Last week, Sue Dawson was one of the guest contributors on Crawling Mondays – an influential and highly-authoritative YouTube Channel hosted by renowned SEO Consultant Aleyda Solis.
Sue appeared with online marketer, Adam Riemer to discuss affiliate search optimisation and marketing as part of the podcast, ‘Affiliate SEO: How to Develop and Optimize Affiliate Websites’.
Some of the topics covered included common errors made by people starting out in affiliate marketing, how to craft scalable strategies and SEO best practices for affiliate sites. Here’s the transcript of Sue’s contributions, followed by a link to the full podcast.
Aleyda Solis
Welcome to a new edition of Crawling Mondays – in this edition we’re going to talk about SEO for affiliate websites…for that I have a couple of SEO’s who are highly focused on affiliate websites. So we can have a conversion about which are the worse mistakes, things to avoid. On one hand I’ve invited the amazing Sue Dawson – head of content at FTD Digital. On the other hand I have Adam Reamer, SEO and affiliate marketer.
For those SEOs who are just starting to work with affiliate websites, which are the most common mistakes that we see?
Sue Dawson
I come from gambling affiliate marketing and one of the mistakes people make there is not researching and planning their sites. They’re not thinking what problem I’m trying to solve with this site – I mean a user problem – and how is this site going to solve that problem better than any existing competition does. This is also about serving search intent – I think that in affiliate marketing search intent is really important. Because you’ve got to get the type of intent where people actually want to buy something – and it needs to be something you can find enough of to sell to them as well.
Aleyda Solis
What are the must-do steps when starting with a new affiliate site?
Sue Dawson
My kind of affiliate marketing is much more about listings of products, listings of offers. So in gambling or something like insurance, if you wanted to move into a new area or a new vertical you would start with the keyword research, you would find out what people were looking for and you would look at the volume. But that isn’t enough because you’ve also got to look at underlying intent – in gambling you’ve got these very, very high volume search keywords which are brand names and actually you can’t make any money out of those with a gambling affiliate website because they’re all navigational searches – somebody types in Paddy Power Bingo, they want to go to Paddy Power bingo – they’ve already got an account there…that’s not something that’s worth trying to rank for because you’re not going to make any money.
Aleyda Solis
What are the best ways to identify those affiliate opportunities that are crazily competitive…what platforms would you recommend when starting from scratch?
Sue Dawson
In recent years, what people have done is not even started with a website, they’ve just started on social media and just post links on social media. In gambling they’re not allowed to do that anymore but I know that in other spheres people are doing that – influencers – use that as step before you build the website.
Aleyda Solis
Which affiliates sites are doing successful, clever stuff?
Sue Dawson
I want to talk about a small website in the gambling niche – it’s actually a competitor of ours – what they’ve done is take a very, very small niche topic in gambling and make a huge success of it. They rank number one for all the associated keywords, they’re called nowagering.com. Though they built a small site they made it very mobile friendly which is really important…they’ve got a lot of supporting content which helps them build up their credibility and authority with users as well as Google. They’re writing a lot about slot games, they wrote very topically about slot games when the Euro football tournament was on that people really engaged with…and also posts about current events that were relative to their subject area, which again helped them establish authority, trustworthiness and expertise. I thought it was interesting because it’s not a huge enterprise – it’s a couple of guys.
Aleyda Solis
Marketing Advice – (Are there) any particular tools, resources…anything we haven’t yet mentioned that you think might be helpful
Sue Dawson
Search analytics for sheets – so downloading in bulk, pages which you’ve already got ranking – downloading all the information from Google Search Console in bulk so you can look at it by the query, look at it by the page and find out things that are getting an insanely high conversion rate that you didn’t even know people were looking for.
Thank you very much for your tips, they are certainly useful and hopefully they will help any SEO out there who are starting an affiliate (business) to accelerate the process. Thank you very much for your time Sue and Adam!
Podcast Timeline
1:18 – For those SEOs who are just starting to work with affiliate websites, which are the most common mistakes that we see?
07:27 – What are the must-do steps when starting with a new affiliate site?
12:58 – What are the best ways to identify those affiliate opportunities that are crazily competitive…what platforms would you recommend when starting from scratch?
15:00 – Which affiliates sites are doing successful, clever stuff?
19:27 – Marketing Advice – (Are there) any particular tools, resources…anything we haven’t yet mentioned that you think might be helpful?
