Hey guys,
SEO affiliate marketing requires you to be an expert in both fields — website SEO and affiliate marketing.
That’s quite a skill, but with the number of resources available, an extremely helpful community, and endless opportunities to step up your digital marketing game, it’s well worth it.
That’s why below you’ll find everything you need to know about SEO affiliate marketing, plus the top 10 SEO tips and practices to use in 2021!
What is SEO affiliate marketing?
There are a lot of popular misconceptions circulating the Internet in regards to SEO affiliate marketing. That’s why we feel we need to start this article with some basic myth-busting regarding the two concepts in general.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and refers to various techniques marketers use to improve the quality and quantity of organic traffic driven to a website. SEO means to enhance organic traffic quotas, targeting unpaid traffic, generated mostly by people’s searches and query entries into various searches. That’s why SEO content optimization tends to focus on answering people’s questions and needs they enter into Google, for example.
Affiliate marketing, to put it very simply, is the process of earning commission for promoting other people’s or company’s products. As an affiliate advertiser, you need to find your offer and then help spread the word about it. Whether you do that using organic or paid traffic is entirely up to you.
As you can see, SEO and affiliate marketing are not an either-either type of situation. And they’re definitely not mutually exclusive marketing strategies.
In fact, these two techniques bring the best results when combined.
So, what is SEO affiliate marketing? It’s precisely what the name stands for — it’s using various SEO techniques to improve your affiliate website, or a product landing page rankings. Better positioning means bigger exposure and higher chances for driving organic traffic to your affiliate offer (or offers that you got from an affiliate network ) promoted with a given page.
How does affiliate marketing contribute to SEO performance?
Now that we’ve cleared the basics, it’s time to ask yet another question… or two. Apart from the reasonable question on what the benefits of combining the two strategies are, there’s also the one about mixing paid and free traffic. Let us start with the latter.
Does using SEO techniques to drive free traffic to your website mean you can’t use paid advertising to drive traffic to the same website?
The answer is — no. As we’ve already mentioned, free and paid advertising isn’t mutually exclusive and tends to bring the best results when combined.
Why?
Whether we ask why or how it benefits your website, the answer is simple — it allows marketers to cover a much bigger share of the available market, get bigger exposure, and ultimately drive even more traffic to the desired webpage or offer. Whether that’s your affiliate site or a brand already.
How to rank an affiliate website?
Being one of the top ad networks and traffic sources in the affiliate industry, we at Zeropark tend to have a fairly good understanding of the concept of paid advertising. But today we’re not going to discuss PPC traffic. Today we bring you some of the best SEO affiliate marketing tips and practices to use in 2021 to help you improve your brand, offer, or product landing page rankings, and make the most of your affiliate marketing efforts.
Regardless of whether your advertising strategy is based on organic traffic only, or combining both — paid and free traffic — including the following tips will surely help your campaigns.
☞ Stick to one niche and find the best affiliate products to promote.
Picking the right niche and then sticking to it is even more important for SEO affiliate marketing than it is for paid advertising, alone. That’s because using organic traffic for affiliate marketing campaigns requires time, consistency, and thoughtfully curated content. Some of the best players in the affiliate industry who focus on organic content for promoting their products and offers, like Neil Patel for example, have been creating their platforms for years now.
SEO affiliate marketing is a long-haul game, but combining the two advertising methods can speed up the process significantly. Nevertheless, the better your content marketing strategy and SEO scores, the better your organic traffic quotas. And the more traffic you get to your page, the more traffic you’re able to drive for offers promoted there. Which ultimately results in generating more conversions — of any kind.
That’s why curating a good enough content platform focused on a particular niche is so important. One can’t be an expert at everything — if you try doing so, you might end up with lots of poor quality content that won’t attract any viewership. It’s better to master a particular segment, as this will generate more user-trust and also allow you to get more profitable offers to promote.
☞ Use SEO tools that make your life easier.
Whether you’re an experienced content creator, a budding affiliate marketer, or an SEO-savvy, there’s surely at least a couple of SEO tools that can make your advertising life much easier. We dare say it’d be even a bit foolish not to use any… and count the exact keyword vs. total word count ratio yourself.
These tools, both free and paid, offer some very powerful algorithms that can solve a lot of SEO problems and riddles for us. Depending on your needs, whether that’s precise keyword research, backlink reports, outperforming your competitor’s content, or simply looking for new offer ideas and currently trending products, there’s a tool made just for that.
Some of the most popular SEO tools include Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest, Semrush, Ahrefs, SpyFu, Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends or Answer the Public. If you’d like to learn more about them, click here and read an article discussing a list of SEO tools every smart affiliate marketer should have a look at.
☞ Analyze what your competitors do and do it better.
Now that you know your niche, the products or offers you want to focus on, and what tools can help you up your SEO affiliate marketing game — it’s time to do some spying.
Competitor analysis is a basic step for any kind of business. Only it really couldn’t be easier for affiliate marketers. Whenever you want to check what your competition is promoting at the moment, what keywords they rank for, which works best or worse for them, what kind of content structure they use, and how it performs — it’s all there, served on a silver platter, with various reports available.
Apart from just browsing the Google search and simply reading up on what they have to say and offer, that’s what SEO tools are all about. Just run their URL in one of the tools and see what the analysis says. Do your keywords research and compare it with your competitor’s reports. Finally, improve your content in all the places they fall behind or try to do even better where you see them doing well.
Remember that if you’re able to see all that, they’re able to spy on you too. That’s why staying alert to any changes in your website performance is key to reacting in time when someone you weren’t expecting to have outdone yourself.
☞ Master your keyword research and drive traffic to your affiliate website.
It’s 2021… and if you don’t do your keyword research right, you’re pretty much screwed. Again, with the variety of both free and paid tools meant specifically to aid you with that task, it’d be unwise to rely on a quick Google search alone. Apart from the broad and exact match keywords, advertisers should also optimize for long-tail keywords and intent keywords, too. Then, several other aspects need to be taken into account.
To make it even easier for you, below we listed all the elements that should be included in a thorough keyword research plan. Make sure you try completing every step from the list.
✔︎ KEYWORD RESEARCH TO-DO LIST
SEED KEYWORD: typically short, one or two-word phrases with no modifiers, e.g.: bag. They’re usually the starting point for a more precise keyword listing, leading to creating long-tail keywords.
LONG-TAIL KEYWORDS: multiple words phrases that serve as more specific keywords. These can be actual search queries people put into search engines, e.g.: big brown leather bags for women.
INTENT KEYWORDS: keywords that reflect the user intent behind a particular search query. Once intent keywords are known, advertisers can target their audience using the most relevant and appealing angle. The most common types of intent keywords are: navigational, informational, transactional, and commercial.
SERP a.k.a Search Engine Results Pages: websites displayed by search engines in response to a query searched by users, with top websites displayed as top results.
☞ Don’t forget long-tail keywords for precise targeting.
If you look at the above glossary you’ll see that we put focus on a few types of keywords. But this tip will help you understand why focusing on long-tail keywords is especially important.
This is because using single-word phrases like “shoes” means we’d be targeting keywords that are just too broad and too general. These tend to show a very high competition score, while their conversion score tends to be extremely low. That’s because people don’t want to buy just any shoes. They want to buy shoes that fit their needs. And that’s why we also need to get more specific with our keywords.
Moving further, two to three-word keyword phrases, like “sports shoes” tend to already give us a better connection with our audience. At least we narrowed it down to sports shoes, excluding quite a chunk of the footwear industry. Still, “sports shoes” is a pretty general term that can be further categorized into men and boys shoes or women and girls shoes to give you the simplest of examples.
That brings us much much closer to meeting the customer needs. Although fairly general, such keyword phrases tend to show medium to high competition rates, with still rather low conversion rates.
But if we really want to get specific selling or promoting affiliate offers related to footwear, there’s still plenty of room for long-tail keyword optimization.
How about “nike running shoes for women” or “outdoor running shoes for boys” or “best selling running shoes for men 2020”. These phrases already give us a lot of information on the potential target audience and allow us to optimize our advertising efforts accordingly.
Long-tail keywords of +4 words tend to bring the best results in terms of low competition rates and high conversion rates.
And your targeting possibilities are just endless.
How to prepare for Google Core Web Vitals update?
Again, let us start by busting a myth regarding the latest hype around the Google Core Web Vitals update. No, Core Web Vitals are nothing new. Core Web Vital elements have been a part of the ranking system for some time already, only the update that was announced to take place in May 2021 will give them higher priority over other ranking factors.
Why? Let’s have a look at what Google Core Web Vitals are in fact.
The three metrics stand for page loading speed, page interactivity, and visual stability — as translated from rather technical-sounding names visible on the graphic. Nothing new, see? Only this time these three elements take way above other ranking factors such as mobile optimization or browsing security. That’s why to prepare for the upcoming update what you should do to make sure your page is CWV-optimized is the following.
Google Core Web Vitlas To-Do List:
If you want to learn about:
– How to optimize product SERPs for intent keywords?
– How to choose a domain name correctly?
– How to optimize for featured snippets?
–Tips on improving page loading speed;
Magda
SEO affiliate marketing requires you to be an expert in both fields — website SEO and affiliate marketing.
That’s quite a skill, but with the number of resources available, an extremely helpful community, and endless opportunities to step up your digital marketing game, it’s well worth it.
That’s why below you’ll find everything you need to know about SEO affiliate marketing, plus the top 10 SEO tips and practices to use in 2021!
What is SEO affiliate marketing?There are a lot of popular misconceptions circulating the Internet in regards to SEO affiliate marketing. That’s why we feel we need to start this article with some basic myth-busting regarding the two concepts in general.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and refers to various techniques marketers use to improve the quality and quantity of organic traffic driven to a website. SEO means to enhance organic traffic quotas, targeting unpaid traffic, generated mostly by people’s searches and query entries into various searches. That’s why SEO content optimization tends to focus on answering people’s questions and needs they enter into Google, for example.
Affiliate marketing, to put it very simply, is the process of earning commission for promoting other people’s or company’s products. As an affiliate advertiser, you need to find your offer and then help spread the word about it. Whether you do that using organic or paid traffic is entirely up to you.
As you can see, SEO and affiliate marketing are not an either-either type of situation. And they’re definitely not mutually exclusive marketing strategies.
In fact, these two techniques bring the best results when combined.
So, what is SEO affiliate marketing? It’s precisely what the name stands for — it’s using various SEO techniques to improve your affiliate website, or a product landing page rankings. Better positioning means bigger exposure and higher chances for driving organic traffic to your affiliate offer (or offers that you got from an affiliate network ) promoted with a given page.
How does affiliate marketing contribute to SEO performance?Now that we’ve cleared the basics, it’s time to ask yet another question… or two. Apart from the reasonable question on what the benefits of combining the two strategies are, there’s also the one about mixing paid and free traffic. Let us start with the latter.
Does using SEO techniques to drive free traffic to your website mean you can’t use paid advertising to drive traffic to the same website?
The answer is — no. As we’ve already mentioned, free and paid advertising isn’t mutually exclusive and tends to bring the best results when combined.
Why?
Whether we ask why or how it benefits your website, the answer is simple — it allows marketers to cover a much bigger share of the available market, get bigger exposure, and ultimately drive even more traffic to the desired webpage or offer. Whether that’s your affiliate site or a brand already.
How to rank an affiliate website?Being one of the top ad networks and traffic sources in the affiliate industry, we at Zeropark tend to have a fairly good understanding of the concept of paid advertising. But today we’re not going to discuss PPC traffic. Today we bring you some of the best SEO affiliate marketing tips and practices to use in 2021 to help you improve your brand, offer, or product landing page rankings, and make the most of your affiliate marketing efforts.
Regardless of whether your advertising strategy is based on organic traffic only, or combining both — paid and free traffic — including the following tips will surely help your campaigns.
Picking the right niche and then sticking to it is even more important for SEO affiliate marketing than it is for paid advertising, alone. That’s because using organic traffic for affiliate marketing campaigns requires time, consistency, and thoughtfully curated content. Some of the best players in the affiliate industry who focus on organic content for promoting their products and offers, like Neil Patel for example, have been creating their platforms for years now.
SEO affiliate marketing is a long-haul game, but combining the two advertising methods can speed up the process significantly. Nevertheless, the better your content marketing strategy and SEO scores, the better your organic traffic quotas. And the more traffic you get to your page, the more traffic you’re able to drive for offers promoted there. Which ultimately results in generating more conversions — of any kind.
That’s why curating a good enough content platform focused on a particular niche is so important. One can’t be an expert at everything — if you try doing so, you might end up with lots of poor quality content that won’t attract any viewership. It’s better to master a particular segment, as this will generate more user-trust and also allow you to get more profitable offers to promote.
☞ Use SEO tools that make your life easier.
Whether you’re an experienced content creator, a budding affiliate marketer, or an SEO-savvy, there’s surely at least a couple of SEO tools that can make your advertising life much easier. We dare say it’d be even a bit foolish not to use any… and count the exact keyword vs. total word count ratio yourself.
These tools, both free and paid, offer some very powerful algorithms that can solve a lot of SEO problems and riddles for us. Depending on your needs, whether that’s precise keyword research, backlink reports, outperforming your competitor’s content, or simply looking for new offer ideas and currently trending products, there’s a tool made just for that.
Some of the most popular SEO tools include Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest, Semrush, Ahrefs, SpyFu, Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends or Answer the Public. If you’d like to learn more about them, click here and read an article discussing a list of SEO tools every smart affiliate marketer should have a look at.
☞ Analyze what your competitors do and do it better.
Now that you know your niche, the products or offers you want to focus on, and what tools can help you up your SEO affiliate marketing game — it’s time to do some spying.
Competitor analysis is a basic step for any kind of business. Only it really couldn’t be easier for affiliate marketers. Whenever you want to check what your competition is promoting at the moment, what keywords they rank for, which works best or worse for them, what kind of content structure they use, and how it performs — it’s all there, served on a silver platter, with various reports available.
Apart from just browsing the Google search and simply reading up on what they have to say and offer, that’s what SEO tools are all about. Just run their URL in one of the tools and see what the analysis says. Do your keywords research and compare it with your competitor’s reports. Finally, improve your content in all the places they fall behind or try to do even better where you see them doing well.
Remember that if you’re able to see all that, they’re able to spy on you too. That’s why staying alert to any changes in your website performance is key to reacting in time when someone you weren’t expecting to have outdone yourself.
☞ Master your keyword research and drive traffic to your affiliate website.
It’s 2021… and if you don’t do your keyword research right, you’re pretty much screwed. Again, with the variety of both free and paid tools meant specifically to aid you with that task, it’d be unwise to rely on a quick Google search alone. Apart from the broad and exact match keywords, advertisers should also optimize for long-tail keywords and intent keywords, too. Then, several other aspects need to be taken into account.
To make it even easier for you, below we listed all the elements that should be included in a thorough keyword research plan. Make sure you try completing every step from the list.
✔︎ KEYWORD RESEARCH TO-DO LIST
- Identify the advertising/product’s niche-related keywords.
- Learn the user intent keywords.
- Research competition keywords.
- List seed keywords.
- Listing long-tail keywords.
- Place keywords in specific places across your content.
- Monitor and score particular keywords performance.
- Monitor your website SERP ranking.
SEO GLOSSARY
SEED KEYWORD: typically short, one or two-word phrases with no modifiers, e.g.: bag. They’re usually the starting point for a more precise keyword listing, leading to creating long-tail keywords.
LONG-TAIL KEYWORDS: multiple words phrases that serve as more specific keywords. These can be actual search queries people put into search engines, e.g.: big brown leather bags for women.
INTENT KEYWORDS: keywords that reflect the user intent behind a particular search query. Once intent keywords are known, advertisers can target their audience using the most relevant and appealing angle. The most common types of intent keywords are: navigational, informational, transactional, and commercial.
SERP a.k.a Search Engine Results Pages: websites displayed by search engines in response to a query searched by users, with top websites displayed as top results.
☞ Don’t forget long-tail keywords for precise targeting.
If you look at the above glossary you’ll see that we put focus on a few types of keywords. But this tip will help you understand why focusing on long-tail keywords is especially important.
This is because using single-word phrases like “shoes” means we’d be targeting keywords that are just too broad and too general. These tend to show a very high competition score, while their conversion score tends to be extremely low. That’s because people don’t want to buy just any shoes. They want to buy shoes that fit their needs. And that’s why we also need to get more specific with our keywords.
Moving further, two to three-word keyword phrases, like “sports shoes” tend to already give us a better connection with our audience. At least we narrowed it down to sports shoes, excluding quite a chunk of the footwear industry. Still, “sports shoes” is a pretty general term that can be further categorized into men and boys shoes or women and girls shoes to give you the simplest of examples.
That brings us much much closer to meeting the customer needs. Although fairly general, such keyword phrases tend to show medium to high competition rates, with still rather low conversion rates.
But if we really want to get specific selling or promoting affiliate offers related to footwear, there’s still plenty of room for long-tail keyword optimization.
How about “nike running shoes for women” or “outdoor running shoes for boys” or “best selling running shoes for men 2020”. These phrases already give us a lot of information on the potential target audience and allow us to optimize our advertising efforts accordingly.
Long-tail keywords of +4 words tend to bring the best results in terms of low competition rates and high conversion rates.
And your targeting possibilities are just endless.
How to prepare for Google Core Web Vitals update?Again, let us start by busting a myth regarding the latest hype around the Google Core Web Vitals update. No, Core Web Vitals are nothing new. Core Web Vital elements have been a part of the ranking system for some time already, only the update that was announced to take place in May 2021 will give them higher priority over other ranking factors.
Why? Let’s have a look at what Google Core Web Vitals are in fact.
The three metrics stand for page loading speed, page interactivity, and visual stability — as translated from rather technical-sounding names visible on the graphic. Nothing new, see? Only this time these three elements take way above other ranking factors such as mobile optimization or browsing security. That’s why to prepare for the upcoming update what you should do to make sure your page is CWV-optimized is the following.
Google Core Web Vitlas To-Do List:
- Start by checking your Core Web Vitals metric scores in the Google Search Console.
- Focus on the areas showing the worst performance first, then work your way up to what’s also urgent but shows decent results. Mind the process may not be that quick.
- Check whether your web hosting services can keep up with the update requirements, if not you need to upgrade.
- Work on optimizing your images and video content size.
- Focus on the content above the fold for better user retention.
- Remember that page experience doesn’t override content — it still matters a great deal.
- Up your mobile game. A lot.
- Make sure to use all the available Google page optimization tools, as well as other options the industry provides.
- Stay on the lookout for the latest update information and tips from SEO experts. There’s a lot of details that could truly help your CWV scores.
- Monitor your page performance carefully before, right around and after the update release to spot any issues and react quickly and efficiently.
If you want to learn about:– How to optimize product SERPs for intent keywords?
– How to choose a domain name correctly?
– How to optimize for featured snippets?
–Tips on improving page loading speed;
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE 
Magda
