5 SEO Tips to Increase Organic Traffic to your Affiliate Site

Optimizing your affiliate site’s SEO is the number on way to drive more FREE organic traffic to your affiliate marketing campaigns.

Even if you rely heavily on paid traffic, you should still place emphasis on improving the visitors who are finding your site through a Google search engine results page (SERP).

Lets look at some ways you can do just that quickly and without spending a dime.

1. Optimize for Google Passage Rankings

Last year, Google allowed for specific passages within a web page to be ranked for the first time. That means individual sections can be pulled and ranked independently of your main content.  

Use this current section as an example. Even though the topic of this post is on SEO techniques, this section on Google Passage optimization could rank on its own. This provides another avenue to try and get your site ranked at the top of a SERP.

Here’s what you can do to get your passages ranked well on Google.

• Use proper heading formats and include relevant keywords directly in those headings.  
• Focus on a writing style that’s straightforward and easy to read.
• Ensure sections/passages make sense on their own while remaining relevant to the rest of the post.
• Repeat the keywords that are in your headings in your body copy.

Strive for Featured Snippets

Featured snippets are the ideal outcome for anyone trying to improve their page’s ranking. They’re that highly coveted ‘position zero’ found at the very top of a SERP. Not only that but they stand out more than a traditional ranking because they include an actual snippet of your post’s body copy.

Let’s look at what you can to improve your chances of rising to the top.

Use longer keywords

The more words there are in a query, the more likely a featured snippet will be delivered to the searcher.  

SemRush determined that keywords of a single word have a 4.3% chance of producing a featured snippet, keywords of five or more produced one 17% of the time and those with 10+ did so 55.5% of the time.

With this in mind, try to match for phrases and definitions rather than just one or two keywords.

Insert Questions

With the rise of voice search, more people than ever are making search queries in the form of questions. Featured snippets are also often utilized as answers to those questions. Therefore, make sure to include those classic question words, specifically “who”, “do”, and “can” in your copy to position your content as a response. You’re essentially trying to provide a solution for a problem.     

Format for Quick Reading

The purpose of a featured snippet is to put easily digestible information immediately in front of a user. That means your most important and informative sentences should be near the top of your content with longer paragraphs following below.

For instance, if you’re writing a health-related post on what foods to eat to lower your cholesterol, one of your first sentences should be: The best foods to eat to lower your cholesterol are x, y, and z. Then you can provide secondary info and insight below.

2. Put More Emphasis on Link building

If SEO is still a relatively new concept to you, now’s a good time to know that link building or back links is/are a longstanding cornerstone of effective SEO and still is in 2021.

Backlinks can help improve your brand’s trustworthiness and image in the eyes of Google. This is accomplished by getting other reputable sites to include links to your site in their content.

This is primarily accomplished by doing the following:

• Taking part in guest-posting partnerships with other sites/blogs.
• Searching for any unlinked mentions or topics and reach out offering links.
• Sharing your content on online forums and social media.

Just remember not to over do any of the above to the point of spam. Google will penalize you, tanking the very thing you’re trying to improve.

3.Write New and Re-Optimize Old

It’s important that your SEO strategy includes both producing new content AND improving old content. It can be easy to get stuck in doing just one but each provides unique set of benefits to improve your site’s overall SEO.

Why you should write new content:

• Users look at dates and perceive more recent posts as having a greater chance of being relevant.
• “Freshness” is an element of Google’s ranking algorithm.  
• Writing new content gives you the opportunity to optimize for current SEO standards.

Why you should improve SEO for old content

• Requires less time than writing new content but provides similar benefits
• Small improvements like fixing or adding new links can go a long way in improving SEO

5. Know How to Utilize Images

How important is it that you include images in your content? Well, 20% of ALL US web searches happen on Google Images. That’s a lot of traffic to potentially let slip by you.   

Images can improve your content in a variety of ways including SEO, but if not executed properly they can also hinder you.

First, make sure any images you use are both high quality and relevant to the topic you’re discussing. Low-quality, random images can quickly turn off any visitors by making your site come off as second-rate.

Conversely, high-quality means larger file sizes and slow loading times. This could impact your site’s loading time which is something Google considers when ranking sites. Even a single image could slow your site down enough to negatively affect your search ranking.

To ensure this doesn’t happen, you can utilize any online compression tool like tinypng.com or imagecompressor.com to reduce an image’s size without sacrificing quality.

Finally, you need to be making proper use of image alt tags. They’re important because search engines use them to associate keywords to your images.

The golden rule with alt tags is to include relevant info/keywords but to keep those limited. The image below illustrates the best way to approach this practice.