Affiliate Marketing is a cost effective way for companies to reach out to new or existing customers and raise brand awareness. Companies can promote and advertise their products or services on other websites and in exchange these websites receive a commission depending on what payment deal has been agreed. Advertisers are generally known as merchants and websites that publish and market these products or services for merchants are known as publishers or affiliates. Since this is a performance based model, merchants are quick to opt in without a clear strategy.
Search engine optimisation strategy for merchants is of utmost importance. Firstly merchants should look to rank higher on search engines for product or service name keywords than their affiliate partners to avoid giving out extra commissions. In the beginning of their affiliate campaign, this might not be the case as your affiliate partners might already have an established base online, but companies should work to achieve higher rankings. This can be done by optimising onsite content with well researched, unique keywords and frequent updates. It is equally important to conduct offsite optimisation to generate back links from reputable, relevant websites. If the company is looking to reach audiences in different regions, then regional optimisation is important as well.
Secondly, merchants should have a legal SEO agreement set up with affiliates, limiting some of the optimisation strategies they can use. This helps in avoiding affiliates that spam to achieve higher ranking and eventually getting banned; as this has a negative effect on the merchant website. Most merchants hire professional SEO agencies for website optimisation needs. Finally, merchants should be patient and regularly analyse their SEO results to keep up to date with their campaign.
4Ps Marketing offers Search Engine Optimisation for Affiliate Marketing Businesses to develop their SEO Strategy.
About the author: Gerard Harris
SEO Manager – Gerard HarrisGerard is the SEO Manager of one of 4Ps Marketing’s search engine optimisation teams. He manages a team of 4 and a portfolio of 15 SEO clients. His day to day work involves managing client relationships to make sure they are getting the best ranking positions in search engines, leading to increases in relevant traffic to client websites.