SEO Affiliate Marketing: Why you should do it

Affiliate marketing is an industry that continues to show steady growth. Research shows that US affiliate marketing spending increases annually by 10.1% and is expected to reach $6.8 billion by 2020.

Because of this, an increasing number of companies are investing in launching their own affiliate programs to market products and drive sales, which creates more opportunities for people to generate income through affiliate marketing.

If you’re looking to start promoting brands and products by using affiliate links, you’ll want to learn how to use SEO for affiliate marketing.

In this article, we’ll give you SEO tips for affiliate marketing and present different SEO strategies you can use to increase conversion rates organically.

What is SEO affiliate marketing?#

Let’s begin by connecting these two seemingly separate marketing strategies: SEO and affiliate marketing. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is all about boosting your websites’ relevance to help it rank higher on search results pages (SERPs).

Thus, the concept behind SEO affiliate marketing is to optimize your content, such as blog posts or product reviews, to increase its chances of reaching the first page of Google, which will boost your website’s traffic and, consequently, improve your chances of selling.

Why is it important to be on the first page of Google?#

According to multiple statistics, the click-through ratio (CTR) for the first page on Google is, on average, 75% higher than for the subsequent positions. The graph below demonstrates the CTR for Google results in the US between Desktop and Mobile devices.

Keep in mind that, although SEO may take longer to generate results when compared to paid advertising, it’s still one of the best long term marketing strategies because it keeps bringing traffic to your website long after you’ve completed optimizing and publishing your content.

SEO strategies for affiliate marketing#

Now that we’ve connected the points and you’re aware of the importance of ranking high on good search rankings, we can move on to what exactly should you do to optimize your pages.

Remember that the Google algorithm uses a wide range of variables to rank pages, as you can see on their official page.

Here are some SEO tips for affiliate marketing you should start using right now:

Plan your keywords#

First of all, before creating new content for your audience, it’s important to identify whether people are searching for that or not.

However good your content may be, if the search volume is low, you’re probably not going to get many affiliate link clicks out of that content.

That being said, keep in mind that a single article or review may rank for more than a single keyword.

To find out what your average number of monthly searches is and plan your keywords, you may use tools such as Google Keyword Planner, as well as other tools such as Keyword Tool or Google Trends.

Long tail keywords are also a good way to build your content around a more specific goal. For example, instead of optimizing your content for "best movies," narrow it down to a more specific audience, such as "best movies on Netflix."

Link building#

Link building is the effort to strategically reach out to other websites and companies that are a part of your industry to create a content marketing partnership.

This SEO strategy can help you increase your website authority, which tells Google that your pages are relevant enough to have other highly ranked pages linking and referencing them.

Through this, you may be able to request backlinks to your pages or even write guest articles to be published on your partner’s pages.

Focus on quality#

Google’s algorithm has evolved significantly throughout the years, and now it can, essentially, tell you how good your content is.

Thus, instead of publishing a lot of content, work on releasing top-notch content that will allow you to stand out and rank higher.

Before creating new content, take a good look at the search engine result pages (SERPs) for your keyword and ask yourself how can you make something better than what’s already available out there.

Optimize your website for mobile#

Today, over 52% of online traffic happens through mobile devices and, as you can see in the graph below by Statista, this number should continue to grow.

Seeing as Google’s goal is to provide the best experience to its users, mobile responsiveness weighs heavily on its ranking algorithm.

Thus, to improve your SEO affiliate marketing, be sure to optimize all your website pages for smartphones and tablets - this will also help you reach a large share of users that prefer to browse and shop through mobile.

Offer a secure experience#

Last but not least, people should feel safe while browsing your website. Web security is a critical factor for Google, so you must at least offer an SSL Certificate, which is what puts the "s" on your "HTTPS" domain.

Also, your website domain and Host should be trustworthy, fast, and it should provide its own security measures to prevent your audience’s information from being stolen.

Ready to boost your sales through SEO affiliate marketing?#

We hope this article has helped you to learn how to use SEO for affiliate marketing and why it’s important to optimize your pages for search engines.

Build your website’s authority, deliver high-quality content to your audience, and you will be able to direct more organic (non-paid) traffic to your pages.