Top 10 SEO Mistakes Affiliates Make
Every affiliate marketer loves organic online traffic pouring on his website. Every minor increase in the number motivates and uplifts the marketer to do better and keep the numbers rising.
Many marketers use affiliate marketing as their only source of income and to your surprise, they live a luxurious life. The key to success is a successful affiliate marketing SEO. No matter whether you believe it or not, the maximum part of the affiliate marketing income comes from website traffic. Thus, if you want to make more money, increase your organic search then SEO is what will help you reach the top.
Many marketers are not able to achieve the numbers others do. The main reason behind this is making some crucial affiliate marketing mistakes. This article covers everything you need to know where you are going wrong.
- What is affiliate marketing?
- Why affiliate marketing SEO?
- Why your affiliate website isn’t ranking?
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Before we jump directly to the mistakes, it is important to know what affiliate marketing is to make certain you have chosen the right stream of income.
Affiliate marketing is the procedure in which an affiliate (you) earns a commission from marketing and selling another brand’s products. The affiliates search for the product they enjoy, promote the product and when it sells, earns a commission for every sale. The affiliate link is used to track the sales from one website to another.
Why Affiliate Marketing SEO?
Affiliate marketing is not complete without SEO. You would not be able to achieve the numbers you dreamt of, without following white hat SEO practices specially designed for affiliate marketing. These figures will help you understand the importance of search engine optimization in affiliate marketing, just like any other online business.
- According to Search Engine Journal, a massive 91.5% of online experiences begin with the search.
- According to HubSpot, 75% of users do not even open the second page of Google of a search query.
- According to Internet Live Stats, there are 69,973 searches made on Google in just a second.
- According to Search Engine Watch, 33% of users click the first organic result on Google.
We hope these facts are enough to let you know how important it is to rank on the top position of the first page of Google.
Why Your Affiliate Website isn’t Ranking?
SEO and affiliate marketing are two awesome combinations when you get them right. Mastering SEO can help you succeed in affiliate marketing programs. But why go over the tedious process when you outsource it to experts because they have been dealing with this day in and day out.
Before you outsource affiliate marketing SEO services, learn why your website is not ranking so that you know exactly what you want from the professionals.
1. Focusing on Keywords and Not Topics
User experience is one of the most important ranking factors for Google. Google determines the value of a web page by whether the visitor can accomplish the task he/she was there to undertake. Irrespective of how many keywords you stuff the content with if Google is not able to determine user experience, it will not make any difference.
No doubt keywords are essentials but users type phrases and words to search for something. It is important to understand their intent. Users do not type keywords to find general articles but are looking for solutions. In affiliate marketing, you need to build long lasting relations by providing value to the users.
2. Ignoring Website Speed
To your surprise, website speed plays an important role in improving search results and also user experience. Google appreciates sites that load faster over those that take forever to load. The ideal time taken to load a website is 2 to 3 seconds. If your site takes longer, consult an expert to improve site speed.
You can use tools like Pingdom Tools and Google Page Insights to know your website performance.
3. Not Creating Authentic and Engaging Content
Many marketers, in the beginning, believe that more content is better for SEO. They may employ amateur writers and may also use an article spinning software which results in no real value. This is the main reason why the content does not perform well on Google. as you may know, Google penalizes plagiarised content.
Not to your surprise, content is the king in the world of SEO. Google would make sure to never rank of website that has plagiarised content. Instead, having short-form original and engaging content is valued.
Check out our recently created article on How to Write SEO Content.
4. Not Using the Right Hosting
When it comes to hosting, most affiliate marketers start with cheap or free hosting. If you really want to make affiliate marketing as the major source of income, then you need to invest money first.
When looking for hosting services, you need to decide your budget and site needs before making any decision. Uptime and reliability are two factors that you can’t ignore when choosing a professional hosting service.
Look for providers that offer you:
- Free website migration
- Excellent competitive pricing
- Brilliant customer support
- Super fast loading
- Free SSL certificate
- Daily backup
5. Not Optimizing for Mobile
More than 50% of the world’s website traffic is through mobile. We consider this as just an indication and assume mobile phones users will keep increasing as days pass by.
Google implements indexing on mobile first and this is why it is very important to provide users with a mobile-friendly experience. Use Google’s mobile-friendly test tool to know if your website is responsive on mobile devices.
Not making the website mobile friendly makes it look weird on the small device. As you know, more than half of the world’s website traffic is from a mobile, you wouldn’t want to lose the trust of your users.
6. Not Building Links to Boost Site Authority
Backlinks of very important but to an affiliate website, they are the lifeline. Backlinks of what tells Google about the relevancy of your website.
For Google to spot you would want a site with high domain authority to link back to your site. When a high domain authority website links to your site, Google understands that your site is relevant. Therefore putting manual efforts in link building is crucial.
Finding it hard to build links to your website? Follow our Link Building Guide.
7. Skipping Meta Descriptions
No doubt you may have many pages on your website affiliate website from blog to product pages. Having a large number of website pages means you skip or duplicate meta descriptions which is one crucial factor that tells Google what you do and distinguishes you from your competitors.
The ideal length of a good meta description is 160 words. Also, try to make it as simple as possible.
8. Not Converting into HTTPS
For internet users, cybersecurity is a serious concern. Being an affiliate marketer you would, of course, want to ensure that your site is safe for every user. Instead of having HTTP in your URL that tells the user that your website is not safe, get an HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) in the URL, which ensures safety.
An SSL Certificate is required for this purpose. Your web hosting service provider can get you one for free. Most websites ranking on the first page of Google have https in the URL. The main aim is to make the web safe.
9. Ignoring SEO Practices
Being an affiliate marketing website, you do not ignore the common SEO practices like broken links, 404 error, plagiarized and thin content, too many redirects etc. These issues must be sorted out as soon as possible.
No doubt SEO is a lot of work, but the rewards are exceptional. If you can’t find time regularly to follow the SEO process, we recommend you to outsource affiliate marketing SEO to experts.
10. Forgetting to Update Inactive Themes and Plugins
As you know, cybersecurity is of utmost importance, and thus you can’t ignore it in any way. One of the worst mistakes that you can make that could hamper the website security is forgetting to delete inactive an unused plugins.
Most people do not pay attention to update or delete any inactive plugins or themes but this could be a threat to cybersecurity. This is because inactive plugins and themes are an easy target by hackers. Regularly updating or deleting helps you keep hackers at bay and your website safe.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. How much money can you make from affiliate marketing?
This is the most common question asked by lots of people and we answer it your today. There are affiliate marketers who make $1,00,000 every month through affiliate commissions. Also, some marketers make thousands every week. This depends on a lot of factors like:
- Your niche
- Your ability to sell online
- Your experience
- Types of affiliate products and their demand
- Your ability to attract visitors and convert them
2. Do affiliate links hurt SEO?
No, it doesn’t unless you ensure to nofollow all your affiliate links. For this purpose, you can either use a plugin that will nofollow all your external affiliate links or get it done manually by adding a tag. If you do not do this, then the links can hurt your site for sure and also sometimes to a greater extent.
3. Should you nofollow affiliate links?
Adding a nofollow tag to every link on your website tell the search engines that they shouldn’t be counting these links when ranking the page. When you link two relevant products add a nofollow tag to these links as well. No doubt your affiliate website will have a lot of nofollow links.
We hope this guide helped you know what mistakes you might be making that isn’t getting you top there in the search results. These mistakes would not be reversed all at once after taking the necessary steps, it is a process and be patient to give it time.
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