If you’re looking for more search engine traffic for your websites and ultimately more affiliate marketing commissions, then have a look at these tips.

Getting targeted, free, recurring traffic from the search engines is probably the best way to do affiliate marketing online. At least it’s the way I am doing it with my websites and the only way I know personally.

The way to do SEO for an affiliate marketing website is similar to that of any other kind of website, but I got one tip that is only available for affiliates. Please see tip #2 below.

Notice: This post contains sponsored links.

Here are 3 of my Best Tips!

#1 – Pick an Easy Niche

There is a wide range of difficulties for ranking a website and its content on Google. My best tips for beginners and intermediate level affiliate marketers is to pick an easy niche.

I use SEMRush to determine the difficulty of ranking. It’s a great SEO tool that I would suggest to anyone taking SEO seriously. I worked out a deal with the SEMRush team to offer my readers an extended free trial. Register for that to follow along 🙂

Anyways, the way to determine what niches are easy with SEMRush you just enter a term into the search box. Then you can show all search terms containing that keyword, with information about the number of monthly searches and difficulty.

I would consider search terms with a difficulty of below 65 to be of medium difficulty, and difficulties of 39 and below to be pretty easy.

This is not an exact science, though. Sometimes you might find your content ranking for search terms with a difficulty of 75 while the 60 difficulty terms don’t rank at all.

Check out my recent blog post about keyword research if you want a few more tips.

Stay Away from Difficult Niches

Google updated its algorithms fairly recently to make some niches really hard to rank for without being able to show that you’ve got high expertise in the field.

This is particularly true for health, finance, and legal niches. Unless you are a lawyer, a health professional, or a financial professional of some sort, I would stay away from these niches. Having relevant education might be enough.

Even if you decide not to pick the easiest niches, I would at least suggest not focusing on one of the hardest niches.

#2 – Get Links from Affiliate Program Websites

Many affiliate programs show testimonials from some of their affiliates that have something great to say about them. These testimonials often include a backlink to the affiliate’s website.

I would suggest asking for this if you have sent some business to the affiliate program already, and not if you are just starting out with a website without traffic. You could, though, but I think you’ll be rejected in most cases.

Another way to get a backlink from the website of an affiliate program is to ask for a link placement in a blog post or ask to publish a guest post in their blog. Many affiliate programs have their own blogs, and you’ve already established a connection between you and them, so asking for this might yield a positive response.

Again, having already sent some business their way is probably a requirement.

Good luck, getting a few of these backlinks can really move the needle.

#3 – Create Lots of Content Around the Same Topic

One of the most important things for ranking in Google is to have relevant links pointing to the content. Internal links work well and you can control those. Internal links are links from a piece of content on your website to another piece of content also on your website.

That is one of the reasons for having multiple pieces of content related to the same topic can help you to rank better.

Internal links also allow for more rich anchor texts in my experience. This means that you can use relevant words to link to the content. Words that you want to rank it for.

I would focus on easy keywords, as described in tip #1, for most of the content. However, I would also create content around the more difficult search terms.

This is for two reasons.

• To hopefully rank at a later time after several post revisions have been made over time and as the website has gained authority over time as it has gotten more backlinks.
• And to show Google that you are a topical expert with exhaustive knowledge about the topic and that your website features extensive information about the topic, making it likely to answer any questions visitors might have.

A Few Additional Tips

• Make your URLs short with a few keywords in them.
• Have a nice and clean web design. I use logo contests on 99designs to get professional and great looking logos.
• Publish content regularly.
• If you get sick of one website, take a break from it and focus on another one for a while.
• Make sure to not have typos in your content. I use Grammarly and it helps me a lot. The free version does the job just fine.
• If you have relevant education or work experience about the niche of your website, let the Google guys know by creating an “About page” where you share this.

If you are a beginner affiliate, you might want to check out my beginner’s guide to affiliate marketing and the list of top affiliate programs for beginners.