Keyword research for affiliate marketing is a pretty important topic if you’re an affiliate. Affiliates use keyword research to find out which keywords their potential customers are looking for. Most affiliates will know about Google’s keyword planner. But there’s a number of other tools which you can use to find the kinds of keywords which are suitable for your particular niche:
- Keywordseverywhere.com
- https://keywordtool.io/
- Google’s keyword planner
- neilpatel.com/ubersuggest/
- SEM Rush Keyword Planner
- The Hoth keyword planner
But all you really need is a basic free tool which gives you the monthly search results of searches people are doing on Google. I use Google’s free keyword planner for this. You can get it here and all you need is a Google Adwords account.
Keyword Research For Affiliate Marketing
The first thing you can do is type in your main “seed” keyword into the planner. This will give you a number of other search terms which are currently being looked for on Google. If you’re selling a particular product, you can type that product into the planner too to see what search terms are related to it.
So, for example, one of my main search terms is affiliate marketing. This is what comes up when I type that keyword into the planner:
Let’s say you’re promoting a particular product from Clickbank.com, for instance. Here’s a product I found for back pain:
To promote this product you might want to create a blog about back pain. The first thing you should do is some keyword research so you’ll know what your potential customers are looking for. Here’s a few of the searches which are found using the keyword planner. As an affiliate, you can look for the less competitive keywords which you’ll more easily rank for.
Keyword research For Affiliate Marketing: Target Audience & Long Tail Keywords
There’s two main types of ways you can sell affiliate products. You can either use paid marketing or create content. Keyword research can be used for both to determine who you will be targeting your content or adverts towards. Without keyword research and some work on your customer avatar, it can be hard to determine who you’re selling your products to.
When you get clear on your target audience for affiliate marketing, you’re in a much better place to make sales. If you’re creating content around certain keywords, it’s a good idea to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. The shorter terms you’ll find on the keyword planner have a lot more traffic, but they are also much more difficult to rank for on Google. Longer tail keywords will have much less traffic every month. But a small slice of something is worth much more than a large slice of nothing!
Going after the keyword term term “Affiliate marketing” for example, looks good but you have very little chance of ranking your content for such a competitive keyword. “Step by step affiliate marketing for beginners pdf” is a much longer term that has less traffic. However, there’s much greater chance of ranking on Google (and other search engines) with a long tail keywords such as this. Finding long tail keywords to rank content for is just one strategy which affiliate can use keyword research for.
Keyword Research And Paid Adverts
You can also use paid adverts as an affiliate and this is a much faster way of obtaining traffic to a website or landing page. Using the keyword planner tool, find keywords in your niche by typing in your product or your niche keywords. Look for those keywords which are most relevant for your product and which ideally have a buyer intent. A buyer intent means the keyword is aligned with something the user wants to buy.
There’s three types of keywords you can use to trigger your adverts:
- Broad match – using the keywords without quotation marks or brackets
- Phrase match – using “quotes” around the keyword means your ad will only show when those terms are typed in that order together, (but it will show with other words added either side).
- Exact match – uses the phrase you choose in {brackets}. This means your ad will only show when those specific words are typed in that order and nothing else.
If you’re running paid ads, it important to only show your adverts to those people who are most likely to buy. A lot of affiliates will also suggest to send paid advertising directly to a landing page too. A landing page is a page specifically designed to take user information so the affiliate can follow up with email messages via an autoresponder.
You can also set negative keywords when planning an advertising campaign. Negative keywords are useful because they can help you avoid triggering your ads when someone is looking for something you don’t offer.