However, many marketers fail to do these important parts and ignore the SEO marketing or other mistakes. These consequently affect the effectiveness on your campaigns. Avoiding these mistakes can have long-term positive impact on your traffic and sales.
Below are the top 9 mistakes done by affiliates.
1) Focusing on keywords rather than solutions
Many affiliates make the mistake of plugging keywords on their landing pages without considering the importance their products have on the customers. Rather than aiming more on solution provision, many people focus more on the keyword density.
You should include main keywords integrated severally in the article to attract high traffic but only use them as a base. Make sure your content is informative and helps readers to solve a problem through a successful method, such as purchasing a certain product.
2) Depending on affiliate business as your only revenue stream
Rather than considering it as a revenue channel, various affiliates mistake by treating affiliate marketing as a business model.
Affiliate marketing is a revenue channel for monetizing yourwebsite, but try to use other methods too- such as Google AdSense, AdWords, etc. Diversifying your income networks helps ensure you still earn even if one method fails.
3) Producing plagiarized rather than original content
Many affiliate websites copy content from other sites and slightly edit it, then attach product lists and publish the posts. This consequently lowers your ranking on Google and other search engines.
You should always write unique and really valuable content for your visitors as it helps the search engines to rank your site high for relevant keywords.
Note that most of the sites with duplicated content never rank well, therefore you need to add value and quality for search engines to rank your site high.
4) Lack or duplicating Meta descriptions
In most cases, you may find affiliates misusing or not able to write good convincing titles and Meta descriptions. You should ensure that your listings are unique and relevant to the keywords/topics.
A simple recommendation would be taking the first paragraphs of every page and put them as the Meta descriptions of each specific page. You might want to consider plugins such as Yoast SEO if you are using WordPress.
They work very well for on-page SEO and helps you create custom Meta description templates. Another plugin would be SmartCrawl, which generates Meta descriptions for you in an automated manner.
Using unique Meta descriptions that are related to the main keyword will help your affiliate pages rise up high the SERPs thereby making you stand out from your competitors.
5) Overlooking Mobile Optimization
Many of the affiliate websites appear horrible on mobile devices. This makes them lose the opportunity to outdo other brands in mobile SERPs.
The biggest problems with SEO for mobile is low speed, normally caused by unused plugins and images, as well as ignoring optimization of site for AMP version. If you give your users a faster experience while browsing through the valuable engaging content on your site, you can be able to outrank all your competitors.
I recommend prioritizing mobile optimization for high mobile conversions and sales.
6) Use of free web hosting solutions
Nowadays, there are various sites such as Wix, WordPress, etc. that provide free and paid hosting solutions. Many new affiliates make the mistake of free solutions, making their business seem somehow unreal.
When using free hosting, you do not own the site architecture and you have limited control over things that boost rankings. Always try to own your website, data and content to protect yourself and your visitors.
7) Use of irrelevant backlinks
For successful affiliate business, backlinks assist in bringing new visitors as well as the ranking of your site. However, irrelevant backlinks can easily get you in trouble with Google since they may be seen as “link schemes” with more negatives than benefits.
In order to prevent this, make sure all your affiliate pages add significant value to any person who visits them. Ensure that your backlinks are hosted on authoritative sites to prevent them from devaluing your site’s ranking.
8) Using undefined canonicals
When you use canonical URLs, they assist you in improving link and ranking indicators for your website content. You should organize your site into various categories, which you use to communicate to your audience.
Canonical URLs assists a lot in managing the content on your affiliate site as well as improving your ranking signals. To learn more about them, you can visit Google Search Console page that gives more information that is detailed.
9) Act as if the best SEO practices do not apply to affiliate site SEO
Most affiliates normally ignore common SEO mistakes on their site. This includes 404 errors, broken links, thin and duplicate content, excessive redirects issues.
All these mistakes need to be addressed to ensure good crawlability and health of your site. You can download a complex suite of SEO tools that can assist you to check and eliminate any errors, as well as correct any problematic content.
Though good SEO needs more work, its rewards are really worth it. Work to clean up your site internally, ease the navigation and speed, and advance your crawl budget.
To the search engines, your site is no different from the merchant or other sites. It is valued based on what you offer your visitors. So, always ensure you do the regular site cleanup and maintenance.
I advise you not to undervalue the effect of SEO on your affiliate marketing business. They are very crucial in determining your site’s rank on SERPs.
So, what do we conclude now?
Try to avoid the above mistakes and you will be a step ahead towards the high ranks. You can use PPC advertising to attract early leads to your new affiliate site but it’s wiser to grow the site naturally by cultivating strong organic links to boost conversions through good SEO.
I honestly hope that you found this post helpful in one way or the other. Please share your views in the comment form below. Also, feel free to ask me any question and I’ll respond as soon as possible. Share this post with your friends who you think it might help too.
Thanks a lot and stay tuned for more!
