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Did you know that SEO is a core part of affiliate marketing? It guides potential customers to your affiliate links when they’re searching for related products or services online.

Understanding the link between SEO and affiliate marketing can give you an advantage. Your affiliate website can become a key tool, helping you hit your target audience more effectively. 

This article will explain to new affiliate marketers the role of SEO in affiliate marketing and give you smart tactics to win more affiliate income in 2024. 

What is SEO Affiliate Marketing?

One of the deciding factors whether you’ll succeed in affiliate marketing or not is how visible your website is in the search engine results. The higher your website appears in the SERP, the more users will find it, visit it, and follow your affiliate link. That’s why E-commerce SEO for affiliate marketing is a cornerstone.

If SEO were a puzzle, then affiliate links would be the missing pieces. Such pieces create a link between seller landing pages and your content to bring you revenue. Search engines like Google catalog these links, tying your site’s visibility to your affiliate income. 

Affiliate marketing SEO involves crucial steps like technical setup, creating relevant and optimized content, and link building. When used with a skill, SEO affiliate marketing can be highly profitable. Below, we’ll describe what tricks you should know to lead your affiliate marketing SEO to higher click-through rates, more conversions, and increased affiliate income.

Step-by-Step Guide to Make Money With Affiliate Marketing SEO

By following a step-by-step roadmap to affiliate marketing you can get the most out of search engines, attracting visitors looking for products or services you promote. From the technology side, you can rely on Website SEO Checker, the ultimate solution that will help you set up a flawless affiliate marketing SEO campaign at each of the following steps:

Research Commercial Keywords

Keywords differ not just in spelling and meaning but also in their functionality within the marketing journey. Various forms of keywords target distinct phases of the marketing funnel, which include:

• The top of the funnel (TOFU)
• The middle of the funnel (MOFU)
• The bottom of the funnel (BOFU)

Commercial intent keywords at the BOFU stage prove efficient if you’re interested in immediate sales. All they need is a link related to the product, upon which they are all set to finalize the purchase. Here are some common search queries these keywords are related to: 

Commercial Intent	Explanation	Examples
Product-Related Searches	Used by prospects who have a specific product in mind. Typical formulations:Best + name of the productDirect product searchesProduct categories Top + product	‘Samsung Galaxy S21’, ‘Apple iPhone 13’
Buy Now Searches	Used by prospects ready to make an immediate purchase. Typical formulations:Buy + productProduct + deal DiscountPromo codesCheap	‘Buy Xbox Series X’, ‘Order Canon EOS Rebel T8i’
Local Searches	Used by prospects intending to find physical stores or services within a certain geography. Typical formulations:Product + near meService + near me	‘Italian restaurant near me’, ‘Nike store downtown’

Write Valuable Content

Your visitors might not be ready to buy immediately. One trick to make them remember you and come back later is to provide valuable content such as guides, statistics roundups, real experiences, and research. 

Always prioritize value in your content. If you publish shallow content, readers might turn away as it won’t engage them or resolve their issues. This contradicts your goal of trying to use resources wisely – huge hassle, no gain. In March 2024, search engines introduced an update that goes beyond defending truly useful content. Its effect can lower your affiliate website’s ranking if your content fails to deliver what it promises. Lower ranks mean fewer visitors and, therefore, fewer clicks on your affiliate links. 

Still, on-page optimization is important and shouldn’t be overlooked – remember to follow these golden-standard optimization guidelines:

• Employ product links naturally within your content. 
• Use effective anchor text for optimal SEO. 
• Stay within your keyword clusters to build topical authority. 
• Identify short and long-tail keywords, and relevant queries that align with your readers’ search intents. 
• Your subheadings should follow the <H1>, <H2>, and <H3> hierarchy for organization and visibility. 
• Ensure your images’ alt text contains keywords for better indexing. 

Have a look at these five strategies for scaling up your affiliate marketing campaign from a single product to multiple niches

Work on User Experience

User behavior is one of the crucial elements of your affiliate marketing success. When users stumble upon nasty UX, the chances of them taking the intended actions plummet. So, along with high content quality, your efforts should be focused on making your articles easy to digest. 

Here are a few recommendations for you to always provide an optimized user experience:

• Set the structure. Always keep in mind that your content should live where it can easily be found. The right structure of your website with categorization and navigation aids and affects the bounce rate and session time. 

• Check load speed. This is crucial not only for tech SEO. No one will feel like your UX is great if your images don’t appear before the user decides to leave. It’s recommended to use image sizes that are optimal for your screen resolution and formats that don’t require too many bytes like JPG. Also, check to see if the widgets that nest videos or social media posts have any loading speed issues.
• Guide them to learn more. Instead of thinking users will browse your website without guidance, add visual aids – widgets like “See also:” or featured articles. If your business has case studies, webinars, etc., incorporate them into articles with a widget or a simple linkable text. Also, you may help your readers get maximum value by adding a table of contents to your blogs.

Use the Website SEO Checker to identify any problems with your affiliate SEO pages, including Core Web Vitals, to enhance user experience. 

Avoid Technical SEO Errors

Technical SEO involves avoiding tech errors like broken pages and non-indexation. What to pay attention to in this area: 

• Sitemaps. A handy XML sitemap helps crawlers as much as your readers. Don’t forget to submit it to Google Search Console to help search engines understand what your site is about.
• Page speed. The same is true for page speed – the Google PageSpeed Insights tool shows whether or not you need to improve this factor for rankability.
• Mobile version. Mobile traffic is important, so ensure there are no tech issues with the mobile website version.
• Meta robots. You can manually guide crawlers on how to index your website properly. Add meta robot tags if you can benefit from this customization.

Add Affiliate Marketing Links to the Best Performing Pages 

Adding your affiliate links should be strategic – adding them to high-traffic pages with no tech issues and optimizing internal links can do wonders for your SEO affiliate marketing. You just need to open any page traffic analyzer tool to identify the most visited articles, review them to find optimal opportunities to link your affiliate offers, and modify your content to add links. No specific advice for this step – just make sure you add links with relevant anchors that seem organic.

Optimize Internal Links 

Generally speaking, internal links help users to learn more about relevant topics and discover more about your products. Also, they are one of the ranking factors Google uses to define your page’s place in the SERP. With internal linking, you can get more opportunities for users to see your affiliate links, increasing the probability that promotional links will be clicked by users from other content if they don’t do it at once. Internal links are also vital for Google when it scans your website to understand the structure and connection between pages. 

Develop a Powerful Link Building Profile

Links remain a stable and influential factor for ranking your pages, no matter what affiliate marketing trends are buzzing around – so earning good backlinks should be a main focus in your affiliate marketing. High-quality backlinks to your affiliate marketing content boost your website’s authority.

By focusing on obtaining links from reputable sources, you enhance your site’s credibility and visibility in search results. Utilizing tools like Linkee (an automated backlinking tool) can simplify the process of acquiring these valuable links, allowing you to scale your efforts and maintain a consistent flow of high-quality backlinks.

Acquiring quality backlinks requires contributing to relevant and reputable blogs and media publications, which often means building partnerships with editors, cross-promoting your content to exchange links with relevant brands, and asking affiliate partners to backlink to your content from their sites.

“In affiliate marketing, a powerful link-building profile is important. Quality backlinks not only enhance your site’s SEO performance but also improve your credibility and trustworthiness in the eyes of search engines. By securing links from authoritative sites, affiliate marketers can drive more organic traffic and increase conversion rates, ultimately leading to higher rankings and greater success.” 

Maria Harutyunyan, Head of SEO, Loopex Digital  

Conclusion

Let’s emphasize once again – SEO and affiliate marketing are deeply interconnected. Higher visibility in the SERP results can take your affiliate efforts to new heights. Specifically designed SEO strategies significantly increase your earnings through affiliate links. 

Remember to stay open to innovative tactics and use available SEO tools. The sky is the limit for mastering affiliate marketing SEO in 2024 and onwards.

Want to build an affiliate program for your store? With GoAffPro, you can easily set up and manage your program. Check out our app: GoAffPro