How to Build Links and SEO for Affiliate Websites?
If you are new to affiliate website marketing, you have to treat it like your other websites. Link building and SEO are as important in affiliate marketing as it is in digital marketing. You have to practice white hat link building and proper on-page SEO for your affiliate websites.
When the e-commerce industry discovered that affiliate websites improve their conversion rates, they immediately focused on it. Now, affiliate marketing is essential in learning e-commerce.
In this article, we will teach you how to build links and SEO for affiliate websites. Follow the current trends in affiliate website marketing and e-commerce SEO to get more conversions.
Why Do You Need an Affiliate Website?
An affiliate website contains recommendations and referrals for customer needs. And these recommendations lead to your e-commerce website and your products and services.
You can promote your products through your affiliate websites and showcase what you have to offer.
In 2021, there was a sudden increase in interest in affiliate marketing compared to the prior year. A whopping 50% of e-commerce marketers added affiliate marketing to their strategies. This is because affiliate marketing is a cost-effective way to advertise a product or service.
Some examples of successful affiliate websites:
TripAdvisor started as an affiliate website directing thousands of customers to hotels and resorts. Now, this affiliate website is a trusted affiliate marketer for anything travel-related.
With almost 17.4 million visitors per month, NerdWallet is now a major affiliate marketer for personal finances. It started as a simple credit card review and comparison website.
This website is a unique product review and comparison website because it reviews digital products and services. The Top Ten Reviews website connects customers to software providers and other service providers.
This website is a community of website designers and developers on the Squarespace website platform. It’s a great resource for newbies on the platform and for anyone looking for support and help with making their own website.
Affiliate marketing is not limited to small-time businesses and startups. Huge companies, like Amazon, use affiliate marketers to redirect customers to their product pages.
You can do this similar technique and redirect the traffic to your product page. You can either hire an affiliate marketer or make an affiliate website to maximize the benefits.
Get Traction for Your Affiliate Website Using White Hat Link Building Techniques
To get new customers on your product page using your affiliate website, first, you have to get organic traffic on your affiliate website. One way to do it is by establishing a proactive link building strategy. But let’s focus on white hat link building techniques to avoid Google penalties on your affiliate website.
Getting new traffic for your affiliate website is a tricky problem. You have to understand how undecided customers can find your product recommendation on Google. But if you’re familiar with digital marketing, you have an advantage in affiliate marketing.
As an example, let’s say that you have an affiliate website for car parts and accessories. These white hat link building techniques can elevate your affiliate website's performance in SERP.
1. Know Your Product's Target Audience
How to do it:
Know the demographics of your target audience.
Bring the target audience to your affiliate website and introduce them to your brand.
Contact webmasters among your target audience to pitch new link building opportunities.
Create content that features your new link building partners.
If you know who you are selling to, you'll know how to sell your product. This is the approach of a proactive affiliate marketer. Your product's relevance to the audience makes them click your link, and it is also a major Google ranking factor.
But how can you identify the right type of audience for your products? The answer lies in the selling point of your product or service.
Let's take the example from above…
If your affiliate website targets car enthusiasts, every aspect of your affiliate website should respond to that. This includes web design, on-page SEO, website and blog content, and off-page SEO. If your content targets rich car owners, other website elements should reflect the same intent.
Knowing your target audience opens up new opportunities to expand your network. You can also target other website owners to generate multiple link building opportunities for your content. This opens up opportunities for white hat link building.
2. Do White Hat Link Building From Competitive Research
What to look for:
Broken links from competitor's backlink profile.
Relevant directory links.
Brand mentions from blog posts.
Affiliate links from the competitor website.
Continuing on our example…
For your affiliate car parts and accessories blog, you can grab low-hanging fruits from competitors within the same niche. Grab those easy links (directory links, brand mentions, broken links) from your competitor's backlink profile and target them for backlinks.
Note: You have to look at your e-commerce website's competitors instead of your affiliate website's competitors. You can find more relevant e-commerce websites to feature on your affiliate website.
Competitor links should come from other car accessory e-commerce sites, car reseller websites, and other car-related businesses. This way, you are grabbing the links with white hat link building in mind.
Competitive research is an important component of white hat link building. If done properly, it levels the field between long-existing websites and new websites in terms of SERP traction.
By looking at your competitor's strategy, you know how to progress and improve your white hat link building.
3. Interview Industry Leaders for Content
What to prepare for the interview:
List of questions for the interviewer.
Copy of the questions for the interviewee (if necessary).
Article draft where their interview will be posted.
Practice for the interview.
The beauty of interview posts is that you can interview anyone you like in the industry. You can interview industry movers and mention them in your affiliate website blog.
Make the offer to get their social media profile links, so you can add them to your interview post. You can expect the interviewee to link back to the interview material. This gets you authority backlinks in your industry.
You can also make a podcast from the interview session. This gives you more content material because you have an audio file and the transcript of the podcast. You can post these materials on your affiliate website blog to get backlinking opportunities.
4. Create Roundup Posts
Industry roundup post ideas:
Roundup articles for useful tools in your industry.
Feature different useful products for your industry.
Crowdsourced ideas from industry leaders.
Highlight service businesses in your industry and interview the owner if possible.
Industry roundups are popular content because they can provide multiple backlinks from a single article. Since you are pulling famous names in your industry in a single post, the roundup post gains a lot of audience. Not just any type of audience; you are getting relevant customers that you can convert to e-commerce sales.
If you are making a roundup post, don't forget to include your e-commerce website in it. You can get referral traffic from your affiliate website and increase your website's ranking. Both your e-commerce website and affiliate website receive the benefits from this link building strategy.
Also, mention the brands and businesses that you include in your roundup post. If you link to their brand, they might notice your roundup post. And if they like it, they can link to it and mention your roundup post in their blog too. This gives you a valuable type of backlink called an editorial backlink.
Optimize Your Affiliate Website Using Proven SEO Techniques
If you rely on link building alone for your affiliate website, you can't get any results from it. Neglecting the best SEO practices in your affiliate website negates the positive value that your link building strategy brings.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the major branches of digital marketing. All websites need to be SEO-optimized to appear on SERPs (search engine result pages).
Follow these SEO tips you can do for your affiliate website:
1. Plan an In-Depth Keyword Research for Better ROI
Before you start tinkering with your affiliate website's content, you have to do keyword research first.
Take a strategic SEO approach by doing keyword research for long-term results. When your article gains traction for its target keywords, you can expect more organic traffic and a better ranking for your affiliate website.
2. Aim for Featured Snippet Links
Featured snippets are content pieces that are direct answers to queries from the search engine. Almost 42% of featured snippets are answers to search queries from the content. A featured snippet gives satisfaction to the users because their questions are immediately answered.
Think about the most common question in your industry. Then, make content that is worthy of a featured snippet link. Answer questions, define industry terms, and other content strategies to get a featured snippet link.
3. Improve On-Page SEO Performance
On-page SEO factors are website characteristics that aim to keep the reader's attention while on the website. In this fast-paced digital media era, keeping the reader's attention is a big challenge. That's why you have to work as hard when optimizing your on-page SEO factors.
Some on-page SEO factors to look for are:
Landing page optimization.
Meta descriptions and title tags.
Alt text optimization.
Readability optimizations.
Website navigation optimization.
Content optimization.
4. Overcome Competitor’s Best Content
If you want to grab your competitor's traffic to your affiliate website, you have to overcome your competitor's best content.
You have to understand the Skyscraper Technique to compete with top-ranking blog posts in your industry. By making content that overcomes your competitor's performance, you can convert their audience to yours.
Final Word
Get started with affiliate marketing by making a website and optimizing it for search engines. Start with drag-and-drop website platforms like Squarespace or Wix if you aren’t familiar with coding.
Build links to it and promote your content to relevant websites. Having an affiliate website opens up more opportunities and conversions for your e-commerce website.
About the Author
Dan has had hands-on experience in digital marketing since 2007. He has been building teams and coaching others to foster innovation and solve real-time problems. He also enjoys photography and traveling. He is a skilled table tennis player.
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