Summary: Here are three expert tips to leverage SEO to drive inbound interest and grow your affiliate program.
If there’s one thing that can be virtually guaranteed in affiliate marketing, it’s that more quality traffic equals more revenue. As an affiliate advertiser, you rely heavily on the organic traffic and search rankings of your affiliates to drive sales.
Similarly, nothing is more powerful for driving interest in your affiliate program than a dialed-in search engine optimization (SEO) and content strategy. Here are three ways to tap into the power SEO to grow your affiliate program.
- Improve your Inbound Strategy
How are new potential affiliates finding you? Your affiliate sign-up page is a vital resource to speak to the benefits of your program and the reasons why affiliates should promote your products. This page should be visually appealing, have clear calls-to-action, and get affiliates excited about partnering with you. However, simply having this page on your site isn’t enough – it needs inbound traffic.
It’s true that you can drive website visitors to your affiliate sign-up page with pay-per-click or paid social ads, but the best long term strategy to drive traffic and affiliate sign-ups is with a strong SEO-optimized content strategy.
Work with your content team to write long-form blog posts related to affiliate marketing with clear callouts throughout the article linking to your affiliate sign-up page. With just one affiliate marketing blog post linking to a sign-up page, BigCommerce saw a 36% increase in traffic to that page and an 83% increase in affiliate applications in one month, according to Google Analytics and Impact Radius data.
- Find New Affiliate Partners
The perfect new organic affiliate partners are in your niche, knowledgeable about your products, and are ranking highly on search engines. Search for the top non-brand keywords you’d like to rank for and examine which sites already ranking for these terms.
The first two to three pages of results are perfect organic affiliates to recruit into your program (if they’re not already in it). Keywords Everywhere is an excellent Chrome extension to view search volume and competitive data, right from the search engine of your choice.
- Scale your Content Marketing
Content creation may feel like a never-ending hamster wheel: there’s keyword research, creating outlines, drafting copy, publishing articles, and the need for new content never goes away. One tactic to take some of the burden off of your content team and scale your content marketing is to leverage the power of your affiliates.
Co-branded webinars, easy-to-post content templates, link building efforts, and guest posts will increase your content’s reach while providing strong SEO benefits.
Co-branded webinars and easy-to-post content templates supply your affiliates with ammunition to promote you quickly and without much effort. Guest posts and link building programs with your affiliate partners will generate more valuable inbound links to your affiliate web pages, increasing site traffic and positioning you as a premiere affiliate program to join.
There are countless ways to leverage SEO to expand your affiliate program. With a few simple tactics, you’ll generate more traffic, more inbound affiliate sign-ups, and ultimately, more revenue for your program.
Adam Enfroy is the Affiliate Partnerships Manager at BigCommerce, a SaaS ecommerce platform.
This article appeared in issue 45 of FeedFront Magazine, which was published in January 2019: Visit Here