Marketers increasingly use copywriting as a way to guide people from initial contact to making a purchase. When it comes to affiliate marketing, SEO copywriting is one of the most effective tools for driving traffic to a website.
Creating and sharing valuable content better engages your readers, boosts site traffic, and increases conversion rates. All of this, in turn, allows you to better reach and exceed your operational goals.
We have created the ultimate guide to navigating the in’s and out’s of effective SEO marketing strategies to boost your sales and help you better reach your target audience.
This guide is broken down into 4 sections:
- Copywriting as a way to drive traffic to your website
- Effective copywriting tactics for affiliate marketing
- Common mistakes to avoid in SEO copywriting
- Overview
1. Copywriting As A Way To Drive Traffic To Your Website
No matter what type of business you do, every entrepreneur knows how essential attracting new customers and increasing brand awareness is. One of the most effective and affordable promotional tools a company can utilize is creative content.
Typically, affiliate-style marketing rewards current and potential customers for referring, sharing, liking, and purchasing products or services. Creating content can be easy if you understand the specific techniques required to receive the maximum results from your SEO copywriting campaign.
SEO copywriting is all about optimization of your content in order to rank it higher in online search results. This ranking should not be your main focus though. Your priority should be a simple and effective mantra: “People First. Optimization Second.” That's why finding a balance between optimization for bots and creating valuable and meaningful content for your target audience is the key to your business's success.
2. Effective Copywriting Tactics For Affiliate Marketing
Catching a reader's attention is a difficult task in this day and age. Smartphones, quick convenience, and short attention spans can make reaching customers a difficult task - especially when you consider how saturated the market is with clickbait marketing schemes.
While copywriting is used to improve conversion rate, it's essential to know what the most effective ways of making it work for your business are. This way you can organize and create an effective SEO affiliate marketing campaign that engages your readers and boosts your conversion rates.
Check out some of the most effective SEO copywriting strategies that you can incorporate into your affiliate marketing campaign.
Make sure the content you create is relevant to your client's website.
When it comes to providing customers with engaging content, creating it from thin air just isn't enough. A copywriter must carefully put thought into what content is most relevant to the target audience and to the client’s business.
For example, if a client owns a small online store that specializes in selling electric saws, then the content should be themed around tools, woodwork, and even construction. This way, your client’s services are relevant to the article being read and provides a better opportunity to increase conversion rates and boost SEO rankings in search engine results.
Creating content that is unrelated to your clients services, and then linking your client’s website in the article, does nothing to increase conversion rates or boost SEO rankings in search engines. While clients may read through the article, the chances of them making a purchase are drastically reduced.
Pay attention to each component of your content as it should be relevant to the text and your client's products or services. Keywords, headlines, pictures, and links must be organized and combined in order to reinforce your message. Including information, keywords, and links that aren't relevant to the text is not a way to engage and retain your target audience.
When creating SEO content, it is vital to keep an open dialogue with your client to ensure that their expectations are being met. Often, a client will have a vision of what they want and it’s important that your work best reflects that vision. Pay attention to word count, keywords, phrasing, and formatting requests so that you can deliver high-quality work that completely satisfies your client’s needs.
Think of the keywords to drive more traffic to your website.
Getting targeted traffic is crucial for affiliate marketing. The more traffic you have, the more potential customers you have to buy your product or service. It's that simple.
Researching which keywords increase traffic and sales is not a one-time thing. The keywords that reach one type of audience are not the ones that will reach another type of target audience. It is important to develop your keyword strategy to include constant research, new trends, customer likes and dislikes, and the success of past affiliate marketing campaigns.
Your keyword choice will also depend on search volume. There are 2 types of search volumes to consider: High & Low.
High Volume Keywords
High search volume keywords include:
- “Product X” review
- “Product/ Service X” best deals
- “Service X” advantages
These keywords have a high potential to increase exposure but also come with a high rate of competitiveness. This makes it much harder to get to the top of search results.
Low Volume Keywords
Low volume keywords are those that don't often get searched for outside of:
- Holidays
- Small Niche
- Current Events
Operating a low volume keyword business can be tricky, but not impossible to create effective and profitable SEO copywriting for. Most of the time, using low-volume keywords will require more frequent content posting to continue to attract and engage readers.
Additionally, balancing between high-volume and low-volume keywords can give you an opportunity to catch your audience's attention and increase your traffic without being affected by copious amounts of competition.
These are some of the many tools that will help you better research and select your keywords:
Create valuable content.
Content is the first step toward catching the attention of your reader. But capturing their attention isn't enough. Your content needs to also persuade them to make a purchase, or at the very least, share your services and products with someone they know that would like to buy them.
Creating valuable content is the best way to build interest and motivate your audience to make a purchase. Focus on creating, posting, and sharing valuable content that is relevant to the needs of your client as it is the best way to grow and retain your customer base.
Producing content without the knowledge of the topic, services, or industry will ultimately cause a SEO marketing campaign to fail. In-depth research to familiarize yourself with a client’s industry is key to creating valuable content that will increase engagement and boost sales.
We’ll take, for example, cooking courses. If you're referring to a cooking school, it's essential to know, for instance, what cuisines they specialize in teaching a customer how to cook. If they teach French cuisine, you can write some articles about it or post some recipes in order to encourage readers to follow additional related links.
Write reviews for products and services that match your client’s.
A sudden change of content between what you create and where the affiliate posts direct you can have a negative effect on traffic to both your blog and the affiliate site.
The content you provide is ranged by theme. Search engines are designed to periodically check your content and keywords. These checks can determine changes in content and lower your search result ranking.
To keep your traffic, conversion rates, and SEO ranking high, you must create content that matches the affiliate program you've joined. This will make it easier for readers and search bots to locate and classify you as a legitimate, reliable, and relevant.
Add appropriate alternative text to pictures
Alternative text is as essential as the other components of your content. Search engines can't see the pictures you add to your post, but they can analyze the information you provide in the alternative text bar. This allows search engines to understand what the picture is about. The text you provide will help them to categorize your picture and add it to the search results output. This gives readers the chance to follow a link to your site via a photo search query.
This simple technique is a very effective way to boost traffic to your site without taking up too much of your time or effort.
Below you will find examples of what to use and not use when writing alternative text for your pictures:
Avoid these types of descriptive phrases:
- “picture of nail design”
- “image of a lipstick”
Incorporate these types of descriptive phrases:
- “wintry nail design with snowflakes”
- “easy pink nail design”
- “red matte lipstick”
- “cheap long-wear lipstick”
If you are having trouble figuring out which keywords to use in your alternative text, take a moment and put yourself in the shoes of your audience. How would they phrase their search query for your photos? What keywords resonate with your target audience that will bring them to your site?
Optimize for Google's featured snippet.
Not many people fully understand how to take advantage of the featured snippets tool offered by Google. Featured snippets are search results that pop up on the first page of an organic search - right below the ads. They usually include advice, descriptions, guidance, steps, or definitions. When a user opens one of the results, Google suggests more and more related search results.
Optimize your site in the following ways to ensure that your links are included in Google’s Featured Snippets:
- Ask a question in your article and follow it up with a brief one paragraph answer. Using phrases such as “How to...”, “What is...”, “What types of/are...”, etc. will be the most effective way to accomplish this task. The summary that you provide will be a motivating factor for readers to follow your link in the snippet.
- Use bullet points, lists, and numbers. Google loves it.
- When you write an article with a query “How to…” use laconic headings with clear phrasing. (e.g. “Step 1,” “Tip 1,” etc.)
- Include a few similar or related questions in one article.
- Research the questions that have a high search volume using Serpstat.
Decrease Bounce Rate.
The amount of people that entered your site and then left is called “bounce rate.” On average it varies between 41% and 55%. The real goal is to keep it under 40%.
How to do it?
- The first step to decreasing a bounce rate is creating interesting and valuable content with excellent readability and visual reinforcement. People tend to get bored and abandon a website because they can't find what they were looking for as quickly as they wanted to
- Use bullets, headings, and lists to make your information easier to comprehend
- Be very careful when using popups, ads, etc.
- Create persuasion with a Call-To-Action
- Keep your content fresh and up-to-date
Following these easy steps will help you to decrease your bounce rate and boost your traffic.
3. Typical Mistakes To Avoid in SEO Copywriting
Applying the best SEO copywriting techniques can thrust you to the top of search engine results. However, there are a few ways you can ruin the effectiveness of your content before it has the chance to impact your readers.
Stuffing your text with keywords.
The more, the better...right? Not when it comes to keywords. Oversaturating your text with keywords has the opposite intended effect on your content and lowers its value drastically.
Try to incorporate your keywords into your text naturally, so that they flow well with the topic. This rule also applies to alternative text, meta tags, titles, and descriptions.
Don't forget to create content that optimizes readability and content value for your readers and target audiences.
In addition to overusing keywords in your text, you also want to avoid creating content that is not unique or original. Content that is unique is profitable for both you and your client as it increases conversion rate, therefore increasing profits.
Check out these effective tools to help keep your content unique and original:
- Use a synonym generator and content plagiarism-checking software. This will help you gage (and increase) the originality of your content in comparison with the texts of your competitors.
- Hire a professional writer from platforms like EssayTigers, Guru, WriterAccess to look through the text and find the keywords that don’t fit. A fresh set of eyes from experienced writers and editors is a great way to keep your content unique.
- Use keyword generators: LSI Keywords, SEMrush, etc. Use keywords wisely to avoid overusing and lowering your content value.
Clickbait
Ah, clickbait headlines. We all hate them, right? It's just annoying when you follow the link and don't get information that was initially advertised. Headlines that read, “You will not believe...”, “Breaking News!”, or “This will blow your mind...” tend to ruin your audience's trust.
While it can bring you some short-term benefits, the overall result will be the exact opposite of your original expectations. When people see that your content doesn't match what the headline, they will leave your page and in turn, increase your bounce rate rapidly.
Moreover, web bots are able to recognize such pages and lower your site rankings due because of this unreliable content. As an example, in 2016 Facebook started a campaign focused on excluding clickbait content.
Too much pressure
It's good to create a content that motivates the customer to act on a special offer, purchase a product/service, or follow a link to another related article. There is such a thing as too much pressure though.
Avoid trying to intimidate the reader into action with phrases such as:
- “Hurry up, buy X and get a discount!”
- “Buy now without hesitation!”
- "Follow the link to know more about X and buy it to get free shipping!”
Do these phrases sound familiar to you? This is most likely because these are the most commonly used phrases by lazy copywriters that just want a simple call-to-action for readers to take advantage of.
Unfortunately, when your content overuses these high-pressure phrases, it decreases your content readability, reader loyalty, content value, and site reliability. This will inevitably drive readers away and end up increasing your bounce rate as well.
Confusing structure of the content
Easy readability is an all-important factor that motivates your audience to read all of your content from beginning to end. The more complicated your content is, the more bored and confused your reader will become. This is another factor that if not properly structured, will push readers from your site and increase your bounce rate.
Break big texts into short paragraphs, add headings, and use lists to make text navigation easier. Highlight key points with bold font. Add graphics and pictures if needed.
4. Overview
Writing content for a page with an affiliate offer requires in-depth knowledge of your client's business and SEO copywriting techniques. Understanding these two things will boost your rankings, increase traffic, maintain a high conversion rate, and allow you to create valuable content that builds loyalty and trust between you and your audience.
Take these basics of SEO copywriting into consideration to boost your traffic:
- Create valuable and relevant content that is related to your client’s business. This way you can maintain high reliability, relevance, and engagement with your target audience.
- Keep track of keyword usage so that you don't overload the text and lower your search rankings.
- Add alternative text for pictures and optimize your texts for featured snippets by including answers to the high-rated questions related to your niche. This will increase visibility and traffic to your site.
- Structure your text for maximum readability and flow. This will retain the attention of your audience and encourage them to read your content from beginning to end.
Following this guide will ensure that you optimize your content in a way that increases traffic, profits, and your audience base. Take advantage of it.
Seven years ago Stacey Wonder started her career as a copywriter. Now, she manages the team of copywriters and works as a content marketer. Stacey is a regular reader of the most popular blogs for marketers and she also likes sharing her best practices and strategies with other specialists.
