trafficmansionSEO and affiliate marketing go well together – like peanut butter and jelly. When you sit down and really think about it, both of these practices share a common goal: to generate quality traffic. If you’re interested in making affiliate marketing your full-time job, you’ll need to figure out how to engage people with your output.
Learning at least a bit of SEO can help you achieve that goal.
The Case for SEO
As an affiliate marketer, you cannot successfully interact with people if you don’t really know anything about them. To encourage your targeted audiences to click on your links, you need to know how to approach them correctly. Targeting them with ads is not really the best way to do so. We live in a day and age of ad-blockers. Most modern Internet users despise advertisements and that’s why roughly around 200 million of them have some sort of an ad-blocking device installed in their browsers.
Apart from them, modern Internet users are far more complex and demanding to be persuaded into doing, using, or buying something through simple ads.
In 2018, getting people to engage with your output is no easy task. Modern affiliates need to think beyond advertisements and focus on more complex strategies if they want to continue earning commissions from their partners.
Instead of stalking their targeted users online, affiliates need to figure out how to get people to voluntarily land on their pages and consume their content. In order to do that, they need to understand how their potential users behave online, what they search for, and what problems are they looking to solve. Once they wrap their heads around those particular details, affiliates will be able to successfully optimize their content and pages, and thus, generate a lot of conversions.
That’s what SEO is all about.
We at TrafficMansion are huge believers in search engine optimization. As an industry, SEO is still growing and evolving. According to Borrell Associates’ study, the net worth of this industry is currently estimated at a staggering $65 billion. Regardless of the fact that Google’s Panda and Penguin updates have made it increasingly difficult for everyone to make their content and pages rank high in search for desired keywords, marketers are still investing their time and money in this practice.
According to MarketDrive, a lot of marketing professionals still believe that SEO is the go-to strategy for anyone who’s interested in making their bread and butter online, so they’re continually advising their clients to allocate bigger pieces of their overall budget for this type of promotion.
However, all these facts aside, SEO is still a fairly difficult concept to master – especially if you’re new to the game. SEO is a complex process, filled with a lot of different technical aspects and other modern marketing practices (like content marketing, social media, etc.) that are closely tied to Google’s constant and frequent updates.
In layman’s words – SEO is constantly changing, which makes it difficult to comprehend if you don’t closely follow everything that’s going on in this industry. However, there are still a couple of key SEO practices that have managed to remain relevant after all the updates. In the following segments of this article, we are going to list a couple of extremely important SEO practices that could help affiliates generate a lot of traffic:
1. Keyword Research
Every intelligent marketing plan or strategy begins with a proper keyword analysis. By using tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush, affiliates can successfully identify lucrative search phrases for which they can optimize their content and pages to help them generate more relevant traffic.
Locating powerful keywords with high search volumes and low difficulty is the main goal here. These phrases can provide affiliates with everything they need to create content that their targeted audiences will easily find and consume.
If you’re using Ahrefs, finding these types of opportunities is a walk through the park. All you have to do is log into your account, enter the Keyword Explorer option in the navigation bar on top, type in your ideas, select the location of your search, and then simply press the little yellow magnifying glass in the lower right corner of your search field.
Once you do that, the tool will almost instantly provide you with a list of keywords. The results will be sorted by volume and difficulty. It’s easy as pie. All you have to do is go through the results and cherry-pick the ones that work best for you.
Regardless of the niche in which you operate, you’ll probably have at least some competition. That’s why you need to invest a bit of extra effort in the selection of the keywords you’re going to pursue. Your job here is to look for unclaimed traffic that’s highly relevant to what you’re promoting. Sure, this won’t be an easy process but it’s certainly worth the effort.
Once you get a better idea of what your target audience wants to know more about, you’ll be able to provide them with content that answers all of their questions on a certain topic. This, of course, will earn you a lot of quality traffic that you won’t have a lot of difficulty turning into conversions.
2. Content Marketing
Even though a lot of people still feel that SEO and content marketings are two completely different strategies, anyone who relies on digital marketing to make a living will instantly tell you that these practices don’t really work without one another. They are complementary pieces of the same puzzle.
Whether you believe it or not, there is nothing quite as powerful as a well-planned, optimized, and executed piece of content. Every single day, millions of people use search engines to find answers to numerous questions. Some of them are work related, some not – but the majority of modern users usually surf the Web with a single goal in mind: to gather more information on the topics that interest them.
As an affiliate marketer, you can benefit a great deal from understanding what people search for and how to provide them with the information they need. The more time and effort you invest in the creation and optimization of your content, the better the chances you’ll have of generating quality traffic to your pages.
Every great content strategy starts with a proper keywords analysis. You’ll need a list of primary and secondary keywords. The secondary keywords will help you decide on headings and subheadings, which will further boost your keyword usage and ensure you’ve covered the topics users’ are searching for in your content.
Once you figure out what phrases your targeted audiences use to search the Web and what topics interest them, you’ll have a solid idea on how to build epic, timeless content that will provide your prospects with actual value.
Before you actually start developing your material, we suggest that you first validate your concept online and check what your competitors have done. This will help you find a lot of holes that you can fill with your content and thus, position yourself as the ultimate resource for a chosen topic.
3. Link Building
Now that you have figured out which topics to pursue and how to get the most of your keyword opportunities, you might want to consider working on your positions in search. Regardless of how lucrative the keywords you find are and how good your content is, chances are you probably still won’t generate a lot of traffic from search. That’s because the engines won’t have enough proof that your content is legit enough to place high in their listings. If you don’t have a lot of links pointing back to your domain and pages, you’ll probably have a hard time climbing to the top of the search results for desired keywords.
Link building is the lifeblood of every SEO strategy. Links are one of the most important ranking factors that search engines focus on when calculating how high (or low) to display certain domains and pages in search listings for specific keywords.
When done correctly, link building can go beyond just building higher rankings – it can also be used as a strategy for driving quality traffic.
Partnering with influencers while conducting big research and producing guest posts for top publications in your niche will certainly build you some credibility and thus, provide you with a steady stream of relevant traffic.
Apart from that, one of the best ways to drive traffic with link building is by analyzing your competitors and duplicating their most authoritative links. You can do that easily with Ahrefs. Just open the Site Explorer option in the navigation menu on top, type in your competitor’s domain, jump on the backlinks option on the right, and sort your competitor’s DA score from highest to lowest. Once you have a clear overview of their best links and how they were created, you’ll be able to easily replicate them for yourself.
When it comes to building links for your content, you cannot really focus on quantity. This process revolves around quality and diversity. If you want to build links that will help you climb up the SERP for desired keywords, you’ll need to create highly-contextual and relevant connections with respectable sources.
Over to You
Thank you for taking the time to read this article. We hope it helps you understand how to generate tons of quality traffic for your site and pages with a couple of basic SEO tricks. Even though search engine optimization is constantly evolving, all three of these strategies have remained relevant despite the algorithm changes. Keyword optimization, content marketing, and link building are safe bets for anyone who’s looking to invest a bit of effort into learning the fundamentals of SEO.
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