Definitive Guide to SEO Copywriting for Affiliate Marketing

Do you want to get more customers from your affiliate campaigns?

Content is your best bet.

It’s your direct link to your potential customers. It’s your tool for establishing relationships with them and convincing them to buy in a non-salesy way.

But how’s your content performing? If you’re reading this, chances are you need a bit of help.

If you wish to have more people reading your content and clicking on affiliate links, you’ve come to the right place.

In this article, I’m going to teach you SEO copywriting for affiliate marketing. Read further and you’ll find:

• Professional SEO copywriting tips
• Content ideas for SEO affiliate marketing copywriters.
  

Let me start by quickly explaining the importance of SEO for affiliate marketing.

SEO, Affiliate Marketing… What’s the Connection?

Have you ever wondered how content creators like bloggers make money?

As a blogger, it’s easy to sign up for an affiliate program and share an affiliate link on their website. But who’s going to click on it?

To convince people to give that affiliate link a try, you need high-quality, value-packed content. For example, food bloggers who participate in affiliate programs, write recipes, cookbooks, and other content their audiences find helpful.

If you’re a creative individual and you love what you do, then coming up with content shouldn’t be a problem for you.

The problem is, as always, the competition.

According to estimates, 7+ million blog posts are published every day.

Not every one of them is part of an affiliate campaign, of course. If we assume that only 5 percent of those 7+ million posts are created by your competitors, it means they produce 350,000 new blog posts daily.

That’s why you need SEO copywriting because it increases the chance of having Google on your side.

So, let’s make Google fall in love with your content.

SEO Copywriting for Affiliate Marketing: 3 Professional Tips

Content optimization is a process that requires many things to be just right. With Google and other search engines constantly changing their algorithms, covering all bases is a must.

Below, you’ll find SEO copywriting tips to give your affiliate marketing content the best chance to rank high and attract clicks.

1. Optimize your content for search intent

Search intent optimization is the process of optimizing content so it gives the most accurate and focused answer to the target user.

This change is big.

The good old keyword optimization is slowly but surely becoming the thing of the past. Now, Google wants content creators to keywords in the content to reflect a motive of their users when they search for information.

Let me explain how it works.

Earlier, content creators had to include all keywords mentioning the head keyword in content to rank. They would just go through the list of keywords they discovered and took those they deemed relevant.

For example, an article titled “X Best Recipes for Weight Loss” could use these keywords:

• weight loss
• homemade recipes for weight loss
• dinner recipes
• best diet
• breakfast foods for the best diet
• lots more others.
  

As you can see, using pretty much everything related to recipes for weight loss was a common method. There’s breakfast, dinner, diet, and other ideas, all in one.

That means there are way too many intents in one article. Google may treat this content piece as a jack of all trades, a master of none.

Here’s why.

When someone is looking online for recipes for weight loss, they might want to get:

• breakfast recipes
• dinner recipes
• recipes for weight loss for people with certain health conditions
• soup recipes
• smoothie recipes
• lots more other intents.
  

To give your content the best chance to rank high and enjoy nice engagement, you need to narrow down your content topics and use keywords that resemble only a very limited range of search intents.

That means starting with only one search intent, say “*I’m vegan and I’d like to find healthy breakfast ideas for breakfast.” *

To provide an accurate answer to this intent, you can use something like “X Healthy Breakfast Recipes for Weight Loss for Vegans” instead of a more generic, broad topic “X Best Recipes for Weight Loss.”

Keyword research should also reflect that one search intent. The more focused you make your content, the more relevant you’ll make it for people.

Here’s a quick example to help you understand search intent. PickledPlum, a cooking blog that features affiliate links in articles, has a small excerpt at the beginning of each one.

It’s a great move because by reading the excerpt, one could understand the search intent that the article answers.

The excerpt suggests that the recipe is easy, quick, and is perfect for eggplant and Chinese cuisine fans.

Read more: Understanding Searches Better than Ever Before (Google’s detailed explanation of search intent).

2. Solve at least one problem in each content piece

The ultimate goal of your content is to help someone solve a problem (if not, then you should redo your whole content strategy).

You should prioritize this goal because:

• it makes your content helpful
• it makes the content focused
• it increases the chance of satisfying search intent requirements.
  

For example, if you’re writing an article about making a recipe, your goal should be to provide detailed, step-by-step instructions, ingredients, and tools needed to make the dish.

This way, the article will have practical value to the readers and give them useful ideas on how to solve a problem (find new recipes, cook something new, etc.)

Remember: online audiences aren’t interested in what you have to offer. Not a lot of people will be willing to click on affiliate links if they’re not relevant to the content.

The best SEO affiliate copywriting ensures that the readers won’t even feel that you’re trying to sell them something.

Here’s an example. The article that describes how to make a Chinese eggplant mentions that you need a wok to do it.

The writer placed the affiliate link to Amazon (yep, to a wok seller) in a way that feels natural and non-salesy.

The most important thing is that the affiliate link doesn’t interfere with the article’s goal. What’s more, it helps the reader to get all equipment needed to make the recipe.

What a subtle affiliate pitch. Brilliant. That’s how one makes content and links relevant to a client’s website. If you need advice with writing affiliate link-friendly content, go-to tools like TrustMyPaper and get professional tips.

3. Write relevant and engaging anchor phrases

As an SEO affiliate marketing copywriter, you must be familiar with the concept of anchors. They are clickable texts that hyperlinks show when linking to other websites.

Your content will have a lot of them to drive people to your partner’s website, so it’s important to get them right.

The most important thing is to make them descriptive.

This means avoiding generic phrases like “read more” or “click here” and using keywords that describe your client’s products or services (“email marketing software,” “affordable bikes California,” etc.).

Also, keep the anchor texts within 60 characters. If you go for something longer, i.e. “most affordable social media marketing services California web agency,” Google will penalize your content.

So, make your anchor texts descriptive, and reasonably short, and include them appropriately.

4 Content Ideas for SEO Affiliate Marketing Copywriters

If you need content ideas for your next affiliate campaign, check these sections below.

1. Landing pages

A lack of SEO-optimized landing pages is a major reason why many affiliate marketing campaigns fail. To attract more leads and customers with a landing page, follow these tips:

• have an action-oriented CTA that stands out from the rest with a contrasting color
• write a concise copy that encourages the visitor to convert
• add short messages that reduce the hesitation (free trial details, customer testimonials, etc.)
• write a benefit-driven headline.
  

This landing page from Tapfiliate is an excellent example of how to implement these tips.

Keep in mind that a landing page copy needs to convince the visitor to take immediate action. To achieve this, you need to highlight the benefits and reduce hesitation.

Designing multiple landing pages for A/B testing and using affiliate tracking software to follow trial signups is a great way to find which content is best for conversions. Keep a tracker of the landing pages you create to avoid duplicate content on your site, which could harm your SEO efforts.

Read more: 7 Tips for Creating High-Converting eCommerce Landing Pages

2. eBooks and other printables

eBooks, industry reports, white papers, checklists, and cheat sheets are commonly used lead magnets. For customers, these resources are a good way to get valuable information for free, so they are willing to get them in exchange for an email.

These lead magnets are a great opportunity for SEO copywriters to promote a product. They can:

• mention it as a way to obtain a certain benefit
• place a CTA leading to a product page or a landing page
• describe the product’s features
• show the effectiveness of the product with a case study.
  

If you’re running a cooking blog, use banners, textual CTAs, pop-ups, and bars to encourage visitors to download your lead magnets.

Here’s how Recipetineats collects emails with free ebooks.

Getting an ebook is pretty easy. If the content offered by the blog is valuable, people will be more likely to download and convert.

3. Blog articles

This is a no-brainer for SEO copywriters. Blog articles are a nice way to attract quality traffic from Google and place links to affiliate products in a natural, relevant way.

The beauty of having a blog is that you have an opportunity to share valuable advice and gain trust. If they perceive you as a reliable source of recommendations – remember that 87 percent of shoppers start product research online – they’ll be more likely to follow your links.

As you can see from this image, the article of this blogger generated 740 comments. That’s a nice engagement level which gives plenty of opportunities to drive traffic to landing pages.

Remember to optimize each article for search intent by including relevant keywords. But the most important thing is to write something valuable for readers that’ll keep them coming back.

4. Video product reviews and tutorials

Another popular idea for content-based affiliate marketing you can use to drive traffic to landing pages. You must have seen quite a lot of them: a person talks about a product and tests it to show the benefits. At some point during the video, the person invites the viewers to try it out by clicking on a special link.

One big advantage of video reviews and tutorials is the opportunity to show the real benefits of a product. To make the videos work for your campaign, great content is needed.

Check out these few SEO-related points:

• place target keywords in the title and description of the video
• don’t go over 1,000 characters in the video description
• use keywords to tag the video properly.
  

If you need some recommendations on keyword discovery, check out Ubersuggest.

SEO Affiliate Marketing: Putting it Together

Here you go, the basics of SEO optimization for affiliate marketing content. Hopefully, these tips and ideas will be helpful to make your next campaign better at bringing in sales.

Remember that quality content is all about the needs of customers. If you make your content relevant and useful, Google will notice it and move it up. And when it does, good things happen.