Intro

Affiliate marketing can be a great way to make money online. However, it's not as simple as slapping up a few links and calling it a day.

If you want to see real success in affiliate marketing, you need to optimize your website for search engines.

That's one of our key business models, and I'll walk through how we recently used Ranktracker to build an article on the top landing page builders.

Our Process

We knew that many of the landing page builders have well-paying affiliate programs - and we wanted to be able to earn some of that money.

Identifying our Keywords

Identifying the keywords is always our starting point, and Ranktracker makes this an easy process. We used the Keyword Finder tool to determine the competitiveness of various keywords, including landing pages, landing pages, landing page builder, landingi, leadpages, and instapages.

Based upon our understanding of the space and the information Keyword Finder provided, we decided to go for "best landing page builder" as our primary keyword, with all others evaluated as additional keywords we would add to the copy and try to rank for in the article.

For this SEO cluster, this term will be the easiest for us to rank overall.

As an affiliate marketer, when looking at potential keywords, you should always consider:

How difficult will it be to rank for this keyword on my website?

Keyword Difficulty (KD) helps narrow this down.

On my website, for go-to-market terms (around sales, marketing, and so on), we have a shot of ranking for KD levels below 70.

This won't be easy, but we can do it with a good article and patience.

What is the potential reward (i.e., affiliate commission) if we are successful

As an affiliate marketer, I can look at CPC as an indicator of keyword value, and these are good value terms.

I then factor that against the affiliate commission rates, and I know these are terms that, when I rank, I'll begin to make a worthwhile amount of money.

After answering these questions, you'll have a much better idea of which keywords are worth going after.

We decided that "best landing page builder" was the best keyword to target for our purposes. The next step was to create content around that keyword.

Global competition

We translate articles into Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese on our site, so we always look at the global KDs for the key terms.

Going back into the Keyword Finder tool, we change the search to Global to see how competitive the term is in other countries.

We have our best chance of ranking first in the UK and Canada this term.

Why does this help us?

Strategically, we will first want to identify companies in those regions to backlink to our content.

Now, Let's Identify our SERP Competition

Next, we need to evaluate the competition for this keyword.

We'll use Ranktracker's SERP Checker tool for this purpose.

Looking at the top results for "best landing page builder," we see the following:

And we immediately became excited.

Why?

• Most of the high-ranking pages have a domain authority (DA) in the 40s -- we can beat them and often outperform higher DA sites because our content is excellent.
• With the above, I think we can make it to the second spot in 3-4 months, and traffic potential is around 500 monthly visits for this primary keyword. With secondary keywords, we should be able to generate more than 1000 views a month. With a reasonable conversion rate, the path to making money on this article becomes even more evident.

Ranktracker includes an indicator of Above Fold, which is very helpful as it allows us to see how high we need to rank to be visible by searchers.

A rank in the top five is necessary for this particular keyword to be above the fold.

Again, another indication that this is an excellent term to go after.

Analyze Backlink Profiles

Now that we know who the competition is -- the top five websites shown in the SERP checker, let's dive into each competitor's backlink profile.

Why do we care about their backlinks?

If we want to rank above them, we'll need more and better links than they have.

To do this analysis, we'll use Ranktracker's Backlink Checker tool.

Let's open the Backlink Checker and evaluate the 2nd item in the list: FindStack.

Backlink Checker gives me some vital information.

• Sorting by Domain Rank (DR), I can see that only one of the backlinks has a decent ranking, only a 42.
• Many of the backlinks originate from 3 common sites, so that this rank may be artificially raised by some blackhat SEO nonsense, not best practices.
• Only 25% of these links are marked as Do-Follow.

So, what does all of this tell me?

I can rank above this site with fewer and better backlinks.

To do that, I'll need to get links from websites with a higher DR than 42, and at least some of those links should be from sites with a DA over 60 (ideally).

I'll also want to make sure that most -- if not all -- of my links are marked as Do-Follow.

Now that we've looked at our competition's backlink profiles, we can start formulating a plan for building our own.

Write the Content

Now that we've done our research, it's time to start writing the content.

But before we do, let's look at what our competition has written.

Looking at the top-ranking articles for "best landing page builder," we can see that most are listicles with 10+ items.

I created a similar style post in my "best landing page builder" article, choosing to differentiate with higher quality content to help searchers meet their buying intent goals.

Will it work?

I think so.

The post is very comprehensive, going over everything a searcher would need to know to make an informed decision about landing page builders.

It's also well-written and engaging, which I believe will help it rank higher than the competition.

Now that we've written our article, it's time to start building backlinks.

Building Backlinks

The first step in building backlinks is to create a list of potential link sources.

Backlink building is beyond the scope of this article, but I will note that Ranktracker.com has a DR above 50 (in my target zone), and I've written this guest with a link back to my article.

For this article, we'll call backlink building a successful start.

What's left?

Rank Tracking and Updates

We all know that gaining higher SEO rankings requires you to continue polishing articles. Our process includes:

• Checking backlink profiles for new links and lost links
• Updating the landing page builder article with new information (as needed)
• Adding internal links to other articles on our website
• Creating social media posts to share the article

By following these steps, you can rank your affiliate marketing articles higher in search engines, driving more traffic - and more sales.

For ongoing Rank Tracking, we can use the Rank Tracker tool.

Add the keyword best landing page software

and as a result, we see this:

No traffic (yet) and outside of the top 100 positions.

What else would you expect from a brand new article?

Our Final Thoughts

By using Ranktracker to power up your affiliate marketing SEO, you can drive more traffic - and more sales.

Ranktracker will help you analyze the competition, find potential link sources, and track your progress over time.

What are your thoughts?

Have you used Ranktracker for affiliate marketing SEO? Share your comments in Ranktracker Facebook Group