10 Tips for Affiliate Marketing SEO

Having worked across affiliate marketing websites for over a decade now, I’ve learned a few tricks about how to get that traffic curve up, as well as some surprising aspects of the industry. 

I’ve compiled a list of tried and tested focus areas for ranking these particular websites that you should find give your SEO a boost no matter what stage of the race your website is at. 

And if you're curious about a strategy tailored for your affiliate marketing website in particular, let's talk.

What is an affiliate marketing website exactly?

Before we jump into some SEO strategies I’ve learnt, we'll do our diligence around defining affiliate marketing websites.

We’ve all come across them. You’ll do some research online, come across a helpful blog by an expert, see their recommendations on what to buy - complete with helpful links for where to shop.

If you make a purchase through one of those links, the website owner takes home a small commission.This is affiliate marketing and, at scale, it can wrack up millions of dollars.

Ranking organically on page 1 for commercial keywords is a goldmine for any business, equivalent to thousands of dollars in paid ad costs. An affiliate marketing website takes this to the next level. They essentially don’t have any products or services, and instead, their entire business model relies on occupying this coveted space on the SERPs (or, search engine results pages).

They then become a middleman when someone types in a bottom-of-the-funnel keyword, like “education providers near me” or  “motorbike insurance”. If you ranked for that term as an affiliate marketing website, you could engage the captured user with a promise of something like “Click here to get 3 quotes”. You could then sell those quotes on to various education providers, or earn what is called a “commission” or “finder’s fee”. Your pricing will be set by the industry benchmark for leads. Let’s say a lead costs a business $150 dollars via Google Ads. If you sold that lead on for $50 dollars to a business, it would be a very cost-effective and attractive deal for businesses. 

Alternatively, if a user typed in a keyword like "best summer dresses", you could show them a blog with your favourite dresses and links for where to buy those dresses. You would then receive a percentage of the sale if they buy through a channel like Amazon Associates.

Affiliate marketing or “commission-based” websites exist for the most unexpected of niches. Some more common examples include:

• Travel packing guides

• Insurance provider comparison websites

• Solar quote websites

• 3D printer guides

• Education provider comparison websites

• Renovation quote websites

• Recipe websites

• Finance guides

And the list goes on.

SEO Tips for Affiliate Marketing Websites:

Let’s get into some of the particularities of SEO for affiliate marketing websites. These websites are essentially education-heavy, so expect quality and helpful content to reign supreme.

Here’s what I’ve learnt over the last decade: 

1. Meet EEAT - especially Expertise and Experience

Google’s EEAT (Expertise, Experience, Authority and Trustworthiness) means you need to demonstrate subject matter authority. This is especially important in the affiliate marketing space. There are a few ways you can do this, and historically here are some trends that get the job done:

• Use technical terms and explain them: These entities become crucial. Do some research when you write your guides out. Expand on acronyms and define key terms.

• Include learning aids: Include diagrams, graphs, videos, GIFs or other specially made visual aids that genuinely aid user learning.

• Demonstrate personal experience: Especially for reviews or how-to guides. Before it was EEAT, it was EAT. Google added the additional ‘E’ for ‘Experience’ and it has proven a valuable metric for affiliate marketers. Google’s guidelines define experience as “the extent to which the content creator has the necessary first-hand or life experience for the topic”. Phrases like “I tried the blue coolant, and it was more viscous than the regular coolant” can be sufficient to show you tried the products in question. You can go beyond this through authorship sections and including unique images or videos of you using products or demonstrating something. Avoid stock photos you find online - as Google will know they’re not original content. 

• Author bios: Authorship means including a bio or introduction stating who you are, relevant qualifications or relevant life experience that would make you an authority on the subject at hand. You don’t need to be an expert in the studied sense either. For example, you don’t need to be a retired master chef to post recipes - you can be a “Mom of 3 who’s been cooking for 20 years and featured in some magazines”. Links to social media can aid this. While Google has stressed that an author biography is not strictly a ranking factor and is more beneficial to users than search engines, I think it still allows room for EEAT keywords. The links to social media also definitely help if your name has some reputation online, less so if it doesn’t. 

• Include numbers: From statistics to measurements, numbers add an important dimension to educational blogs. For example, if a user typed in “how much oil to put in my car”, the answer “just a little” or “about a bottle’s worth” is not nearly as knowledgeable as “between 4.7 and 7.5 liters” (which is the top result on Google at time of writing). Specificity counts and will get you featured in “People Also Ask” or “Snippets” far more frequently. They tend to be my earliest wins for affiliate marketing content, even with low website DR (or Domain Rank).

2. Look for longtail keywords and get specific 

This is not an unusual source of “quick wins”, but for affiliate marketing there is an added bonus to targeting longtail keywords. Answering niche questions for which there aren’t many guides online can not only lead to quick traffic exposure but also typically comes with high conversion potential. The more specific the better. For example, “what mirror does the 2018 Honda CBR500 need?” probably gets asked only a handful of times. But your guide could feature a link to the mirror in question - which would have pretty high conversion rate outcomes given its timing.

3. Get featured in “People Also Ask” by writing succinct, professional answers

This increases the chance they get featured in “People Also Ask” or featured snippets. For example, for the question “How much oil to use in a car”, answer A would have improved chance to rank over answer B:

Answer A: “The average car generally needs between 4.7 and 7.5 liters of motor oil” 

Answer B: “Well, most cars will need something like 4.7 liters, but that could go all the way up to 7.5 liters”

Answer B was less professional, less succinct, and didn’t include a complete answer to the question in isolation (e.g. it didn’t mention motor oil, and simply assumed it was in context to its own article, making it less likely to be picked out for a feature).

4. Specialise in your subject

If you want to rank well, you need to niche down. The benefits of this cannot be overstated as Google is less likely to view you as an authority on a subject the more watered down your site is. If your website provides quotes for the construction industry, don’t try to add in quotes for wedding dresses. At that point, you’re looking at two different affiliate marketing websites, usually with very different target audiences to boot. There are some monster websites that “do it all” - but it’s just not a feasible entry point for most affiliate marketing ambitions.

5. Plot your site architecture

To perform well in affiliate marketing, you’ll typically want scale. That means planning your site architecture is a vital step. Set up some parent pages that break down into categories that are broad enough to be futureproofed. For example, you might have:

• motorbikewebsite.com/reviews/honda, motorbikewebsite.com/reviews/kawasaki - allowing you to easily add more brands in future, and group these areas of interest for users or sift through them in your analytics tracking. 

• pcwebsite.com/owners-guides/blog-1, pcwebsite.com/troubleshooting/blog-1, pcwebsite.com/build-guides/blog-1

• travelwebsite.com/country/france, travelwebsite.com/country/australia/what-to-do-in-sydney

6. Internal linking is vital

Treat your site much like eCommerce SEO when it comes to internal linking. Make sure all your pages benefit from some internal linking. Your site will (typically) become content dense, with many smaller blogs spanning several topics. Help ensure they’re found during website crawls and they don’t drop-off the featured blogs page into obscurity.

7. External link to authorities

Make sure you back up what you say with sources to external authorities. Good sources include industry authorities (e.g. if you were in the medical space, you could link to HealthDirect), government sources, university sources, newspapers, white papers, case studies, census documents, and so on. 

8. Keep your content updated

To remain relevant, you’ll need to remain current. That means updating your guides regularly and including notes like “Updated for 2024”. You must also refresh the content for this to work. Old blogs left to stagnate typically slide down the ranks, as Google knows information becomes outdated and will favour newer articles or articles that keep on top of the latest information.

9. Don’t forget forums like Reddit, and Facebook or LinkedIn groups

While you don’t want to be annoying, the odd well-timed post to a forum can be a great boost to direct traffic to your website. This lets users interact with your website pages and can send a signal to search engines that your website is actually useful to people. Pages that receive a lot of direct traffic with good time on page tend to get increased “interest” from search engines, and this helps them rank faster and higher. Make sure where you post and how you post is appropriate. For example, I may post in an SEO subreddit “for those of you who missed it, here’s a summary guide on the latest Google update that hit yesterday”. That’s a useful time-saver, so people might appreciate the resource.

I’m not going to delve into parasitic SEO, but there is also the ever-present chance your blog ranks via Reddit too - especially after Google and Reddit teamed up. Google has shown increasing preference for UGC (or user-generated content) when it comes to answering search queries. 

10. Leverage the unique avenues for backlink building for affiliate websites 

It’s no secret backlinks are pivotal to ranking online, and affiliate marketers have a few unique levers to pull to acquire them. My advice here is to leverage the fact that you feature people’s products for them. You help them make sales. Would someone be willing to feature you if you feature their product or a product they sell? I’ve run several successful campaigns in this space for a host of industries - no dollars exchanged, only content and mutual benefit.

In summary:

Like any business, an affiliate marketing website will take time to grow. Start at the bottom and go wide with quality content. And avoid any temptation to just blindly generate content with AI tools like ChatGPT. Affiliate marketing is competitive and depthless content won't win you any ground in the long run.

In summary, you'll want to focus on showcasing your expertise in pursuit of delivering genuine value to your readers, prioritise longtail keywords and succinct answers to longtail questions, and building up unique content and learning aids that make your website a satisfying resource to anybody learning more about the subject in question. Don't forget to build up your off-page signals with direct traffic (such as from forums and social media) as well as backlink building - great content alone is only half the battle.