How to Incorporate SEO into an Affiliate Marketing Campaign

One way people build an income online is through affiliate marketing. This type of marketing involves an agreement between a brand and an affiliate partner. The affiliate partner earns a commission for every successful sale that the brand gets through his or her efforts. Commissions typically come in three structures—pay per lead, pay per click, and pay per sale.

Pay per sale is the standard for affiliate marketing. The brand or merchant pays its partner a percentage of the sale price after a consumer buys it through the affiliate’s link. Pay per lead, a more complex system, drives traffic to the merchant’s website and gets them to complete the desired action. Signing up for a trial, subscribing to a newsletter, or downloading software or files are possible actions to take. Finally, pay per click redirects consumers from the affiliate partner’s marketing platform to the brand partner’s website.

Affiliate partners are often people who have a network or an audience, like B2B marketers, podcasters, direct response copywriters, and video streamers. Affiliate marketers can also use SEO and PPC to promote their partners’ products. If you’re interested in affiliate marketing, here are a few tips to help you start.‍

Choose Products You Trust

‍If you’re a marketer who wants to become an affiliate partner for a brand, you need to think long-term. Are you comfortable attaching your professional reputation to this company’s, or are you in it only for money? SEO-focused affiliate marketing involves facilitating relationships between customers and a business, so you need to be comfortable vouching for a product before sending people your affiliate link for it.

Also, your marketing skills can only go so far. It’s vital to study the demand for a product before becoming an affiliate partner for it. Research the seller as well—do they mean business? Are their claims sound? Is the commission you will get worth the effort of promoting them? Your audience or network trusts your professional opinion, so you should recommend products you use or have tried yourself.‍

Do Keyword Research‍

Affiliate partners need the same amount of keyword research and SEO you put into your website or business. Keywords are an essential part of SEO affiliate marketing—using tools like Google Keyword Planner, the SEMRush Keyword Overview Tool, or the Ahrefs Keyword Research tool will help you find terms related to your affiliate partner’s business.

Also, your content should lie at the intersection of what you and your affiliate partner provide. It won’t do to shoehorn a product or service into a blog post so that you can include an affiliate link at the end of an article or a video. Create a series of posts or videos that can naturally incorporate your keywords and your affiliate partner’s.‍

Use Long-Tail Keywords‍

Long-tail keywords are more efficient in driving organic traffic. Since they are less competitive and target customers further down the sales funnel, you are more likely to get conversions from this type of keyword. 

Finding long-tail keywords is also relatively easy. Instead of focusing on highly competitive keywords, it’s better to choose longer phrases that incorporate them. For example, suppose you want to target “fitness supplement.” Since many other businesses are trying to rank for this keyword, you should focus on “best fitness supplements for females,” “fitness supplements for weight loss,” “fitness supplements for muscle gain,” or the specific long-tail keywords that suit your content plan.‍

Stay Up-to-date on Trends‍

There are plenty of affiliate marketers today, and they use different methods of reaching customers. Influencers, bloggers, YouTubers, game streamers, and other online celebrities all use some form of affiliate marketing to boost their revenues. So, you would want to ensure you and your partners remain competitive. Knowing new trends and creating content about them helps you stay on top of your audience’s minds. Besides knowing the latest in pop culture and the news, you should also update your marketing techniques, tools, and strategies. If you hop onto a new platform, create a promotional tool, or engage audiences in novel ways, you keep yourself relatable and fresh.‍

Set Affiliate Links as “Nofollow”‍

Google does not consider paid links as a source of “natural” authority since their placement involves a potential commission in the event of a successful sale. As such, when they evaluate your entire website’s link authority, they will try to remove those links. Setting all affiliate links as “nofollow” can have a significant positive impact on your results.

The search engine finds it more convenient to identify affiliate links from popular sites like Amazon. Google automatically tags affiliate links on these sites as “nofollow.” If you are a smaller website or are on a less popular network, it is better to include the “nofollow” tag. Visiting the site audit option in your Google console should enable you to see a list of dofollow external links you have on your website.‍

Ensure That Your Website Has Good UX‍

If you aren’t getting conversions, you need to review your SEO strategies or content plan. The main goal of SEO-focused affiliate marketing is to boost revenue, so if that isn’t happening, you might need to implement a few changes. Using a more prominent call-to-action button, writing more informative descriptions, and personal anecdotes on why you support this brand could help. 

Catchier headings and subheadings, better-quality photos, and A/B testing your title, first paragraph, and CTA should also generate data for revisions. Consider changing the layout of your posts as well. Using tools like Hotjar will let you collect feedback on which areas of your page get the most attention from visitors and which ones they skip over.‍

Conclusion‍

Affiliate marketing leverages experts’ or online personalities’ authority to promote a product or service to their audience. Marketers often consider search engine optimization and affiliate marketing as two different strategies. However, incorporating affiliate links into your videos’ or articles’ SEO will boost your partner’s visibility and create revenue for both of your companies.

Join the most rewarding affiliate program for SEO today! Ranked is an SEO platform and service helping enterprises and agencies acquire customers organically. We provide a 20 percent recurring commission on all our plans—no monthly minimums, for multiple sites! Book a call with the team to learn more, or sign up for your unique link today!