This post explains what is SEO, affiliate marketing, how to do affiliate marketing with SEO tactics both for merchants and affiliates, what are the best SEO software affiliate programs to earn commissions. Hope this guide can help merchants to recruit more high-quality content affiliates and publishers to succeed in affiliate marketing by taking advantage of SEO or other marketing channels.

What is SEO Affiliate Marketing?

To answer the question, we need to know what is SEO and what is affiliate marketing.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

According to the latest IAB affiliate marketing handbook, affiliate marketing is defined as a performance-based channel in which an online advertiser pays a commission to an affiliate for any sales or
actions that were generated from their referrals.

There are three major roles: affiliates, advertisers, and affiliate networks.

Affiliates also called publishers or partners, are people or companies that will promote a product or service to their audience.

Advertisers, also known as merchants, retailers, or brands are the online companies that have this product or service to sell. 

Affiliate networks are the companies that help connect affiliates and advertisers and provide tracking and reporting services such as Awin, CJ, Rakuten (former LinkShare), Pepperjam, ShareASale., and Webgains.

( You may hear affiliate tracking software, that is for an in-house affiliate program, that is to say, the merchants use the tracking software such as Afftis, HasOffers by Tune. Radius by Impact, Partnerize to run their partner programs with full control. And affiliates usually use Voluum for tracking.)

How Affiliate Marketing Works?

• Affiliates promote a brand’s product or service on the website.
• When a consumer clicks an affiliate link and then is taken to the advertiser’s website and finally makes a purchase.
• The transaction was tracked through the affiliate network.
• The affiliate is credited with the commission for the sales he/she drives for the advertiser.

Learn more about affiliate marketing.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic by optimizing websites so that they rank well through organic/natural search engine results.

Google is the most popular search engine, others include Baidu (China), Yandex (Russia), Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo…

In SEO, not all search engines are equal. Accord to StatCounter data of search engine market share, Google is 91.75%, Bing is 2.75%, Yahoo is 1.7%. So make sure to put more emphasis on Google.

How Search Engine Works?

Search engines have three primary functions: crawl, index, and rank.

Google explains how it discovers, crawls, and serves web on Google search console help.

1. Crawl: Scour the Internet for content, web crawlers(commonly known as search engine bots or spiders) look at data such as URLs, sitemaps, and code to discover the types of content being displayed
2. Index: Store and organize the content found during the crawling process.
3. Rank: Display the most relevant content that will best answer a searcher’s query

Here’s what Google says on “How search works” although it does not tell much about its algorithm.

Google ranking systems are designed to do just that: sort through hundreds of billions of webpages in our Search index to find the most relevant, useful results in a fraction of a second, and present them in a way that helps you find what you’re looking for.

To give you the most useful information, Search algorithms look at many factors, including the words of your query, relevance and usability of pages, expertise of sources and your location and settings. The weight applied to each factor varies depending on the nature of your query.

In simple terms, SEO works by demonstrating to search engines that your content is the best fit for the search query. After all, all search engines are aimed to show the best, most relevant results to their users.

Generally, SEO includes on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO. Because people spend more time on their mobile phones, mobile SEO is more and more important. Some business owners also use Google My Business to increase exposure, which is local SEO.

SEO is just one part of digital marketing, it needs to be combined with other channels like social marketing, content marketing, and PPC/SEM, and so on.

Learn more about SEO fundamental

• Moz beginner’s guide to SEO
• Google Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide
• SEO All in One

SEO and Affiliate  Marketing

So we come back to the original question: what is SEO affiliate marketing.

If you are a merchant, what you worry about is whether affiliate marketing harms your SEO efforts.

If you are an affiliate, what you concern about is how to use SEO to drive more traffic.

Do Affiliate Links Help SEO?

For the most part, affiliate links do not directly help or hurt your SEO.

Affiliate links through major program networks do not get followed from the search engine.and  will not pass any link equity to the receiving page. Even for the affiliate links which do not have this nofollow tag, full Affiliate network link URLs pass through a 302 redirect and shorthanded links pass through a 307 redirect. These are temporary redirects that are not followed by search engines and pass zero SEO value. Learn more from Awin Wiki.

Just think about how many merchants own the affiliate program, so do not worry about the affiliate link issue.

How  Affiliates do SEO?

First of all, always follow Google guidelines on the affiliate program to create websites with original content that adds value for users.

John from Google suggests that rel=sponsored be used for affiliate links.

Yep. And definitely use rel=sponsored for affiliate links, if you can. And to be more complete: affiliate links are not bad. It's fine to monetize your site. Google's OK with that. There's no need to hide them, just use the right kind of link if you can.

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) February 4, 2020

The differences between Google’s Nofollow, sponsored, and UGC link attributes are clear from the Moz chart. Learn more about the Nofollow link attribute change at Search Engine Roundtable.

Keep in mind these rules, you can start your blog to do affiliate marketing. The major process for SEO affiliate is:

• Find a niche product that you are interested in or familiar with and can be profitable
• Do competitor research and make a content plan
• Creat quality content based on keyword research
• Do on-page SEO include title, tag, description, image alt and so on
• Promote your content on social networks like Youtube, Reddit, and Twitter…You can also try paid ads and email marketing.
• Build your links and win more backlinks for your websites. Do Not Buy links.
• Optimize, Test, Optimize, and Test… and Scale.

Best SEO Tool Affiliate Program

If you are an affiliate and have a basic knowledge of affiliate marketing, SEO, and digital marketing, it is a good choice to promote SEO affiliate programs or other SaaS affiliate programs. The advantage is that you use them and you know them.

SEMrush affiliate program seems popular while ahrefs and Moz, unfortunately closed their affiliate program.

Besides the SEO tools, other types of marketing SaaS are also worthy of consideration such as BigCommerce for e-commerce website building, Aweber for email marketing, and LeadPage / InstaPage for landing page design.

Conclusion

Hope this guide can help walk you through SEO affiliate marketing. No matter you are an advertiser eager to boost your affiliate program or you are an affiliate desiring for SEO traffic. Digital marketing is like an umbrella, it is wise to take all the channels-SEO, SEM, social, content, affiliate, EDM programmatic, mobile into consideration.