Kathryn McMann

How to Combine your SEO and Affiliate Marketing Strategy

Affiliate marketing is an effective way to make money online, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process that helps your website rank higher in search engine results. Combined, these two tactics can have a significant impact on your website's targeted traffic and revenue. 
In this post, I’m going to discuss why combining these two make a powerful strategic combo and can reach new potential customers and increase revenue.

Why Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing lets you earn a percentage of commission on the promotion of products or services. This could be on your website, or through links you have created on other sites, through social posts and content, and even posted in comments. The other side of this is industry-relevant people will promote and sell your products or services. For example, if you are a food blogger and vlogger, you could have affiliated adverts on your website, linked text (anchor text) in your copy, links beneath your videos and in your profiles about products that are related to cooking. Your audience are already there and interested in cooking. They are interested in your recipes, cooking technique and so will look to you for suggestions of the right tools for the job, for example. This is a win-win for the affiliate, the audience, and the merchant. You can include your unique link everywhere. (But remember you don’t want to appear spammy to the reader or search engines.) The products or services gain exposure to an audience who are interested in that area or topic, and the affiliate earns a percentage from each sale made through the unique link they provide. This works well if you are a business who suggests tools or partners too. You can even become a micro-influencer and sell the advantages of the products or services through your content. It’s fantastic method for brands/the merchant to build an advocate base who sell the benefits for you. People buy from people after all. The only downside is depending on which affiliate programme you use, such as Amazon or Farfetch (fashion), you will only receive a small percentage of that final value of that product. For example, if 10% of your traffic click the link, and only 10 of those clicks convert (make the purchase). You may only get 10% of the cost back. That’s could be quite a small percentage depending on value of the item itself. So you need to have a good flow of traffic of the right people who are really interested in your topic. The upside of this is once you’ve created the affiliate account and placed your unique linked code, it can creates a passive income stream that you won’t need to worry about. You just need to focus on creating the content that brings the right people to your site or content. And these need to be the right people, i.e. people who are interested and would benefit for those products or services.

Common Affiliate marketing examples

  • A church website –> Charitable donations in affiliated links
  • Marketing company –> Recommended tools with affiliate programmes
  • Natural Skincare – Video and content creators showing Before and After videos with affiliated links in social profiles or on micro-sites. 
  • Tech Reviews Site – Affiliate linked to Amazon products through their affiliate programme.

How to Optimize Your Affiliate Programme

To optimize your affiliate program, you should create a landing page, use a plugin to create a popup, use an autoresponder email service, and create a blog or Vlog channel such as YouTube, daily Facebook or Instagram lives. These strategies will help you reach potentially interested audience and drive them to the links. 

What is SEO?

In a nutshell, SEO is about optimizing your website to rank higher in search engine results pages. It involves making sure there are no technical blocks in the backend. That the site is structured in a way that makes it easy for people to read and understand. And that it provides content that is relevant to the subject matter you show. This provides credibility and assurance to the search engine pages that you offer as well as providing relevant information (content in all forms) on what you say you do. You sell teddy bears, so you use the words 'teddy bear' and have pictures of the teddy bears on your site. If say you sell 'teddy bears' but have no reference to it, in both on site content and backend, they won’t provide them in the SERPs. They will mark you down for being untrustworthy. Refer to my blog post 'What is SEO?' for much more in-depth explanation. This was an extremely simplified explanation. SEO is a long-term strategy that requires time and effort but it will generate more traffic and drive it to your website in the long-run. It can take 6-9 months for all the SEO tactics to be picked up by search engines, then you need to nurture your progress. We can provide a strong SEO set up for new website and build in a long-term strategy.

How to Combine SEO and Affiliate Marketing

So you see, SEO and affiliate marketing complement each other well. One provides the content that people want to read/see– the potential chefs, the techno addict, the want for natural beauty – and the other provides the search results in SERPs (search engine results pages) that show them where they can get that information. To combine them for a powerful strategy, you need to research specific search terms for a range of priority keywords; optimise your website and key landing pages; use an autoresponder email to drive traffic; anchor text with affiliate links in your blogs or within social media profiles (if it's relevant to the media), or have them under videos and within specific pieces of content. And provide content that matches your audiences wants, and keep adjusting your SEO strategy monthly to support all of these. And be consistent with your actions

In conclusion

A well-planned SEO and affiliate marketing strategy can give your business a significant boost in the long run that will only grow and grow over time, reaching new target audiences. And remember, consistency is key to success in both affiliate marketing and SEO because once you start reaching new traffic it needs to allow time to build reputation, and efforts, and will support and grow the traffic flow even more. This will help you generate more leads and increase your sales and revenue as your company grows alongside.  

Need help pulling it altogether and delivering a consistent plan, get in touch to discuss your industry and key area of focus. 

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