How to Do Keyword Research for Affiliate Sites

There are a lot of ways to do affiliate marketing. If you choose to do it through a website instead of running a social media or a YouTube account, keyword research for affiliate marketing is the first and most important thing you can do.

Understanding what keywords you should optimize your site for is crucial for proper ranking and positioning of your site. Digging deeper with research can show you what to focus on first to maintain a high ROI.

In this article, you’ll learn why keyword research is important and how to find the best keywords for affiliate marketing.

What Is Keyword Research for Affiliate Marketing?

If you’re running an affiliate website, the main source of leads for your business is organic traffic. This makes search engine optimization a big part of your marketing routine.

There are a lot of small but important jobs in SEO. You have to ensure your site loads fast on all devices, search engine crawlers can access it, you earn links and mentions from reputable sites, and a million other things.

However, once you have your website set up correctly, the main SEO task is keyword research for affiliate marketing. By scanning the page for keywords, Google understands what your page is about and when to show it in the search engine result pages. 

Doing keyword research helps you find keywords that people use in Google to find content related to your affiliate offers. Adding them to pages that answer these keywords signals the search engines to show these pages to people interested in viewing them.

Keyword research involves a combination of brainstorming and using specialized tools to find keywords that fit your website and your pages. For affiliate marketing, you’ll be looking for a lot of branded keyword variations. For instance, keywords like “is Company good?” or “Company reviews.”

You’ll also have to study how the SERP looks for each keyword to understand search intent. This allows you to create content that users want to see when they google those keywords and improve retention as a result.

Importance of Keyword Research for Affiliate Marketing

All SEO jobs are important, from technical optimization to link building. However, keyword research for affiliate marketing is one of the most crucial tasks. It’s relevant when you’re just starting out and creating your site and when you have hundreds of affiliate pages that you want to optimize more.

There are three main reasons why keyword research is so important.

The first one is getting more traffic. When you do keyword research and create a list of multiple relevant keywords, you can optimize a page for more than one keyword. The same comparison page can be optimized for keywords like “Company A vs Company B,” “Company A comparison,” or “What is better than Company A.”

Having multiple similar keywords on the same page means it can receive traffic from multiple search queries and get more traffic overall.

The second reason is targeted traffic. When you optimize your pages to commercial keywords, you’ll be attracting people who are interested in a purchase. Even if they don’t convert on the spot, depending on the affiliate program you’re in, you can get a payout after a month or two.

When you do deeper keyword research, understand what the users want to see, and change the page to fit that need, you’ll also have a better chance of converting them.

Reason number three is improved ROI. When you have more traffic coming to each of your pages and converting better, you’ll start seeing better ROI figures.

How to Find Keywords for Affiliate Sites

Now that you know why keyword research for affiliate websites is important, let’s explore how to do it.

Your keyword research process can be as short or as detailed as you want it to be. An optimal process would include at least these five steps.

1. Brainstorm Seed Keywords

Before you can do keyword research and find keywords that fit you, you need to have a list of keywords you think will fit. That’s just the starting point. You’ll put those keywords in a keyword research tool to find similar ones.

Start this process by brainstorming keywords people might use to find your affiliate offers. Mostly, you’ll have to focus on keywords that include names of the brands you’re promoting and questions related to the industry you’re in.

For instance, if you’re trying to promote beauty products on Amazon, you might start with a couple of brand names and typical comparison keywords. You could add keywords like “Thrive Causemetics vs PrimeLash,” “Is Thrive Causemetics good,” or “PrimeLash eyeliner review” to your list. You can also add general keywords like “best eyeliners in 2024” or “best mascara under $50.”

If you’re just starting with affiliate marketing and haven’t picked what you want to sell yet, start by looking for good products to promote and work from there.

2. Utilize Keyword Research Tools

Now you have a list of brand names and general terms potential leads must be using. Here’s where the longest part of keyword research for affiliate marketing begins. You have to put those keywords through tools to find more similar keywords and verify they can be targeted.

Keyword research tools provide metrics like search volume and keyword difficulty. These metrics can tell you whether you should focus on the keyword or not. High search volume means the keyword will bring more traffic, and low keyword difficulty means it’s easy to rank well for it.

Generally, you want to focus on keywords that have both, but that’s not always possible.

You can use these two tools for research.

Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is a free Google Suite tool for researching keywords for search advertising. You can use it for basic SEO research as well. This might be the best keyword research tool for affiliate marketing simply because it’s free.

Put your keywords into the Keyword Planner, and it will show a long list of similar keywords. For each keyword, you’ll get to see a few metrics. The ones you need are the search volume group, competition level, and CPC cost.

You can also filter the list of keywords. For instance, you can only get a list of keywords that contain a brand name, have medium or low competition level, and have search volume in 1-10k group.

SE Ranking’s Keyword Tool

An alternative to this is to use specialized SEO software like SE Ranking’s Keyword Tool. It can find hundreds of similar and related keywords and show more precise traffic numbers and keyword difficulty.

Having more precise numbers means you can predict how much traffic you can get from a keyword and how hard it would be to rank for it more effectively. Search intent metrics and automatic grouping both save you time on research.

This tool will also show you a detailed SERP breakdown with ranking dynamics for each keyword.

This helps you understand what types of sites appear in SERP for the keyword, analyze their general SEO and keyword optimization, and gauge whether you can beat them in search results.

3. Focus on Long-Tail Keywords

Short keywords like brand name or product name are often transactional in nature. This means a user is likely ready to make a purchase. It would be great to get your site to appear for those keywords, but the SERP is often dominated by large websites like Amazon or brand websites.

This means you have very little chance of beating them to the top. Focus on long-tail keywords instead.

Keywords longer than three words are often commercial in nature. These are questions about a product, and users who google them are doing product research. SERP is dominated by smaller sites, and you have much better odds of ranking there.

To find those keywords, you can use a tool like SE Ranking. It suggests question keywords for some searches. You can also use a keyword research tool specializing in long-tail keywords like AnswerThePublic.

4. Analyze Search Intent

Search intent is the reason a user googles a certain keyword. There are two parts of search intent analysis: confirming that the search is commercial and understanding what the user wants to see on the page.

The first one is easier. Glance over the search results page and confirm that it shows pages with reviews or otherwise offers to buy something, not just informational articles or blogs.

Then, go through a couple of pages and note what content is there. The ones ranking in the top ten typically will give you an idea of what users want to see. You’ll have to create content that is on par with those pages or better to have a chance of ranking for this keyword.

5. Make a Competitor Analysis

To finalize keyword research, research your competition. You have already done some of the competitor research in the previous steps. Now, you can research what keywords your competitors are using.

You can do it with one of the tools above or use Similarweb. It has a feature that can show you what keywords your competitors rank for that you don’t. Investigate those and consider adding some to your keyword list.

Types of Affiliate Keywords to Target

An affiliate website can target all sorts of keywords, but there are a few types that you should focus on. Here are the four best types of keywords for affiliate marketing.

1. General “Best of” Keywords

These types of keywords typically cover lists of the best products in a niche and follow the “best product name” formula. In the case of the beauty industry example used earlier, these might sound like:

• Best mascara brands.
• Best eyeliners in 2024.
• Best burgundy lipsticks.
• Best glitter palettes under $50.

Of course, if you choose to target shorter keywords like “best eyeliners,” you’re going to have a hard time ranking because those tend to have a lot of competition.

These general keywords can have a lot of modifiers, like in the examples above. If you focus on those longer keywords, you’ll have better odds.

2. Comparison Keywords

The next category you’ll want to focus on is comparison keywords. These are mostly comparisons between different brands, such as “Thrive Causementics vs PrimeLash.” Sometimes, you’ll find more precise comparisons that narrow the user interest down to a specific product of these brands. An example of that would be “Thrive Causementics vs PrimeLash mascara.”

Another variant is a comparison with multiple brands like “Thrive Causementics vs PrimeLash vs Wowcombo.”

You can also find product comparison keywords. In the beauty industry, that can be keywords like:

• Mascara vs no mascara.
• Mascara vs eyeliner.
• Mascara vs lash extensions.

Some of these keywords might be more informational in nature, so you’ll have to pay close attention when analyzing their search intent.

3. Product Review Keywords

Most affiliate marketing websites thrive on providing product reviews, and these keywords are going to cover a lot of your content. Many keywords like these can be long-tail keywords with medium search volume and low keyword difficulty — exactly what you need.

There are as many product review keywords as there are products. You can either find keywords for the specific products you want to promote or find review keywords for the brand or industry that work well and find affiliate links for those products.

You can also find review keywords about categories of products. For example, “Maybelline mascara review” instead of “Maybelline Lash Sensational Sky High Mascara review.”

4. Question Keywords

The last important category of keywords you want to focus on are product or brand-related questions.

In some cases, these keywords are about brand trust or information about the brand. For instance:

• Is Maybelline good?
• Is Thrive Causemetics cruelty-free?
• Is PrimeLash clean?

Sometimes, you’ll find keywords that don’t exactly fit your purposes in this category. For example, “Is Thrive Causemetics sold at Sephora.” You might try to target these, too, and offer to buy through your affiliate link instead of Sephora. But your conversion rate won’t be high as user intent is just to look for a straight answer.

In other cases, these questions are about using the product.

• How to apply mascara?
• How to get perfect lashes?
• How to make mascara look natural?

These keywords are mostly informational, and you might not get a good conversion rate out of targeting them. But it’s still good to have informational content on your affiliate site, so consider adding them to your list as well.

Summary

Affiliate keyword research is a good start to turning your website into a success. It allows you to find opportunities to rank well in search results where users are likely to convert and bring in more qualified traffic.

If you have to pick what you’re going to work on first, focus on keywords with high search volume, low keyword difficulty, and commercial search intent. Those would be easy to rank for and can bring a lot of conversions.