiliate Marketing

When you use affiliate marketing, SEO is an excellent part of your toolkit. You can pay for ads and use other marketing methods to promote your business. However, it never hurts to broaden your reach.

SEO is one of the easiest options, and it can be effective long-term. Once you publish a blog post or article, it can start to rank in search results. As long as you write timeless, relevant content well, it can continue to show up in search results for months or years.

Consider the following steps to help you combine affiliate marketing and SEO. Then, you can reach your business goals.

1. Focus on a Niche

One of the best things you can do as a business owner is to choose a niche or topic that you'll stick to. Your niche refers to the subject you create content on. If you don't have a product or service yet, it will help you create one as the basis for your affiliate program.

You can also use it to help attract the right type of affiliate marketer. Another advantage of having a niche is that you'll have an easier time promoting your products. You won't have to try and market to everyone.

You'll have an easier time creating high-quality content on a subject where you have experience. However, you should balance expertise with available products to promote. Then, you can find various options to help increase your income potential.

As you start, try to choose as small of a niche as you can. Make sure it's not too small, though, because you want enough affiliate marketers to help promote your offers.

After a while, you can always expand your niche to include more content. However, a small niche will give you a chance to become an authority in your space. People will trust your recommendations more, which can help you increase sales.

2. Do Your Keyword Research

Before you write any content to promote your affiliate program, you need to learn about keywords and choose the right ones. As a beginner, it's especially important to focus on long-tail keywords, which have multiple words.

These keywords may have a smaller search volume compared to individual terms, such as the word "health." However, you won't have to compete with massive online publications to rank on the first page of search results.

You can discover this data for different keywords with a few SEO tools, such as Serpstat or Ahrefs. These tools will tell you how competitive a particular keyword or phrase is and how many searches it gets per month.

For your first few posts, stick to posts with a decent search volume but low competition. Those stats will give you a better chance of getting your content to appear near the top of search results.

Be sure you look for relevant keywords each time you go to write a blog post. You can also do your research in batches and save the data for when you're ready to write. Then, you can ensure each piece of content you publish will help you reach your ideal customers and affiliates. 

• Keyword Research Without Agencies: Manual For Beginners And Online Store Owners
  

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3. Create Content That Provides Value

After you choose relevant keywords, you need to write blog posts and other content to rank in search results. While you should aim to promote your affiliate program, you also want to make sure you're helping your ideal audience.

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Answer questions people may have about your niche and a specific product you want to promote. You can write some posts for direct customers. However, if you're looking to find affiliates, you may create content that helps them promote your business.

Put yourself in the shoes of an affiliate marketer. Think about the concerns you'd have regarding your product. Use your content to alleviate those fears, and you can encourage more affiliates to join.

No matter what you write about, make the content easy to read. Avoid technical language, and try not to use the passive voice. The more engaging your writing is, the more likely people will stick around.

As a company using affiliate marketing, you can also share this content with your affiliates so that when they talk about your product, everything they say is correct. To help even more, create a separate section or email list for affiliates so you don't overwhelm customers.

4. Optimize Your New & Existing Content

To actually implement the SEO part of affiliate marketing SEO, you need to optimize your content for search engines. Make sure you use a suitable keyword and include it in the post title, body text, and URL slug.

When relevant, you can also add images to help break up the text. Images are helpful when reviewing a physical product. You can showcase what the product looks like in your space to help promote it to readers.

Another way to break up long blocks of text is to keep your paragraphs short. You can also incorporate bullet lists to:

• Catch the reader's attention;
  
• Share quick tidbits of information;
  
• Add additional formatting to the article.
  

SEO best practices can change regularly, so follow the updates from Google. Use those news blasts to inform your SEO strategy going forward.

After a few months to a year, go back through your older blog posts. See what posts are ranking in search and which aren't. For posts that aren't ranking highly, you can update them with photos, new formatting, and a better keyword to see if that improves the link's position.

You should also update any affiliate posts whenever you update the product or service. Make sure you inform your affiliates of these changes so they can update their content accordingly.

5. Add Just Enough Nofollow Affiliate Links to Your Blog Posts

Before you publish your next post, you'll want to add some links. You'll want to add enough links to make it easy for your readers to click on the link to the product they want. It also helps to link to the signup page for your affiliate program to help prospective affiliates join.

On the other hand, including too many links can harm your blog post's SEO. Search engines may think you only have a little value to offer if you link externally too much.

Luckily, this is where nofollow links come in. A nofollow link has a particular setting that doesn't officially endorse the content you link to. SEO experts recommend tagging affiliate links this way to avoid a penalty from Google, but you can use the tag on any link.

That can keep from showing the search engine that your content is "thin" and doesn't provide value. You can link to however many pages or products you need to in your post, and you shouldn't have a problem getting the content to rank in search results.

Since there's no single number of links you can add, experiment with it. Try adding more links to one post that already does well. You can add fewer links to other high-performing posts, and you can see which posts continue to perform better.

6. Gain Backlinks To Boost Your Website Authority

To help with the SEO part of affiliate marketing SEO, you should get backlinks. This is when another website links to your website in its content. Ideally, you'd get backlinks from websites in your niche that have a lot of traffic or high domain authority.

That means Google trusts those websites to provide value. Getting a link from an authoritative site can increase your SEO, which can help you get even more organic traffic.

As a business with an affiliate program, you'd get most of your backlinks from affiliate marketers. Whenever an affiliate publishes a new blog post, they'll include the specific link to earn their commission.

However, you may want to be picky about who you approve for your affiliate program. If you get links from spammy websites, Google won't trust those links. Even if you have an established website, the search engine may penalize you for your backlinks.

Now, you can use SEO tools to monitor your backlinks. That way, you can learn when a spammy website links to your site, and you can ask them to remove the link. To help this, you can allow only websites with good content and a high domain ranking to be affiliates.

Read more:

• Serpstat Backlink Analysis Tool: A Comprehensive Guide
  
• How To Stop Paying For Trash In The Backlink Index? [Research on backlink index data from Serpstat, Ahrefs, MOZ, Megaindex, Semrush, and Majestic]
  
• Backlink Profile Benchmarking: Measuring your Site Authority vs. your Competitors
  

7. Try for a Featured Snippet

The featured snippet is the first result you see in search results (see the example below). However, it's not the same as a standard search result. Instead, it includes a short preview of the content in the article the snippet leads to.

For informational snippets, you'll see a paragraph or two of text with some of it bolded. You can also find snippets with bullets or number lists. That's especially common for tutorials and other how-to posts.

You won't find a featured snippet for every possible search term. However, they're becoming more common. If you get the featured snippet for a relevant keyword, your website will appear before anything else.

That can increase the chances of people clicking on your website when searching for the given keyword. You can get even more free website traffic if your website gets multiple featured snippets.

You can optimize your content for different types of featured snippets. Either way, be sure to include the keyword in a header. Then, provide value in that section either with a bullet list, table, or a regular paragraph.

Read more:

• Complete Visual Guide to Google SERP Features: What Keywords to Use and How to Get Featured

8. Offer a Deal

You may also want to offer a special deal if you use different channels to promote your affiliate links. You can create something to give people who purchase the product or become an affiliate at a specific time.

For example, maybe you'll send a free PDF guide with tips for using a particular product. Or maybe you set up a private Facebook group for people who buy the product. Then, you can use the group to help people use their new purchases.

You can also offer promo codes and other discounts to your affiliates. Not only will that help you make more sales, but it can help the affiliate marketer. The discount may help your affiliate's customers decide to buy your product.

You can make the deal time-sensitive so that people have to buy right away. Then, you'll need to set aside time to send the bonus or offer the deal to those who opted in.

Be sure you track your affiliate link stats and get the details of whoever bought through your link. You can use this data for your own marketing, but you can also provide it to your affiliates. Then, they'll know what worked, and they can do more of that to increase sales.

9. Cross-Promote Your Content On Your Different Channels

Your website is an excellent place to use SEO for your affiliate marketing endeavors. However, you may want to use other digital channels to promote that content.

For example, you can share a quick tip in your next few social media posts. Then, you can link back to the full blog post in case people want to learn more, buy the product, or become an affiliate.

If you prefer email marketing, you can also link to your blog posts in each email. Share a short excerpt of the full blog post, and encourage people to click to read the whole thing.

Cross-promotion is an excellent way to get more eyes on your content. Plus, you can increase the number of times one follower sees the content.

Sometimes, it can take as many as seven times for someone to see your content before they take action. The more you get your content in front of people, the easier it will be to move them through your affiliate marketing sales funnel.

10. Track Your Successes & Learn From Any Failures

Regardless of how you promote your affiliate content, you need to track your analytics. You should be able to do this with Google Analytics for your website. If you use Instagram or Pinterest, the social media platform will usually have a native analytics tool.

Consider what types of affiliates get you the best results. Then, you can make your program more selective and filter out people who are less likely to succeed.

You can use all of that data to determine if you're on track to meet your goals or not. If you ever fail, you can also determine what you did wrong and how you can improve in the future.

When starting an affiliate program, you may need to experiment to see what works. Give each new strategy a month or two to start showing results. After that, you can decide if something isn't right for you, and you can move on.

Make a spreadsheet to collect all of your sales data over time. You can reflect on your old strategies and note your progress. You can also note what strategies you tried each month so that you can continue to add more strong affiliates.