How To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing Using SEO

Whether you have an online blog, or a start up business website, satisfying your visitors should be your number one priority. If you create a good user experience on your website, then your site visitors will return for more.

Once you’ve created a loyal audience you can then use your website as a revenue stream through adverts and marketing products and services. This is what is known as affiliate marketing.

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is simply where you earn money by linking your website directly to products or services offered by other companies. There are many different ways to be paid for referring your site visitors, but you are usually given a commission when the referred person makes a purchase.

Becoming an affiliate is easy, but building a trustworthy site that gets regular traffic is the difficult part. The key is creating a niche site that targets a less competitive industry.

Getting Traffic Through SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website to rank for specific keywords in a search engine, usually Google, as it’s by far the most used. A well-optimized website that is in the first position of the search results will lead to higher traffic, higher page views, and therefore higher affiliate marketing opportunities.

Additionally, it’s beneficial to have repeat visitors, who can be a continuous source of revenue. In return, you’ll have a steady stream of commission, all for having good content!

Doing SEO is usually a long-term game, rather than a quick way to get traffic. Unlike an advert, it can take a long time to prove to Google that you are worth ranking in some niches. There are some quick ways to improve SEO, but many SEO strategies can take months to or even years come to fruition. 

Learning the basics of SEO is quite simple, but the more advanced techniques to be successful with SEO can be a bit more tricky. Here we’ll show you how learning SEO can be incredibly lucrative. 

Here’s a summary of understanding and how you can use SEO and affiliate marketing effectively to build your business and earn money:

Do keyword research

Learn what keywords are relevant to your audience to support your product or service offering. For example, if your website is about travelling, you could choose “cheap flights”, or “best luggage” or “unique holidays”  for your topics.

Many keywords have thousands of searches every month, the phrase “travel insurance” is searched over 1,300,000 times every month around the world. Many travel insurers pay a 20% commission on purchases from referrals, so if you were to be at the top of Google for this query referring to all these visitors, I don’t need to tell you how much money you’d make!

Although, if you have a small or new site you are far better off targeting smaller and less competitive keywords to begin with. Ranking for a longer phrase like “is getting travel insurance worth it” would be much easier to get a first position with. 

You can utilise many tools for keyword research, such as Semrush, Moz, Ahrefs, or Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest, which is free. 

Create Memorable and Relatable Branding

You want to avoid boring your audience or make them wince at your bland or ugly website, as they will be less likely to return. The way users interact with your website is used as a measurement of your website’s quality by Google. 

If people notice your website in the search results even though it’s further down the page, that indicates to Google that your website is a good option for searchers.

Make sure you create visually striking graphics and useful infographics in your content to cater to a larger audience.

Ensure you use your target keywords

Add keywords to your content, as well as your headlines, body copy, to clearly show Google what your webpages are about. For example, if you’re a business specializing in pet toys, add relevant keywords to the body copy of your website and the keywords to your headlines and titles. Additionally, look for related words or phrases that complement your keywords.

Be careful, though, don’t overstuff your keywords as Google can punish your site for using it too often!

Make the most of your content

Repurpose content that you’ve previously published to bolster your SEO ranking. When choosing content to repurpose, it’s important to ensure that it will be relevant to the target audience.

Try not to create a new page with similar content, update your existing pages and even add to them to make your content more informative. 

Examine all major search engines to determine where your website ranks for certain keywords. Search engine filters and other algorithms can be a factor in determining where your site ranks. Be sure to update your keywords and rank whenever appropriate to ensure that your site continues to provide the best search experience possible.

Earn relevant links

A site’s backlinks are a ranking factor, which simply means that the more high quality links you have to your site, the better. Making the right connections through good content and outreach is important to showing Google that you deserve to be at the top of results page.

Be sure to get the right links; it would be far better to get a highly relevant link from The Wall Street Journal than to receive 50 links from brand new sites that aren’t relevant to yours. 

There are a million and one ways to rank your site, but following these tips, picking your niche carefully, and being savvy with your content can be hugely rewarding with affiliate marketing!