There is no doubt that in this digital world numerous websites are trying to seek audience attention on their end. When we talk about affiliate marketing, it requires more than just promoting a brand’s product. Why so? Well, primarily because of the fact that there are thousands of people doing the same thing, so how would a customer end up on your page and not others? This is where SEO comes into play. 

SEO is the engine that powers affiliate marketers to increase their visibility and boost their sales tenfold. Without SEO, affiliate marketing loses its value and fails to provide the results it has the potential to provide. Affiliate marketers can incorporate SEO into their content to drive traffic, boost conversions and multiply their growth. In this article, we will discuss what are some of the best SEO practices for affiliate marketers that can help them reach their target audience at the right time. 

Why do we need SEO in affiliate marketing? 

Search Engine Optimization or as we call it SEO,  is the key ingredient that helps your content get the limelight it deserves. In simple words, SEO helps your affiliate pages become discoverable by the right target audience. Since affiliate marketing requires you to promote a brand’s product in order to earn commission, SEO ensures that your content makes it into the feed of people searching for things that you are promoting. 

This is how you will make sales and earn profits. So, what even is affiliate marketing without SEO? Nothing, because when you make content, you keep in mind the people who will buy these products. But if your videos or websites never reach them, then what’s the point? Some key points highlighting what SEO does for affiliate marketing are mentioned below:

• Drives Organic Traffic - Based on your niche, SEO will ensure that your content ranks on search engines and ultimately brings traffic to your website. 

• Increased CTR - If your page is ranking, it will become the first choice for people to read or watch and hence more people will click on it. When CTR is increased, the chances of making sales also increase. 

• Trust and Credibility - In a myriad of affiliate pages, the audience often chooses to trust the pages that are authentic and reliable and SEO makes that easier for you. If your page is consistently ranking, people will be assured of your credibility. 

• Higher ROI - Unlike most paid ads, SEO may take some time to build but it gives results that are long lasting. With SEO, affiliate marketers benefit from a higher ROI as a ranked page will generate income for you for months or years too. 

Top 7 SEO practices for Affiliate Marketers to follow 

1. Keyword Research 

Keyword research is the building block for affiliate marketing as it lays the foundation for it. Your main job as an affiliate marketer is to find keywords that have a higher search volume so that when you incorporate them into your content based on the niche, it specifically reaches the potential audience. When you perform massive keyword research, it helps you and your audience to skip through the clutter and align with their interests. Don’t worry, you don't have to be under pressure of doing it alone. Your job will be made easier with tools that help you find keywords within your niche that are trending.

You can use platforms like Semrush, Ahrefs, Google Trends etc. Now, your job is to utilize the right keywords seamlessly into your content without spamming them and keeping a balance. You can add product related keywords, long tail keywords and comparison keywords with keeping the search intent in mind. This will significantly increase your CTR and help your page perform better. 

2. Content Creation and Optimization

Without a well researched content, audiences might not be interested in going through your affiliate page at all. What you serve is what you get and that holds true for affiliate marketing as well. Your main task is to provide quality information to your audience and give a solution to their problems. So what can you do other than talk about your product? Well, focus on providing a detailed review, comparison with its competitors and why this is better or even adding visuals and tables. 

Since the digital world changes quickly in the blink of an eye, there emerges a need for your content to go through revisions and updates, or else it will become outdated. Therefore, you need to keep up with the latest information and add them to your content to maintain trust, authenticity and credibility to boost your ranking.  

Along with this, you should also focus on creating content with keeping the search intent of users in mind. These tips can significantly increase your conversion rates. 

3. Utilize On Page SEO 

Adding more to the content creation optimization point, you can use better On Page SEO elements too. This involves structuring your content and in a more aligned manner, which makes it easier for search engines to rank your pages. Wondering what all you need to do in order to achieve this? 

The answer is simple - you can use keyword rich titles and headings like H1, H2 and H3 which puts your content in a chronological order and helps improve readability. Apart from this, make sure to use the keywords with high volume in the first intro paragraph or subheadings, use schema markup for the product reviews, optimize meta descriptions and add alt text for images. You will think that these changes are small but so significant to boost your conversion rate in no time. 

4. Conversion Rate Optimization 

The whole point of affiliate marketing is make sure people not only visit your page but also end up making a purchase. Now, this doesn’t just happen magically while people surf the internet. As a marketer, you should focus on adding a strong CTA which will motivate people to take action. You can even use A/B testing to identify what works the best for your website and from which source the traffic comes the most. 

Factors like improving user experience also play an important role in turning conversions into sales as a fast loading and responsive website helps retain potential customers. In addition to this, you can use comparison tables and buttons like - ‘Check deal on Amazon’ or ‘View Deal on Nykaa’ etc, which helps convert better than normal links. When you focus on analysing data for insights to understand how visitors interact with your website, that’s when the magic happens and optimizing conversion rate becomes a necessity. 

5. Be Strategic with long format content 

Most people in today’s time have relatively shorter attention span and love content that is direct and to the point. So what to do with content that are in long format? Well, nothing just strategically plan and present them to your audience. Long format content doesn’t have to be boring when it can be the backbone of affiliate marketing. Wondering how? With long format content, there are multiple opportunities to add keywords and affiliate links. 

Additionally, you can use them to answer every question that lingers in the mind of your audience before making a purchase. You can focus on covering ‘how to tutorials’, product reviews, product comparison, listicles, using landing pages etc. So, a long format content is the best technique to cover relevant topics and information in depth and help your content rank higher. 

6. Link Building and Authority 

Affiliate marketing becomes a success not with just one link but with multiple links. In such a case, it becomes important for marketers to use correct outreach strategies whether it is through backlinks or internal links. If you are wondering how they are useful, well, the reason is that they help in improving your site’s indexing and crawlability. 

Having strong backlinks from prominent and reputable sources helps to attract their audience onto your website. Similarly, internal linking allows you to guide your audience to search relevant articles that you have previously covered. Backlinks and internal linking in such cases become vital to boost your search authority and drive better traffic.

7. Use SEO Technology 

We all know how new inventions in technology have helped businesses skyrocket their success and increase their profits, right? Well, so can you by using tools specifically designed to improve SEO techniques. Whether it is tracking competitors, finding high volume keywords, analysing your performance, improving visibility etc, there are tools tailor made according to your needs. 

Some tools are paid while some might even offer free services to an extent. If you are looking for long term growth and success, then these SEO tools can help you achieve your affiliate marketing goals in no time. Some popular options are Semrush, Frase, Ahrefs, Jasper AI etc. 

Conclusion 

So now you know that you cannot hit your mark with affiliate marketing if the best SEO practices are not sewn properly into your content. Whether it is targeting the right keywords, using backlinks, creating high quality content, optimizing on-page SEO etc, this article will help you reach new heights in your affiliate marketing journey.