Tips for Boosting Affiliate Marketing with SEO Techniques

Enthusiasts make affiliate marketing seem easier than it is—the promise of residual income and earning thousands of dollars while you sleep is undoubtedly attractive. Many people enter affiliate marketing because they want to reap the benefits and gain an additional income stream. 

However, affiliate marketing can be challenging. Affiliate marketers know that building a reliable and profitable program won't take days or even weeks. If you're committed to the process, though, you'll surely start earning, especially if you implement a solid SEO strategy. Here are tips you could use when optimizing your affiliate content.

Use the Skyscraper Method of Creating Content

If you use SEO and PPC tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush, you can do in-depth research on your competitors' pages. For example, if you use SEMRush, you can type your competitor's domain name into the search bar, navigate to "Pages," and see which pages drive traffic to their site.

If you can write interesting articles, it's possible to replace these top-performing pages on SERPs. Top-performing does not necessarily mean comprehensive. You can replace your competitors on SERPs by coming up with better versions of their low-quality articles. Posts that are too short, offer little to no practical information, and have a poor backlink profile are good candidates for this technique. SEMRush's Post Tracking tool can help you dig deep into specific articles.

Using the skyscraper technique—writing better, more informative versions of these articles—will divert readers to your site. Keep those readers on your website by ensuring you optimize your pages. Make sure you have actionable advice and build backlinks to your pages.

Do Better Keyword Research

Scaling your organic traffic would involve having a good plan, which means getting serious with your keyword research. Being strategic about the phrases and queries you target will pay off. You have to know what keywords seamlessly incorporate your offerings and your affiliate partner's products. Use Ahrefs or other keyword research tools to find phrases you can use in your next blog posts.

Keyword research involves knowing your customers' search intent. Also, you need to be clear about your goals. Do you want a higher ROI, more conversions, or simply grow your blog traffic? The keywords you choose will have to relate to your goal.

For example, if you're only growing traffic, you can target high-volume keywords. Since people looking for these are probably at the early stages of their research, creating long-form articles with unique angles will be enough to get people to click on your link. If you are on Ahrefs, you can open your account and go to "Organic Keywords." This section of the platform lets you discover keywords to use and track keyword movements for your competitors.

Tracking your competitors will allow you to monitor their possible keyword strategy. If you see a competitor ranking for a keyword, you can create a post that provides more value. Your domain rating, the niche's size, the number of competitors you have, and other factors like these affect which keywords you should target. Generally speaking, successfully targeting keywords with a search volume above 1,000 will produce good SERP rankings.

Make Your Web Pages More Reader-Friendly

People have shorter attention spans than ever before. Everyone is busy with work, whether young or old, and they want to get the most information in the least amount of time. What's more, they also have easy access to countless distractions. Holding people's attention is harder these days, but it is not impossible. There are still ways to ensure that readers hang on to you or your marketers' every word.

1. Create Digestible Paragraphs

Eliminate the friction that people might feel from reading your work by creating short paragraphs. It can be overwhelming to face an entire block of letters, so breaking your text into three- to four-sentence paragraphs will help the reader understand more of what you're saying. 

What's more, the more topics you include in your article, the longer it will become. You must strike a balance between promoting your products and services, talking about your affiliate partner's, and discussing the actual topic of the blog post. Breaking your content into smaller paragraphs will let you see if you're going on for too long about something.

Finally, choose a starting point for your improvements. Find a page with a high bounce rate and low average duration session—this is a good candidate for improving the page layout. Break the paragraphs into smaller ones, use simpler words, and take note of your bounce rate and session duration after a month to see the effects of these changes.

2. Keep Your Sentences Short

Make your content readable. You do not need to use complex words to speak to your audience—even if you're in a field that uses plenty of technical terms, blog articles and posts shouldn't have too many of them. A famous quote from Mark Twain talks about the importance of using "better" words. He says, "Don't use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do." Use shorter sentences, and you'll get your point across faster.

3. Keep Revising Old Content

Posts that already bring in traffic can always bring in more! See if you can improve or update the information on these pages—doing so will ensure that your post meets people's needs. For example, if you wrote an article on the best two-door fridges, try adding more types of refrigerators and providing more details under existing subheadings.

Focus on timeliness as well. Are there outdated tips and broken links? Replace these with the latest information from the manufacturer or find new models to write about. Do you have the most recent statistics in your article? Perhaps you lack outbound links—make sure you link to high-quality sources that do not directly compete with you or your affiliate partner.

Optimize Your Click-Through Rate

You need to maximize your CTR if your content is on the first or second page of SERPs, but you do not see an increase in your page views. You could change your title tags and meta descriptions and see if this will get more people to your site. If you do not know yet if your page is underperforming, you can check its CTR with the average for this SERP. 

Use Google Search Console to find the CTR for a keyword—doing this lets you compare your CTR to the industry average. Hiring SEO writing services should help—they would have systems in place to identify underperforming pages, change title tags or meta descriptions, and perform other tests that will optimize your website.

Conclusion

Search engine optimization is crucial for driving traffic to your website, but it is indispensable if you are launching an affiliate marketing campaign. If no one is visiting your website, you won't drive sales for your affiliate partner. Teaming up with SEO experts should help you boost traffic to your posts and gain qualified purchases through your affiliate links.

Join Ranked's Affiliate Partner Program today and be part of the most rewarding affiliate program for SEO. We are an SEO platform and service offering a 20 percent recurring commission on all our plans, with no minimum monthly amounts! Book a call with the team to learn more, or apply to be a partner today!