How Your Brand’s Affiliate Program Should Be Working Alongside SEO and PPC

In recent months, there’s been a growing demand for digital marketing teams to work together, so that they can strategically align their PPC, SEO and affiliate programs to further drive performance. By doing so, brands are able to dominate their audience’s search results to ensure relevant queries are targeted everytime. 

Strategic content is a tactic that’s helped us see incremental results here at Silverbean. Through affiliate content marketing, we’ve helped brands dominate search results by targeting high volume, high converting searches that are often too competitive for PPC and SEO. 

Beth Durham, Associate Director at SEO agency NORTH, said “To make sure your brand is getting the strongest search visibility, it’s so important for SEO, PPC and affiliate programs to work in unison. The best way to do this is to look for any potential gaps in your SEO strategy and think about how PPC and affiliates can fill these. 

Where PPC can help you gain visibility for terms that your brand is still climbing the search results for, affiliate programs can help you appear in searches that are simply too difficult to appear organically in. This could be due to highly established publications taking the top spot, or it could be down to your website not fitting the intent of the search. 

Understanding which keywords to target through which channel can help you get the most out of your digital strategy and drive the most revenue.”

How affiliate strategies are changing 

Historically, affiliate managers would work with content partners to push product reviews that would drive a short-term spike in sales, while the publisher promoted the review via social media and newsletters. 

Now, however, publishers are looking to gain long-term traction from searches and are utilising affiliate relationships to monetise their high-ranking positions. 

Here’s how you can use affiliate marketing to dominate the search results…

Target the right search terms 

There are types of non-branded search terms which, when targeted, can increase market share significantly. These include searches with:

• High volume 
• High competition 
• High conversion rates

PPC and SEO teams will already be aware of which terms the brand performs well for, and they’ll often work in conjunction with one another to ensure all are hit. However, there may be some terms that are dominated by affiliate publishers – and that’s where partnerships between the brand and these publishers need to be made.

Research the search climate 

When creating and publishing affiliate content, it’s important to understand the level of competition around each search term. You should also take your website’s search engine rankability into consideration too, looking at metrics such as domain authority and backlinks. 

Where it isn’t feasible for your brand to rank, these search terms can be targeted through affiliate publishers. 

Or, where the search terms are extremely valuable to your brand, affiliate content can help boost your visibility further. That way everywhere your audience looks, your brand is there waiting. 

But the type of publishers you choose depends on the specific search term. From media owners to regional bloggers, each publisher has their space within the content strategy, targeting different queries and different user intentions. 

Think about your audience’s search intent 

There are some search queries that are almost impossible for e-commerce websites to rank for, particularly when the user wants to compare items. Instead, affiliate publishers are the ones who are ranking, with articles like gift guides or ‘best’ lists. 

For example, let’s say we’re a bank and we want to rank for ‘best mortgages’. Because the user wants to compare products, the search results are filled with aggregators, rather than banks trying to push their own mortgages. Google’s aim is to put its audience’s intentions first and stay clear of bias. It’s therefore imperative for a neutral voice to appear here. 

In search, there are many instances where a particular brand just doesn’t have the authority to talk about particular topics. That’s why it’s vital to partner with the right publishers who do, so you can work together to create content that’s valuable to both parties. You can then use optimisation tactics to ensure your brand appears in the best place, driving click-through-rate and conversions.  

To find out more about aligning your SEO, PPC and affiliate marketing strategies, get in touch with a member of our team today. 

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