10 Actionable SEO Hacks for Affiliate Marketers
SEO is essential for affiliate marketers, especially for those who use content marketing to promote their affiliate offers. Proper SEO tactics don’t only improve your rank in the search results and drive more traffic, but they can also generate more conversions and affiliate commissions. It's not possible to have effective content marketing without SEO.
Let's look at ten actionable SEO hacks that you might not have considered before:
Rank for Featured Snippets
Featured snippets are effective for SEO, as they show up search engine results before the actual ranked results. With this, users will get direct answers to their questions without having to click through to the results.
How do you optimize the content to appear as a featured snippet?
- Make your content abstract and to the point
- Get the benefit of external resources
- Use headers for easy navigation
- Consider cross-device functionality
Checkout some of the featured snippets type:
Paragraph featured snippets: A few lines of text that directly answer a particular question. A paragraph that provides a brief overview of the topic or presents a definition of that topic.
List featured snippets: Short introductory lines in small chunks with a numbered or bulleted list of steps.
Table featured snippets: Uses an excerpt from an HTML table for writing important information in brief.
By centering on associated keywords and focusing your content around questions that you expect your audience to search, you can optimize your content for featured snippets.
Focus on base content
Cornerstone content comprises the core of your affiliate site, covering the crucial articles you want to rank the highest in the search engines.
Focusing on the cornerstone, or base content means creating longer, informative articles that cover all the important information about a specific topic. You should update these articles regularly and get them to rank for the most competitive keywords.
Keep these in mind when creating your base content:
- Use your focus keyword in the Title.
- Ensure that you use high priority focus keyword at the start of the peragraph and atleast in one subheading and also in one image alt text.
- Have one fundamental article that links everything together
- Assure that the content is appropriate to the needs of your audience
- Keep it up-to-date and include a link to it in the sidebar of your affiliate site
Take advantages of long-tail keywords
It is easier to rank long-tail keywords, as they are generally more specific and include high-traffic keywords. You'll boost the volume of related search queries that you also rank for when you focus your content around long-tail keywords.
Embed videos in your posts
To make your content more engaging, add videos to your post that are effective at conveying a strong message, particularly on social media. Videos can easily explain or show the method instead of writing. A video is an excellent way to catch your visitor's attention. It is good for SEO because the videos tend to lower your bounce rate.
When it comes to optimization, blend only related videos into your content. You can make videos the center of your posts, but assure that your video and audio have a high-quality and optimize your heading and meta descriptions with relevant keywords.
Create Infographics
Infographics are visual representations of data, and that is helpful for earning backlinks and increasing your traffic.
How do you make an effective infographic?
- Use an outstanding design that attracts attention
- Do more research on statistical data
- Avoid recycling the same data
Infographics make your content more attractive and help your post gain attention. Make your infographic easily sharable on social media channels and forums. You can use tools that allow people to copy your infographic on their own website, which gives you attribution every time this happens.
Increase Click-Through-Rate(CTR)
The rate of search engine users who click on your search result is called click-through rate. Similar to search engine ranking, your click-through rate has a direct impact on your traffic and conversions.
The more people who notice and click your website in the search results, the more relevant your website appears to Google. Your high rank in the search results is justified if your affiliate site has a high CTR.
How can you optimize your click-through rate?
- Write a unique and effective meta description that matches your content, including your focus keyword.
- Use long-tail keywords as they are more specific.
- Formulate relevant and clickable titles that include your focus keywords.
- Ensure that the title doesn't have extraneous keywords or phrases.
- Use power words that evoke responses from search engine users.
- Make your URL descriptive and include your focus keywords.
By optimizing these factors, you’ll raise your CTR and increase your ranking.
Optimize your footer links
In order to optimize your footer, make your anchor texts more descriptive. Anchor texts appear at the bottom of each page on your website and should match with popular search queries that guide people to your site. Creating clickable anchor texts in the footer is one of the easiest and quickest ways to optimize this part of your website. You don’t have to link only to your product pages, either. Determine what pages add the most value to your visitors and link to those instead. These pieces are also most likely to be your cornerstone content.
Install an SEO plug-in on WordPress
If you use WordPress to maintain your website content, you can boost your optimization efforts with an SEO plug-in such as Yoast. Yoast comes with a bundle of useful SEO tools that are useful for complete website optimization. These tools will give you helpful advice on what and how to optimize individual pages and posts.
You can efficiently optimize your SEO meta titles and descriptions with SEO plug-in that automatically generates an XML sitemap for all your content.
Grow up with guest blogging
No need to stick to your own channels. You can grow reach by writing guest posts for other websites. It is a powerful marketing strategy, as it introduces you to a new audience. Apart from this, guest blogging enables you to strengthen your digital reputation and lead conversions within your industry.
Measure Results
The final step to hack your SEO is to measure the results of your affiliate campaigns and get feedback that can help you to improve future activities. It is a critical process because you need to understand how your content performs in order to make your campaigns as effective as possible.
By tracking your performance, you will able to identify top-performing products, content types, communication channels, timing, and more. All these will help you to increase affiliate marketing plans and maximize the profit of your campaigns.
These techniques are easy to implement and help you to stay ahead of the competition. By using these SEO hacks, you'll boost traffic to your affiliate site that will bring more sales and affiliate commissions.
