Affiliate marketing has become a popular way for web publishers to earn revenue online. This business consists of promoting products or services of other companies and receiving a commission for each sale made through the various promotions.
However, the competition is tough. To really succeed in this business, it’s important to implement acquisition strategies that will increase your traffic and maximize your sales. The most sustainable one is SEO.
This guide will help you understand how to make the most of affiliate marketing SEO to succeed.
What is affiliate marketing?
The business of affiliate marketing consists of promoting a company's products and services. As soon as a sale is generated or a particular action is performed (e.g., requesting a quote), the affiliate earns a commission.
How affiliate marketing works
Affiliate marketing is a three-way model consisting of the advertiser, the publisher, and the end customer.
In general, an advertiser (or merchant) registers on an affiliate platform to offer their products or has their own program. Affiliates (publishers), who have a website in the merchant's theme, will then apply for this program.
Once the agreement is finalized, the affiliate will add the advertiser's products in different strategic places on their site with affiliate links. The goal is to get visitors to click on these links and then purchase the product on the advertiser's site.
Once an order is placed through the affiliate link, the publisher receives a commission on the sale. This percentage varies depending on the terms of the affiliate program.
Affiliate links
Affiliate tracking works, in most cases, with affiliate links. These links are generated through the dedicated area of the affiliate program.
For example, if you like the advertiser's product and you want to promote it on your site, you will get the URL of the article. Then you will go to your affiliate area and enter the URL. The tool will then generate the same link with the addition of your affiliate setting.
Each affiliate link is designed just for you.
It’s this element that makes it possible to track the sales that are made by your website. So make sure that they’re present and set up correctly.
Affiliate programs and platforms
A very large number of websites today offer an affiliate program.
The majority of them go through specialized platforms, called affiliate marketplaces.
Among the best known, you can find Amazon Associates, Awin, Affilae, Rakuten Advertising, Effiliation, Kwanko, NetAffiliation, and many others.
Each brand that opens up to affiliate marketing sets its own rules and commissions. It’s also adaptable depending on the number of sales made. So your terms can change over time depending on your results.
Some brands also have their own program with their own platform. This is the case of our ecommerce solution WiziShop Partners. You can find more information via this link: https://partners.wizishop.com/aff.
Examples of affiliate sites
To inspire you and bring you a better vision of affiliate marketing, there are some reference sites:
- Wirecutter
- ConsumerSearch
- NerdWallet
- Selectos
- Etc.
These sites are very popular in affiliate marketing and generate hundreds, even thousands of sales to advertisers every month. Most of them use SEO as their primary acquisition lever.
What is SEO?
Definition
SEO (search engine optimization) is a marketing tool that involves optimizing a website to improve its ranking on search engines.
SEO is represented by the first results that are displayed "organically" in the results.
How it works
The goal of a search engine like Google is to offer the best possible result to internet users. When a user types a query, a whole bunch of criteria will be taken into account to define the positioning of each site in the ranking.
To have a chance to be well displayed to people searching online, you must therefore focus on quality. Your site, in its entirety, must be optimized.
This optimization involves technical improvements (loading speed, mobile compatibility, crawling files, etc.) and the integration of quality content that meets the search intent. Finally, you must do everything to improve the trustworthiness of your site, and this involves obtaining quality backlinks.
These improvements represent the 3 pillars of SEO: technical, content, and authority.
Why do SEO in affiliate marketing?
When it comes to affiliate marketing tips, note that SEO is the most important lever to activate if you want to succeed and perpetuate your business.
- Visibility: One of the first benefits of launching an affiliate SEO strategy is the visibility it brings. Billions of queries are made every day in the world, just on Google. So it would be a shame not to make yourself visible in the search results for your theme’s keywords!
- Qualified traffic: By ranking for beneficial queries, related to your activity and the products you promote, you attract qualified traffic consisting of people in your target audience. Unlike advertising, it’s the internet user who searches for specific information and decides to visit your pages.
- Profitability: Affiliate marketing is a business that often offers lower margins than ecommerce or dropshipping. It’s therefore complicated to set up advertising campaigns and have a return on investment. For this reason, SEO is the most advantageous channel for attracting organic traffic on a regular basis without spending too much money.
- Conversion: SEO has one of the best conversion rates. This lever allows you to naturally attract qualified traffic. Internet users perform a search with a real intention behind it. If your page and the products that you highlight are adapted…jackpot!
- Sustainability: The particularity of SEO is that once you’ve optimized your site and you work on it regularly, your traffic will only increase. You ensure a certain durability for your site and your business.
How do you do SEO in affiliate marketing?
Whether it’s in affiliate marketing, ecommerce, or even dropshipping, the principle is the same to set up your SEO strategy.
Technical base
The technical pillar is a key factor to improve and optimize in order to have a technically sound base for your SEO work.
The technique of a site is based on several elements such as the speed of the site, the configuration of files related to crawling and indexing (robots.txt, sitemap, ...), pagination, canonical tags, etc..
To benefit from a technical structure that meets the requirements of search engines like Google, it’s important to choose the right CMS. Without technical knowledge, these configurations will be very complicated to set up. It’s therefore necessary to ensure that your site is natively optimized for SEO.
All the websites of our solutions (WiziShop for ecommerce and Evolup for affiliate marketing) are entirely designed for SEO.
You can start with peace of mind, as the technical base is fully optimized.
Niche research
In order to get started in the affiliate marketing business, one of the first steps is to choose a niche that is accessible in SEO. This niche must also be profitable, i.e., the commissions earned must be interesting.
As a general rule, it’s best to start with a theme that you like and that you know. It’ll be easier to create content and especially to stay motivated when working on your project!
Keyword study
Once you have your affiliate marketing niche, you’ll have to do a keyword study.
This step consists of analyzing all the queries that are typed by your audience to find the products that you’ll promote and the pages that you’ll create. From the short tail to the long tail, you must list everything.
To do the keyword study, you need to start by brainstorming, analyzing the search volumes, and checking the competition as well as the search intent behind each query.
Site structure
During your keyword study, you’ll find many interesting queries to use for your site. You’ll therefore group the different families of keywords together.
Based on your results, a site structure will emerge with categories, blog articles, shopping guides, etc.
You can use tools such as MindMeister to help you shape the tree structure.
Content creation
Once your site structure is well established and you’ve found many keywords to target, you’ll need to create SEO-optimized content.
For each piece of content created, the tags and elements of the page must be properly optimized: title, meta description, Hn structure, URL, images, etc.
Then, the text that you’ll write on each page will be the determining point to rank effectively on search engines. The text that you include in your content must be of high quality and respond to the search intent of internet users.
The goal with your content is to rank highly on search engines with SEO, but it’s also to generate sales for your website! When you write and format your texts, think about the integration of the different affiliate products. Everything must be thought of to be well listed on Google and boost conversion.
Authority work
Onsite work is one of the keys to success in SEO, but to rank for keywords with high competition, you’ll have no choice but to improve the authority of your site and your pages.
The increase in authority is achieved by obtaining backlinks. These are links, coming from other websites, that point to your site.
Just like the content you publish on your site, backlinks must be of quality.
There are several techniques to get started with this strategy: forums, directories, link baiting, guest blog, influencers, shopping platforms, etc.
BONUS: The Evolup tool to boost your sales and SEO
The affiliate marketing business is very attractive and can become very profitable! Nevertheless, website creation remains a hindrance for a large number of affiliates.
Most of the time, you have to use open-source software like WordPress, install hosting, manage security, make updates, buy extensions to synchronize products in affiliate marketing... many points that can discourage many people.
That's why the WiziShop ecommerce platform launched a solution 100% dedicated to affiliate marketing: Evolup.
This all-in-one tool allows you to create affiliate stores very easily and quickly without worrying about the technical aspect. You’ll also see that there are many other advantages to start with this solution, especially if you want to do SEO.
Over 50 SEO features
First of all, Evolup includes more than 50 SEO features!
The technical base is perfectly optimized to guarantee optimal results. Many SEO experts recommend our solution. All basic improvements are included: customization of SEO tags, URLs, sitemap, robots.txt file, etc.
Then, advanced features are also offered, such as the following:
- Link obfuscation
- Log analysis
- Topic Cluster Manager
- Searchdexing
You can find details on each of these optimizations in the SEO category on our WiziShop blog.
Ecommerce template
The other point of differentiation of the Evolup solution is the ecommerce templates.
Each website you create for affiliate marketing on Evolup will look like an online store. This visual aspect allows you to improve conversions but also to differentiate yourself from competitors.
In today's SEO, search intent is crucial for successful ranking. Many queries are based on transactional intent. That is, people are looking for products to buy.
For this type of keyword, most of the results that appear are online stores. With an affiliate blog, it’ll be very complicated to rank.
However, with an ecommerce site design, you increase your chances of displaying your pages for these keywords!
Amazon synchronization
On Evolup, you can benefit from Amazon synchronization directly in your subscription plan!
Each month, you can import up to 50 products and benefit from synchronization on 50 products.
This is a real time-saver for website editors. You don't have to waste time importing items, checking that the product you’re selling is in stock, and above all, verifying that the product you are displaying is correct.
If you wish, you can work with other affiliate programs. On each product page, you can manually insert the link to the advertiser's site.
Software with artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the basis of the Evolup solution with SEO.
Within your administration area, you can use our AI tool for many tasks: niche search, name search, automatic content generation (product descriptions, blog posts, paragraphs, etc).
This technology allows you to save a considerable amount of time in the creation of content for your affiliate site.
Take advantage of it: right now, we’re offering you the first month of artificial intelligence for free!
Updating and security
Finally, the roadblock that we remove with Evolup and that I mentioned in this article: your site’s updates and security.
It’s complex to manage a WordPress site in its entirety without technical knowledge. You may encounter security gaps, errors that make your site inaccessible after updating your theme or extensions, hosting problems, and many other issues.
With Evolup, this is history! Everything is turnkey, and we take care of all the technical aspects. You focus only on the creation of your website and the implementation of your SEO strategy.
Evolup's monthly price starts at $10/month. Start your free trial now and take advantage of the solution’s many tools to help you make money with affiliate marketing and watch your sales skyrocket!
