How to Use SEO for Affiliate Marketing

So... You’ve built an amazing affiliate blog and you may have even written your first article with links to offers you're promoting. Yet, you’re not getting many visitors, and definitely not making money.

Or, maybe you've built this incredible affiliate marketing landing page with high-converting features, but for some reason you're lacking organic traffic.

Wondering why?

The problem is that just writing good content alone isn’t enough, you need to get your articles & landers seen organically - both by people and search engines.

So, how can you get more potential customers from Google to land on your blog or website and click on your links?

That’s where SEO for affiliate marketing comes in. Search Engine Optimisation is vital for any affiliate marketer. Using SEO, you can rank higher on Google and get more organic traffic - and more traffic means more sales!

What Is SEO?

Just in case you’ve never heard of SEO before, here is a quick break down:

SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization, which is the name for the methods we use to get Google and other search engines to put an article near the top of their search results. 

Google uses crawlers (imagine little robots) that look through your website and decide how good your content is. The better Google thinks your articles are, the higher you appear in search results and the more traffic you get. The more traffic you get, the more people are going to be checking out your blog articles and clicking on your affiliate links.

So, how does Google decide which article to show first? 

Google regularly changes how it ranks different articles but we do know the main things Google always looks for, and in this article, we explain the key elements that will help your affiliate marketing article to rank on Google and, therefore, get more traffic.

And we also hope we did a good job with this article and you've landed here organically, from Google. A bit meta, isn't it?

Anyway, let's get to it!

SEO Key Terms Explained

Before we go any further, let’s look at a few SEO terms that are going to be useful for you to understand.

Keyword Research: A Quick Guide

Keyword research is how you find out what people are searching for. Below, we’re going to explain how to do a quick keyword research for any affiliate blog post you write. You will need a keyword tool for this. We recommend using ubersuggest if you are just starting out because they offer some free options. Once you have gotten as much use out of the free version as you can you can, either upgrade or opt for another keyword tool like Mangools, Ahrefs or SEMrush.

These are pretty advanced tools, and you can get amazing results once you learn how to navigate them.

Here’s how to do keyword research for an affiliate marketing blog article:

1. Choose the main keyword that is the focus of your article. 

2. Pop that word into a keyword research tool.

3. Filter the results to volume above 10, and for keyword difficulty, you are looking at below 45 but below 20 is ideal.

4. Next, pick out a selection of keywords which could be relevant to your article. Aim for 10 words or phrases.

5. Put the keywords at the top of your article to remind you as you write.

Wondering how you pick from a huge list? It’s important to think about the intent of the person searching. If the word ‘buy’ is in the keyword for example, they probably want to buy that product so it’s a great keyword to use. ‘Review’ is another good keyword to look out for as review blog posts are perfect for affiliate marketing purposes.

Also, look out for those keywords with a good search volume and a low difficulty. These are the best to target because lots of people are looking for content on the topic, but there isn’t too much competition out there yet.

4 SEO Tips For Your Affiliate Blog Posts

1. Think about your keyword placement

Once you have your list of keywords, it’s easy to go crazy and stick them in every sentence. However, this will actually reduce your rankings. Why? The most important thing to Google is how useful your article actually is to readers. If it’s stuffed full of keywords in weird places, no one is going to spend time reading it. So put your keywords in relevant places rather than everywhere. H1s and H2s are great. Your title tag, meta description and article introduction are all also great places to put your keywords.

Always read your affiliate article back to yourself at the end. Does it make sense? Is it useful?

2. Target your audience

Your writing needs to be suitable for the people reading it. If it’s aimed at rocket scientists, then it’s fine to use some complicated words. However, if your article is trying to reach a wide audience, then you need to keep things simple. Try not to write huge long sections or sentences that are hard to read. Go for short paragraphs and sentences with words everyone can understand. 

3. Get your images right

It’s good to have relevant images included in your article. There are a few things you can do to get Google to see your images as relevant. The first is to make sure the file name includes your keyword. Next, is to make sure the image isn’t too big. Big images take a while to load and Google punishes articles that have too long loading times. Plus readers are more likely to click away if it takes too long to load. You can use a tool like TinyPNG to reduce your image size before uploading it. Featuring videos in your affiliate marketing articles will also help your SEO efforts, increasing time on page.

4. Answer questions

One of the best things you can do for SEO is to answer questions with your article. Why? Most people use Google because they have a question of some sort. If you can answer a question with your article, it will not only better target keywords, but it will also make your article more useful. The longer people spend reading your article, the better your rankings.

What Is Linking And Why Is It Important?

The final element of SEO we need to talk about is linking. Links within your site, to other websites and from other websites to yours are all ways Google knows if your article is good. 

Ideally, you want at least a couple of external links (links to other quality websites) to show that you are providing plenty of information and that this topic is related to the one you link to. 

Internal links (links to other pages in your site) can be good for a few things. If you have a targeted sales page, then you can send users to that. Also if someone clicks on an internal link, they are staying on your website for longer which shows Google your website and content must be good.

Finally, links from other sites, known as backlinks, are one of the best ways to improve your rankings. Backlinks are a great way of showing your content is valuable because it’s so good someone else has put a link to it on their website. Now this topic could have an entire book written on it.

Essentially, if your content is great, this will happen anyway, but you may want to also reach out to other related websites (or websites you link to) and ask them to link to your content. Here is a useful backlinks article you can have a look at for ideas on how to do this.

Pro Affiliate Marketing SEO Insights

And... If you've thought we're ending it there, we have some extra tips & tricks for you from SEO expert John Limbocker. 

So check out this Affiliate Marketing Academy episode and learn how to use SEO like a pro in affiliate marketing, with John Limbocker from Internet Dominators. 

John is a lifelong entrepreneur, marketing expert, SEO authority, and Founder and CEO at Internet Dominators.

And in this episode, he answers some of the industry's burning SEO questions to help affiliates just like you leverage this practice in your marketing efforts, including:

Final Thoughts

Now that you have completed this crash course in affiliate marketing SEO, we hope you are ready to write your next affiliate marketing blog post! Just remember learning how to do SEO for affiliate marketing doesn’t make anything happen overnight. With each post you create, you slowly build your website’s importance and authority on a subject.

Happy blogging!

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