Panda aimed
to devalue mediocre content, and, unfortunately, many SEO affiliates had
historically invested too little in that field the number of big affiliates who
gained the majority of their traffic through SEO saw traffic reduce considerably.
Penguin was
aimed at violent off-page strategies, and here, too, SEO affiliates have always
decided for the easy way in favor of the rocky one.
No Google
update, regardless of how revolutionary it may be, will keep affiliates from
doing SEO. However, SEO affiliates who want to sustain success in 2013 and the
following years need to re-think their strategies.
This
article will present two strategies that affiliates can use to implement
future-proof SEO.
Recalling
the AIDA Funnel and Applying it to Search Marketing
To explain
the sustainable SEO affiliate strategies, let's recall the AIDA funnel. The
model essentially divides the buying processes into four steps:
Attention or Awareness
Interest
Desire
Action
Often, this
process is displayed as a funnel. Why a model for buying processes? Well,
affiliates are paid for sales or for intermediating contacts that can lead to
sales. Affiliates assist in the sales process of advertisers and get a share of
the revenue generated.
The
following figure displays the purchase as a process, and below it matched the
three different search types (that are informational, transactional and
navigational search) as well as the aims of an advertiser who is active during
this phase.
AIDA funnels
with different search types and advertiser aims.
To identify
and explain future-proof SEO strategies for affiliates, it is important to
classify in which fields affiliates have been active by the majority until
recently.
Historically,
affiliates have always had a strong focus on clearly transactional searches. An
affiliate ideally wanted to rank for terms for which a lead or a sale was
within close reach. These are, for example, keywords like "buy washing
machine", "rent pallet transporter", or "register online
dating service".
This, though,
is exactly where Google has succeeded in giving affiliates a really hard time
through algorithmic changes since 2011. Google is increasingly trying to list
actual retailers in transactional search queries that stand for the
"destinations" of the query of the searcher, and at the same time
display less affiliate in the good SERP positions which in the end only serve
as “channeling and pushing searchers through to advertisers”.
In the
model established above “old” affiliate strategies would be illustrated in the
following way.
Now let's
look at two SEO strategies for affiliates that have something important in
common: they represent a move upward in the AIDA funnel.
Strategy 1: Reviewing, Testing,
Consulting
A very
sustainable strategy for affiliates is to lay their focus on informational
searches / keywords that are "close to transactional" but not purely
transactional yet. Examples of such searches / keywords are “comparison iPhone
Samsung Galaxy” or “reviews Siemens washing machine”. In the established model
this strategy can illustrated like this:
Focusing on keywords that are searched
for in the interest phase
For the
affiliate, such an approach is very close to their classic strategy that aims
very much at transactional searches due to two aspects: acquisition of traffic
and monetization first let’s take a look at the acquisition of traffic: For one
part, there is even less competition between the organic results in the SERPs,
but what is even more remarkable is the small number of Ad Words ads in
informational searches. What that means is clear: More of the people who type
in those terms at Google are in fact led to the websites that rank well in the
organic results.
When it
comes to highly competitive transactional terms, it is clearly always the case
that there aren’t only Ad Words ads on the right hand side that “distract” from
the SEO consequences, but additionally there are often up to three “high-performing
ads” above the SEO results which take absent potential visitors from every SEO
positioning.
Furthermore,
in a shopping context there are not only the classic Ad Words ads but also the
very strongly attention dragging PLAs (product listing ads).
Additionally,
such an SEO strategy as the proposed has another very important advantage: If a
user enters a mere transactional keyword in Google, for example “buy monitor”,
and an affiliate succeeds to get the user to his website through good SEO, the
user basically will nearly always be disappointed. Most of the time, the user
will find a text about buying monitors and a couple of neatly integrated means
of advertising, but he won’t be given the possibility to directly do what he
wants to do – buying a monitor.
It is here
that, as an associate, one produces some disappointment to the user. Here, one
should remember why Google mainly change its algorithms: Google wants to give
the user the best search experience and lead the most direct way to what he is
looking for.
To connect
this to the alignment on informational searches as an affiliate SEO strategy,
one needs to keep in mind what a user expects from such a search. The affiliate
offers exactly what the user is looking for.
As can be
expected from the term “informational” the user wants information – and this is
exactly what the affiliate offers him. Therefore, he offers exactly what is in
the interest of Google, and if this is the case, there is no need to worry
about any soon-to-be Google updates.
As can be
seen, an alignment on transaction searches offers distinctive advantages in
regard to the acquisition of traffic. But what about the monetization?
It has to
be clearly stated that users who are gained through informational keywords show
distinctively worse conversion rates than users that are gained through mere
transactional search terms. This is a little weakness of this strategy.
However,
one needs to be clear about the fact that gaining heavily converting traffic is
going to be more and more difficult. Consequently, the “old” strategy is not a
real option anymore.
Strategy 2:
Become a Brand
Another
approach can quite rightly be entitled as old news. Years ago, following
Google's lead, online marketing veterans started recommending sites should
become a brand. In order to grasp the core idea of this strategy, one has to
take a close look at the goals of advertisers during different phases of the
buying process.
Affiliates should consider building
a brand with their SEO efforts.
Affiliate
that want to become a brand can neither focus on many conversions nor huge
amounts of traffic and impressions. Instead, the main focus is on developing a
good image and on building a brand.
Well-known
affiliates who chose such an approach are bargain blogs like retailmenot.com or
moneysavingexpert.com. If one takes a look at the search volumes of these
domain names in the keyword tool, one will understand that it is really brands
that were created. These players have been in the market for a long time, and
you definitely won't quickly or easily achieve the same success. Nonetheless,
you should get some inspiration from their promising strategy and begin to
create thematically specialized portals. The goal will always be the same: the
website/product has to be so convincing that, in the end, the user will really
start to search for the brand of the affiliate.
Moving Upward in the AIDA Funnel
As
recommended and suggested the path to sustainable strategies SEO strategies for
affiliates will focus on the additional benefit for the searcher and are
consequently appreciated by Google. The following graphic illustrates both
strategies within the introduced model.
Sustainable
SEO strategies for affiliates are an upward move in the AIDA funnel.
Think about
a testing portal for a specific niche that doesn't use a generic domain name,
but instead tries to establish a brand and tries to become the leading testing
reference for this topic – maybe even establishing a topical quality seal.
No matter
if the above strategies are applied separately or in combination, it's vital to
focus on keywords that a user would search for in an early stage of the AIDA
funnel.
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