Optimize Your Affiliate Marketing Efforts With Keyword Research

Affiliate marketing allows you to control monetization and focus on the niches you’re most passionate about. It also gives you the chance to promote products you truly believe in and generate more revenue. As a blog owner or affiliate marketer, to take your strategy to the next level, you need a good balance between SEO and affiliate marketing. And that’s where keyword research can help potential audiences reach your content and find your brand naturally. Here are the top ways to conduct keyword research for affiliate marketing. Find a profitable niche for your business One of the reasons affiliate marketers may fail is because they’re trying to promote too many different things from different categories. That will affect your visibility on Google, as search algorithms can’t easily detect your area of expertise. Moreover, users can’t really understand what your website is all about. So, it would help if you positioned yourself as an expert in one or two areas to increase trust and sell products. Affiliate Marketing Is a Safe Haven for Publishers in a Cookieless Future Identifying a profitable niche can take more than just focusing on what you’re passionate about. Start by researching and brainstorming topics you like most in Google’s results. Then, narrow down your list and find trending topics using Quora. Use ClickBank for further research to determine if you can monetize these topics. The Gravity score shows an average income per sale and how well affiliate products sell for a chosen niche. You can double check the average cost per click of topics in your field on AdWords—you'll need to find out how much clicks cost, who is bidding and how you can compete. Get specific Try to be specific and conduct a detailed keyword analysis to get the ball rolling. For example, if you're a law firm and want to focus your law firm’s services, what's more important is finding your target niche practice. See what’s trending on Google Trends, what potential clients are searching for and what potential demand for your services globally or nationally—a personal injury attorney in Illinois versus a criminal defense attorney in Florida. Learn more about your audience and see what services they might be interested in. You can filter results by time frame, category and region. It also gives quick ideas for relevant keywords with rising popularity to target. The more you know about your audience, the sharper your emotional compass is when defining what services they might be interested in or not. Once you define your niche practice and target keywords, you need to go in-depth and build a list of search terms you want to target. Draft a list of your top 5 competitors, check out their Google ranking and keyword density on pages you will compete against. Keep search intent in the picture You should think about search intent while doing keyword research for affiliate marketing. There is a top-priority goal that people want to perform. Rather than mentioning your service, I recommend using certain types of affiliate keywords to help users purchase your service. Let’s look at what keywords you should focus on: Phrase match: This option includes your keyword and close variations of it. People often use typical search terms like “best tennis shoes” or “best laptops.” Use this phrase as the title of your subpage, the headline for a landing page or a blog post. This direct approach can be very useful for those who use phrase match keywords in the search results.Branded comparisons or product comparison keywords: As the name suggests, these are simply keywords that users often search when they want to compare products or brands. Some examples of what they might look for in the search results look like “Bahamas vs. Caribbean,” “Ahrefs alternatives” or “HP or Lenovo desktop.” These keywords may be less competitive, but they can be easier to rank for.Product review keywords: People are actively looking for reviews of products they’re most interested in the search results. It can be a great way to generate profitable keywords. For instance, if people want to buy a dishwasher, they will research it—as an affiliate marketer, you can use keywords like “dishwasher reviews” or “best dishwasher U.K.” to attract more customers in your niche.Trust and authority (T&A) keywords: They are less commercial and can help you educate and inform your customers. The best thing about them is the ability to build trust between you and your audience and increase the chance to follow your affiliate links. This informational content is excellent for generating quality links. For example, you can use search terms like “how to clean the dishwasher,” “dishwasher problems” or “dishwasher water usage.” Filter the keyword data Now you have a list of keywords to target on your affiliate website. It’s high time to filter out the unwanted keywords. Make sure to delete keywords with extreme competition or non-commercial keywords that aren’t worth your efforts. Try to create groups of keywords and use these groups for different posts. You can better organize your final keywords using mind maps or spreadsheets. Avoid These Partnership Marketing Pitfalls