As an affiliate or blogger, it is crucial to have good SEO practices so that you can rank high and convert many visitors into buyers of the products you are promoting. And an increase in sales means increase in revenues.
However, the link between affiliate marketing and SEO can be complicated. In such a case, most affiliate networks conclude that their rankings lower due to poor practices of one or several affiliates.
To fight this bad reputation of affiliate backlinks, it is crucial to have clear understanding of good SEO practices for affiliates. This starts by knowing the criteria used by search engines in ranking websites.
Once you have practiced good SEO techniques, your site will reward you with more revenue. Below is my breakthrough about the best effective SEO affiliate marketing tips for successful affiliate journey in 2019 and beyond.
1) Select your niche
This is one of the most important stages of affiliate marketing. Once you choose a niche that suits you well, you are half the journey. I have explained in another post here how to choose a good high-converting niche, so am hoping you have the knowledge.
Make sure you can find a variety of keywords related to your niche. After selecting a good niche, go ahead and get yourself a domain name.
2) Choose your domain name
A website’s domain name also determines whether the site will be a successful one. You can choose to get a large authoritative website that you can later brand. At the same time, you can decide on a short, simple and straightforward name.
Come up with the long-term goals for your site before launching it. This will help ensure your site has the potentiality of succeeding and bringing you huge income.
I recommend choosing and building a huge authority website. This is because you can be on top all times and make real cash. However, selecting an exact match domain and targeting a single major keyword could eventually fail with changes in trends.
3) Decide on a good website host
May be you are asking, does hosting really matter? Yes! Hosting plays a crucial role in generating traffic regardless of the method you choose – PPC, SEO, and Social Media marketing. If a host is slow in loading, then your site will be slow too.
Whichever method you use to drive traffic, they will soon leave if your site takes too long to load a single page. This negatively affects the efforts you had put to drive the traffic and your revenues can even lower to zero.
With a good website hosting solution such as WordPress or Bluehost, the website will load faster, the connection secure, reliable, local and inexpensive. You can look for customer reviews and ratings of different hosting companies before deciding which one to use. Just be sure your choice is a reliable one.
4) High-quality content
For your site to rank high, you need to provide high quality and detailed content, which will largely be determined by the choices you made earlier. Ensure you create seriously amazing content that engages, educates, entertains and adds value to the reader.
This will definitely attract more backlinks and this means higher ranking. You should also ensure that your content is comprehensive and long to at least 1500 words for blogs- best SEO perspective since 2016. The video and presentation content should also be long enough and thoroughly researched.
High quality content will increase the trust and loyalty of your audience, thereby enticing them to purchase the services or products you are promoting. This is the best way to attract high rankings on search engines and this means loads of targeted traffic and possibly more revenues. If done right, SEO can attract huge numbers of followers and regular readers ever.
5) Right keywords’ selection
The keywords you choose for your niche and posts directly affects your SEO ranking. It’s recommended that you choose a short and memorable domain name so that your URL can be short.
Google values the first five words of your domain more than the others do. It introduced Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) and added the Hummingbird Algorithm to its search engine. This ensures that the engine figures out what your post is actually about.
To ensure high rankings, ensure you use long tail keywords that have less competition. Due to LSI, you don’t have to keep repeating the keywords or writing them as they are. This makes long keywords stand out from short ones.
For example, instead of using highly competing keywords such as “best restaurants,” you can use long tail keyword like “best Italian restaurants in Virginia.” Make sure your keywords are closely related to the products you are promoting.
To enhance optimization, you might need to use LSIgraph tool. It is a very easy and comfortable to use tool so you will do your keyword research efficiently.
6) Do on-page SEO
No matter the size of your website, on-page SEO should be ensured on every page. Make sure you occasionally include the target keywords within your article, page and subpages.
Also, use them on the title of the page as well as alternate names for included images. Each page might require different optimization from the others if they are not directly related (e.g. in case of a wide authority website). However, you need to ensure you do the following on each specific page or post.
- The main keyword density should be about 1.5-2.5 percent of the whole content. This helps Google to easily understand the relevance of your website to this keyword or topic. Main keywords also have a commercial significance, so ensure you use them along with other informational keywords to support your sales posts even via other pieces of content. For lucrative affiliate marketing SEO tactics, try to consider the purpose and nature of the keywords while assigning them to articles.
- Using appealing introductory paragraph is a great way to captivate your audience. Therefore, always ensure that your initial paragraph is powerful and attractive to hook your audience right from the beginning. This lowers the bounce rates and boosts your articles’ ranking on search engines.
- Use H1/H2/H3 titles for different sections of your articles. Ensure you use the main keyword in the H1 heading. This gives your visitors an easier time reading when reading your content. Additionally, it assists Google in understanding what a certain article is about.
- Ensure you put ‘alt’ tags containing keywords. Make sure that all your images have alt tags that comprises keywords. To understand what an image is about, Google bots are pointed to the alt tags. So, make better use of them to increase your ranking.
7) Include more media and CTAs.
While writing your articles, try to add media and call to actions to make it easier for your readers to understand all the information contained. In this case, you may decide to use images, embedded videos or infographics.
Good videos and CTAs assist in boosting the activeness and engagements of your site visitors. You can use Google Analytics to get reports that are more detailed regarding this performance. Distributing them wisely enhances the rankings since Google identifies it as a positive user experience.
8) Ensure your site is mobile-responsive
A mobile-responsive website responds quickly in a clear design on all types and sizes of mobile devices. With the increase in number of mobile users, optimizing your site for mobile is very essential.
According to projections, more than 80 percent of online users and about half of online traffic comes from mobile devices. That being said, you need to ensure that your site is mobile-friendly (if you haven’t already).
If you use site builders such as WordPress themes, you can use plugins to help you optimize for fast, easy and clear mobile browsing. You can find services from sites like Google PageSpeed Insights for testing and solutions to increase loading speed.
9) Ensure good Social Media practices
In the world of online marketing, there is no doubt that social media is the king. Most people use different social media platforms to communicate, share and read peoples thoughts. To promote their brands and establish effective communication with world audience, over 95% of affiliates and online merchants use some kind of social media marketing campaigns such as Facebook and Email marketing.
Using different interactive platforms makes customers feel like they are communicating with others rather than connecting with an impersonal company. Use it to engage your followers and occasionally recommends products to them, or redirect them to your site where they can read the comprehensive post you have written.
When used appropriately, it can attract high conversions. And remember, the post will ever be seen by your growing audience. When the post is great, people will comment on it, share and promote it for you, thereby enhancing your brand awareness.
10) Optimize your site for conversions
If your website is not well optimized for conversions, all the above points will be meaningless. Even though you need to get traffic to get conversions, ensure that you dedicate the necessary time (and/or money) to add good CTAs. This helps to direct viewers where you want them to go. No matter how small twists you make, you can start getting massive conversions and profits.
Affiliate marketing is an awesome method for anyone to make money online from anywhere. You become your own boss, work the time you want and best of all, allows you maximum freedom since you don’t have to keep working; it gives you passive income. It’s not easy though, but it’s not a very hard work. With help of the above SEO marketing techniques, you can start reaping the fruits of affiliate success.
To maximize your income, you may need to use social media tactics and email marketing techniques to attract more sales. You might also want to consider the xMails email autoresponder that allows sending unlimited emails to unlimited subscribers, with templates to suit your desire.
I hope this post has been of help to you. Feel free to share your opinion on the comment form below and share it with your social media friends using the buttons below.
Thank you so much.