How to Combine Affiliate Marketing and SEO

It’s absolutely no secret that a properly-executed affiliate marketing campaign can skyrocket your growth.

However, the reality of the situation is that a lot of affiliate marketing campaigns are ineffective. This is usually for one clear reason: people fail to align their affiliate campaign with their ongoing SEO efforts. This means that their content performs poorly and fails to generate the required revenue.

But, how do you properly combine affiliate links with SEO? Let’s take a look.

Why Combine SEO with Affiliate Links?

Ultimately, for any piece of affiliate marketing content to perform well and generate revenue, it needs to be seen by the right people at the right time and via the right channel. Ultimately, the best way to achieve this is through SEO.

Of course, combining your affiliate marketing strategy with your SEO efforts isn’t easy. That said, once you’ve broken down the initial barriers, the link between the two disciplines becomes clear and your marketing activities get even stronger.

With this in mind, here are five ways that you can merge your SEO strategy with affiliate marketing:

5 Top Tips for Combining Affiliate Links and SEO

Ensure Your Affiliate Content Contains the Right Keywords

In order for your affiliate content to rank, it needs to contain the right keywords. So, before you start to write any content, make sure you conduct keyword research on the subject matter.

By doing the research before you start to write, you’ll provide your affiliate marketing strategy with a clear direction while also ensuring you’re maximising the success of your SEO-led content strategy.

Ensure all Content is Value-Driven

Never just write content for the sake of it. Every piece of content that you write needs to provide value for your audience, match their search intent and resolve their pain points.

If you fill your affiliate marketing content with false promises and clickbait, you’ll lose the trust of your audience and you’ll be penalised by search engines. So instead focus on creating the following types of content:

Detailed product reviews
How-tos and tutorial-style content
Listicles
Videos
Affiliate landing pages that contain useful information

Ultimately, you need to produce content that reads naturally and compels the reader to engage.

Optimise Your Copy

Adding keywords to content is a great start, but ensuring that your content is SEO friendly goes well beyond adding a couple of keywords here and there. Ensure that you also:

Correctly format headings
Use eye-grabbing images with well-written alt tags
Use a natural anchor text for product links and include all references naturally
Use a tone of voice that is easy to understand (no jargon)

Improve Your Linkbuilding Profile

Once you’ve written, optimised and published your affiliate marketing content, you then need to build backlinks to it. This will help you boost your search authority and drive more traffic to your website. Popular linkbuilding tactics include:

Guest posting
Cross-promoting the work of other affiliate marketers
Asking other affiliate marketers to add backlinks to your content within theirs

Report, Iterate and Improve

Finally, at the end of each month, you should report on the successes and pain points you experienced. This way, you can continue to fine tune your efforts and adapt to further improve performance.

By harnessing the power of data, you’ll easily be able to identify what worked and what didn’t. You’ll then be able to use these insights to improve performance going forwards.

Are Affiliate Links Bad for SEO?

Many old school SEOs have put forward their concerns that combining affiliate links with SEO can have a negative impact on rankings because Google often targets affiliate sites.

However, Google’s John Mueller has addressed this misconception, saying:

“We have a blog post from about 10 years ago about this, and it’s just as relevant now. The short version is that having affiliate links on a page does not automatically make your pages unhelpful or bad, and also, it doesn’t automatically make the pages helpful.

You need to make sure that your pages can stand on their own, that they’re really useful and helpful in the context of the web, and for your users.”

So, put simply, it isn’t true and you definitely can combine affiliate links and SEO. This is the case as long as the content on your pages is relevant for your audience and you’re not using outdated or spammy tactics, such as keyword stuffing.

Ultimately, if you publish good and helpful content that happens to contain affiliate links, Google will not punish you for this and will likely actually reward your high-quality content.