If you are not the patient type then SEO probably won’t help you with affiliate marketing.
It’s been a rough year for affiliate marketers. Between John Mueller letting SEOs everywhere know that even adult websites must adhere to Google’s policy on organic search marketing as a warning to blackhat SEOs and Google’s most recent Core Update, affiliate marketing just got harder.
Google is more focused on content more than ever before and is less reliant on links. Since links are a large portion of blackhat SEO then it’s easy to see how blackhat SEO will be killed off eventually if Google continues in this direction with it’s search engine and finally reaches a point where links will become obsolete. Links are still a factor now but they will never beat authentic, quality content if the goal is search engine rank improvement.
So, what’s the good news about affiliate marketing?
Video marketing is easier than ever.
High quality stock video footage, professional voice actors, and talented 2D and CGI graphics artists are easily accessible online on multiple sites, quite affordable, and easy to find with simple Google searches. Applying basic SEO principles to video pages in sites like YouTube is effective and can at least get you started in increasing your YouTube search rank.
Creating a solid review niche site that gives detail, unbiased, and content filled reviews and then applying SEO to every page is another way to tap into organic traffic.
Organic traffic is king when it comes to affiliate marketing. It’s possible to create sites that generate passive income when you combine a steady stream of organic traffic to a high-converting affiliate marketing site. The best part is your marketing budget won’t be affected since organic traffic is free (you might have to pay an SEO expert to help tap into this free traffic though). With organic traffic, a website making thousands every month with a cost of around $100 a year between domain registration and hosting cost is completely possible.
However, the problem is still competition. It can take years to gain presence in search engines simply because of the sheer amount of competing sites that are all going after the same keywords.
One solution is by finding new emerging markets by keeping up with news and following trends as they develop. An emerging market has some characteristics of a developed market, but does not fully meet its standards. This includes markets that may become developed markets in the future so it’s an opportunity to get into a market early.
Additionally, following the news in key areas that are already exploding in growth and keeping your eye open for spin-off niches that can create whole new markets.
If you are interested in getting started in affiliate marketing, here’s a tip: start with digital products. The less overhead the better especially in the beginning when your affiliate marketing income is $0. There are plenty of digital products online that can be sold so no need to try and sell physical products directly unless you are the original creator of the product or don’t mind sitting on inventory. Of course, you could also dropship products to avoid the burden of inventory but this can eat into your profits significantly.
Is one of your 2021 New Year’s resolutions starting a new business online?
Pirated software has a long history of containing malicious codes going back to the days of P2P sites likes Napster and Limewire when such software was shared en masse. In the case of pirated WordPress plugins, the codes purpose is to boost another website’s search engine rank by dropping hidden links on any WP site that installs the plugin in the first place. This could also lead to problems for the site that installed the plugin as Google might flag the site for “unusual link activity” and issue a penalty even though the site’s owner is unaware of the plugin’s hidden blackhat SEO feature.
Think twice next time you want to download and install that nulled premium WP plugin.
A reoccurring question that comes up when people are questioning Google on the metrics used for ranking is ‘Do you use domain authority?’
The answer from John Mueller of Google himself:
“No, that’s a proprietary Moz metric. We don’t use Domain Authority.”
John further expanded on the answer in an interview featured on brainlabsdigital.com:
“I don’t know if I’d call it ‘authority’ like that, but we do have some metrics that are more on a site level, some metrics that are more on a page level, and some of those site wide level metrics might kind of map into similar things.”
This can be further emphasized by Gary Illes, Google’s head webmaster trends analyst, in his comments back in 2019: “whatever Fishkin’s new theory is, those are generally made up crap.”
Rand Fishkin is the founder of Moz and the creator of the “domain authority” theory-based metric, a metric Google does not officially use or even recognize as a valid metric in their search engine.
For years various 3rd party metrics have been referenced when making Google SEO assessments. Majestic’s “trust flow” and “citation flow” is another example. These metrics are based on 3rd party proprietary theory.
Theories have there place. Any veteran SEO has more than 1 or two ideas about how Google’s search engine work that is not revealed to the public by Google. Theories can lead to discovery but it’s dangerous when people start confusing them with proven facts.
There are a couple new search engines on the horizon that may disrupt Google’s 2 decade hold on the search industry.
Neeva
“We envision a search engine very differently” – Sridhar Ramaswamy, former head of Google advertising and co-founder of Neeva.
Neeva touts “Ad-Free Private Search” as stated in search results.
Sound familiar?
It’s DuckDuckGo’s claim to fame but their progress in competing against the other bigger brands in search has been slow. Maybe Neeva can pick up the slack.
You.com
“In many ways it’s surprising, given how large of an industry search is, that it hasn’t been fundamentally rethought,” said Richard Socher, formerly of Salesforce and You.com’s chief executive.
Organic First
You.com has ads but it claims to “prioritize real results over paid content and ads to ensure that can the integrity of the results can be trusted.”
Organic traffic being pushed to the top is something I’m sure SEOs love to hear.
I have search engine optimized websites for local pizza restaurants, law firms, and electronics manufacturers, just to name a few. This means I am skilled in “pizza SEO” “lawyer SEO” and “electronics manufacturer SEO”, right?
No, because those aren’t even things. SEO’s core fundamentals don’t change, regardless of industry.
However, as a marketer, I completely understand why all these different “types” of SEO exist: To target specific types of clients where there is usually more to be gained financially from said clients. Specifically, certain types of clients require significantly more work than others. With more work, comes more pay. I’m familiar with agencies that specialize in ecommerce site SEO because literally hundreds of thousands of pages need work in some cases. A team of multiple SEO specialists is needed.
Things like geographic target, page count, and competitor volume are just a few reasons why one client may differentiate greatly in workload from another.
Alternatively, SEOs target specific industries as a way to set themselves apart by being niche specific. Why be just a plain old boring SEO when you can be a “furniture SEO” who works solely with clients that sell furniture? If anything, it’s an effective way to cull the competition rather than compete with every SEO in the whole world for clients of all type. Regardless, the SEO core fundamentals are still the same. SEO process for a page about wooden rocking chairs is the same process as it is for a page about diesel engines.
However, to be fair, there are SEOs that have years of first hand experience in a certain industry which gives them a notable edge on the content side. You can write more when you know more and textual content is needed for SEO. Keep in mind though, the core SEO process doesn’t change: Keyword research and implementation, site structure, meta tags, fixing page errors, etc. Furthermore, a lot of content on a website doesn’t automatically equal a good rank as covered in a Search Engine Journal SEO article on content with John Mueller of Google back in 2018. The number 1 takeaway is “it’s not enough to just create content”
So, SEO is SEO and the work is exactly the same regardless of the website being worked on?
Not exactly.
SEO work can be broken down into 4 distinct categories based on the goal of the site. In this way, the SEO work that needs to be performed may require a different approach and follow different procedures:
Technical SEO
Technical SEO mainly focuses on technical details. Like the name implies, “technical” or factual and accurate information only. No opinions. Very little creativity. Fixing canonical errors, fixing broken links, and entering information into meta tags are some common examples of the work needed when you perform technical SEO.
Speed optimization though site structure and content management so that a website loads faster is an example of technical SEO.
Using Schema.org markup is another example of technical SEO. This kind of work is done in an attempt to get site links, rich snippits, or knowledge panels to appear in search results.
A company that sells sewing machine parts online complete with individual model numbers is an example of a client that would most likely need technical SEO.
Local SEO
Local SEO’s main goal is to focus on a specific geographical region. This type of SEO is usually done for local businesses that have a limited reach in terms of the service they provide. A pizza restaurant that offers delivery is a good example. In Google, a Google My Business (GMB) page is the key component of local SEO and even by itself, without a website attached to it, a GMB page can be a pretty powerful marketing tool for a local business.
Targeting specific keywords with local identifiers ({city, state}) is another example of Local SEO.
A local mom & pop ice cream shop is a good example of a business that would need local SEO.
Blackhat SEO
Disclaimer: It is not advised to use Blackhat SEO
Search engines have clear guidelines for people looking to rank well. Blackhatters ignore those guidelines and try to get results anyway possible. Google is clearly against link schemes , which are often used in Blackhat SEO. The information is under “Advanced SEO” on Google’s official website which did make me chuckle a little.
Although not illegal by definition, blackhat work can involve breaking the law (i.e. hacking a website) but most blackhatters don’t take things to this extreme and only break website policies instead which is not ethical but also not illegal.
Several years ago, when PageRank (Google’s official rank score per page) was public information, high scoring pages were a target for blackhatters looking for powerful link sources. Combined with blackhat automated link building tools and knowledge about which sites to drop a link on, it was the “Golden Age” for blackhat SEOs. Since PR has been made private and links have been devalued over time, blackhat SEO has only gotten weaker in effectiveness. There are still content spam tactics that are used but these tend to be short-lived sites that quickly get hammered by search engine spam prevention systems.
Getting caught doing blackhat SEO can get you into hot water with Google. A de-ranking or, worse yet, de-indexing can be the punishment in some cases. For this reason, it is not advised to use blackhat SEO on any website you are serious about making successful and stable.
An affiliate marketing site thats sole purpose is to direct web traffic to other companies products or services for monetary incentives is often the type of website that utilize blackhat SEO.
Whitehat SEO (SEO)
When industry professionals and official representatives of search engine giants talk using the term “SEO” what they are referring to is the following:
Adhering to policy guidelines and following new information (from official sources) surrounding algorithm updates to increase search engine ranking.
“Whitehat SEO” is the type of SEO that any professional SEO should be doing moving forward into 2021 if they are serious about this type of work as a career.
If you are doing both technical SEO and local SEO the right way then you are doing whitehat SEO.
If you are adding a nofollow tag to any link pointing to a product that you are reviewing (in exchange for compensation in someway) then you are doing whitehat SEO.
Not buying backlinks? Not doing a link exchange? Only allowing people to naturally link to you over time? Whitehat SEO. There are countless other examples and they all come down to following the guidelines and not trying to cheat the signals with blackhat tactics.
At this point, Google has provided enough transparency with search to give anyone a decent chance at ranking a website for consistant traffic. It’s just a matter of someone putting all this information together and executing it while continuing to stay up to date with whats happening in the world of search engines.
Any credible business, whether online only or brick and mortar, that wants to increase it’s presence in search engines in order to increase it’s revenue is going to want SEO.
Honorable Mentions
Mostly subsets of SEO rather than a stand alone category, here are other variations of SEO that are often singled out:
Greyhat SEO
Can you guess what this means? Yep, a little blackhat and a little whitehat. It’s debatable if this type of SEO is even a thing though since the moment you use blackhat techniques you are conducting blackhat SEO regardless if eveything you did up until that moment was whitehat.
Still, there are those in the SEO community that consider greyhat SEO a type of SEO simply from having both blackhat and white SEO knowledge and experience to execute both so it gets an honorable mention.
Recipe SEO
I recently wrote on recipe SEO on account of a famous celebrity pitmaster recently speaking out about his frustrations with Google when it comes to ranking recipes in Google search. Recipes (if done correctly) can show up as individual knowledge panels at the very top of search results. This mainly involves Schema.org markup so I am tempted to just say that recipe SEO is just an extension of technical SEO, like any SEO work that involves trying to get knowledge panels to appear. There seems to be a lot of focus lately on specifically getting recipes (cooking at home because of COVID-19 maybe?) to rank in Google so it gets an honorable mention.
Hotel SEO
Google offers a special knowledge panel just for hotels. To get your hotel to show up you need to follow a special set of instructions and have an “integration partner” to provide you rates and availability to Google. Like recipe SEO, the work involves a lot of technical information rather than creative content. There is some talk that there is a specific way to have a better chance at ranking a hotel in Google above others but I tend not to entertain theory and have no first hand experience with this so I will just leave this in honorable mentions until I see some proof of this.
Adult SEO
A special kind of SEO just for Porn!? Not really, but, it is required for someone to be of a certain age (depending on their region of the world) to be able to work with adult content in the first place. I’m not an adult entertainment lawyer so I really don’t know the specifics but I do know that different countries have different laws involving adult content online. It’s the only way I would classify “Adult SEO” as a separate category because, outside of any kind of age requirement, the SEO process is the same.
Search Engine Specific SEO (Google/Bing/Yahoo!/YouTube/etc.)
Not all search engines are created equal and, although they all use similar signals, the weight distribution of these signals can be vastly different so you will see different results in different search engines for the same keyword.
Consult the SEO map to determine which which search engine is most used depending on the region in the world.
There are a lot of SEO “flavors.” Just remember that the main ingredients are all the same.
The year is almost up and it’s time to present the best free SEO tools for SEO professionals in 2020 EVERY YEAR. In my opinion, the best tools are “the best” because they service real foundation needs not fly-by-night gimmicky trends or 3rd party metrics that are not used by major search engine algorithms. Because of these reasons they are used year after year and they continue to be developed and improved upon.
These tools give any SEO real value in the form of easy to digest information that is still highly in depth. In fact, the amount of data given can arguably be overkill for smaller SEO projects (looking at you Google Analytics). Either way, I have used these 5 tools year after year as an SEO professional and I would personally recommend them to anyone looking to improve their search presence.
SEMRUSH SEMrush is the “swiss army knife” of SEO tools. It does a lot of different things that can help search engine marketers with marketing insights. The “snapshot” of useful search engine marketing information (keyword ranking, keyword bid cost, traffic volume trends, competitor data, etc.) found in the SEO dashboard alone is worth using the tool.
SERPLab A keyword tracking tool with a simple interface that provides free SERP (Search Eninge Results Page) checks, track and monitor your search engine keyword ranking quickly and quite accurately.
Ahrefs Backlink Checker Probably the best backlink profile tool available right now. A very robust platform that gives more backlink data than any other free backlink checker. I have been using Ahrefs for years and recommend it to anyone who need backlink information on a website.
Google Analytics Google Analytics (GA) is a web analytics platform offered by Google for free. Tracks and reports website traffic, and contains a dizzying amount of information. A useful tool but a common sentiment is that it is overly complicated and despite all the information it provides only a portion of it can be used to better an SEO campaign.
Google Search Console Check indexing status, optimize visibility a website, and get organic positions for all keywords a website is being indexed for. A great compliment to Google Analytics ever since GA went dark on providing organic keyword data (not provided).
Google Ads Keyword Planner Googles own keyword tool complete with search volume (average estimates) and PPC costs per keyword bid (range). That’s right, you can literally see what people are typing into google and how much they are typing it on an average monthly basis. This tool is a necessity for any serious SEO trying to rank specific keywords. It’s a free tool but the catch is a Google Ads account is needed with at least 1 Google Ads campaign running.
2020 Statista Survey Shows SEO Outperformed Social Media Among Leading Traffic Drivers
HubSpot’s 2020 SEO statistics are pretty much what I expected. 2020 has been tough on businesses and cost effective marketing solutions like SEO became more in demand than ever.
About 64% of marketers actively invest time in search engine optimization SEO.
Text will always be the foundation of search so making sure the text around your website’s assets is descriptive will help them rank well in search. This includes adding text to images.
In 2020, SEO reports will tie initiatives to outcomes, such as showing the impact of SEO on broader business goals.
This year SEO has delivered more traffic than social media.
To improve site performance, the top technical SEO tactic used by marketers is optimizing mobile performance.
49% of users say they use Google to discover or find a new item or product.
50.33% of searches on Google end without a click on a result.
As of June 2019, 94% of internet searches happen on a Google property.
Google uses 810 unique SERP features. Of those, 161 are found on more than 0.2% of keywords.
The average CTR from image results on Google is 0.21%, but it varies widely by industry.
Schema.org markup (often just called Schema) are tags containing tiny bits of information (microdata) that can be added to HTML to change (and possibly improve) the way search engines read and represent your page in SERPs. For example, seeing a 5-star review in an organic listing is a result of Schema.
Schema was created through collaboration between Google, Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo!
Officially, there is no conclusive evidence that Schema improves rankings. However, good schema that web visitors may find useful could lead to a click. So, in this regard, good schema markup could lead to a better click through rate (CTR) but does CTR increase SEO performance? Not according to what was said last year by Gary Illyes of Google who serves as the head webmaster trends analyst:
“Dwell time, CTR, whatever Fishkin’s new theory (Moz) is, those are generally made up crap. Search is much more simple than people think,” Gary said.
Any time that I personally used schema.org markup (adding reviews in my listings, recipes) I never saw a change in rankings from it solely. For something like recipes, or other pieces of standalone content, schema.org markup can make it easier for Google Search and other major search engines to index and organize properly but that doesn’t equate to good rankings. That only equates to search engines being able to communicate with your content. At the same time, with something like recipes, schema.org markup is practically a requirement since so much detailed and precise information can go into a recipe.
In conclusion, there really isn’t anything that structured data is going to do for a website in terms of SEO. Schema can, however, speed up the search engine indexing process and possibly increase CTR by revealing details that would have been otherwise hidden from a search results page.
John Mueller, the ever-so patient Google Search liaison, has once again revealed some useful SEO information. Google’s algorithms not only try to look at the “bigger picture of the website” but also “look at smaller parts of a website” according to John.
“And it’s also that there are always a lot of different things that come out with regards to search, and some are a little bit more focused on the domain or on a bigger picture of the website. Some are focused more on smaller parts of a website,” John explained. “so even outside of a core update, you might see these shifts across some parts of your site, and other parts going up, some parts going down.“
Google ranks pages. Not websites. Google will present you a single page per listing on any search you conduct. Every page on a website that has content on it has SEO potential.
Many website homepage rank well compared to other parts of the site but the truth is it’s because the homepage most likely has better/more content and more links pointing to it (backlinks). This is why the homepage ranks over most other pages on my most sites. Not because it is called the “home”page.
Takeaway Tip: SEO every page on your site that has content.
Does Google really know my taste buds better than me
It just goes to show you how much of an impact SEO has on the business world regardless of niche when celebrities get involved and speak up about Google SEO directly with a harsh viewpoint on Google’s search landscape. Such as in the case of Meathead Goldwyn, the celebrity pitmaster, who has recently revealed that he has spent $300,000 in the past 5 years rebuilding his site to meet Google’s strict search guidelines.
Meathead, who first criticized site’s recipe search system in 2011, is especially critical of Google when it comes to Google recipe rankings and how Google displays recipes in search results and has recently been vocal on the subject once again. “Engineers at Google have changed the way cooks write recipes,” Meathead tweeted on Christmas Eve. Some of his site’s best-loved recipes have been replaced by “oven-baked” barbecue and “crockpot” ribs on the first page of Google results.
Recipe SEO Is A Bit Of A Pain
To be fair, my experience with recipe SEO is limited as I have had only 1 client in my life that needed this service. Furthermore, there has never been much transparency on how Google ranks recipes.
Recipe SEO is more technical because of the Recipe schema. Lots and lots of details need to be added just to have a chance at entering the carousel displayed in Google Search. It’s very tedious work to be perfectly honest but it needs to be done if you want the best chance. The schema itself is a set of data-formatting specifications which standardize recipes across websites so that Google and other tech companies can display them to their users.
It’s not clear if recipe ratings are a valid ranking signal but, according to a recent article from Slate, “Google’s recipe ratings are meaningless.” I know from my own searches that subjective titles seem to have an effect as I often have seen “best” “easy” “fast” and other attractive adjectives as far as cooking goes. Of course, this is personal experience comprised of a handful of searches over the years so hardly a valid proof but do your own search on “chocolate brownie recipe” and see if the “best” one comes back. For me the top 3 results were the “best” whatever that means as I feel people have their own opinions about most food, unless you want me to believe that everyone thinks See’s candy is better than Godiva’s. I like See’s but maybe you like Godiva better. Sure, most people can agree when food is bad but when two delicious dishes are pitted against each other I feel like it will be a matter of personal preference among the masses to determine which is best.
Recipe SEO becomes frustrating fast and the best synopsis on it as of late can be represented by some recent words from Meathead Goldwyn himself:
