Affiliate marketing through the creation of content in a niche topic area is one of the best ways to build a successful online business. You don’t need a big financial investment to make it work, and an affiliate model is highly scalable, as you may know.

All of your success with an affiliate or niche site, however, depends on your search engine optimization.

If you aren’t ranking, then people aren’t finding your content. If they don’t see your content, they’re not clicking your affiliate links and your site isn’t profitable.

Link building tends to be overlooked in terms of not just its value but its necessity by a lot of affiliate marketers. Get in touch now!

If you saw your sites take a hit in the SEO rankings in the summer of 2021, you weren’t alone. If your affiliate site or sites falls into the category of YMYL, you may have especially noticed a decline in rankings and traffic.

YMYL stands for “your money, your life.” A lot of affiliate sites fall into this category. If you provide information or sell products or services impacting the health, finances, safety or happiness of your audience, you’re YMYL, according to Google.

That’s a lot of affiliate marketers, right?

When you fall into the YMYL category, Google is holding you to the highest standards. Your content is high-stakes, influencing people’s health and lives.

Every time you produce a piece of content, you have to ensure that it will only help and in no way hurt the people who read it.

Since your site might be held to a higher standard based on YMYL, what does that mean as far as the content you create?

That’s where the EAT acronym is relevant. EAT stands for expertise, authority, and trust.

This is essentially a model or framework you should aim to follow with all of your content. That doesn’t necessarily mean EAT is a specific, measurable ranking factor.

However, the signals that we know Google uses to rank content do correlate with EAT. Google’s goal in assessing the EAT framework relative to sites is that they want to deliver high-quality and relevant content to their users. They want low-quality content that doesn’t add value to the lives of users to be less visible.

  • Expertise: Are people who are subject matter experts creating the content for your sites?
  • Authoritativeness: PageRank has long been used by Google to understand the authoritativeness of a site. With that in mind, one signal has always been links. The quality of those links and their presence is a top ranking factor. We often use the comparison in link building that it’s like votes. The more votes you get in the form of high-quality links, the more popular you are—or in this particular case, the more authoritative you are. Authoritativeness can be described as your online reputation, and building links is the best way to bolster and boost that reputation.
  • Trustworthiness: In a lot of ways, a strong link profile shows you’re trustworthy as well as being an authority.

All of the above factors bring us to one crucial takeaway—links have been and remain a primary ranking factor.

When you have a high number of backlinks, you’re much more likely to rank well in organic search. Without rankings, on the other hand, it’s extremely unlikely you’ll rank well, particularly for a relatively competitive keyword.

While things like YMYL might be new, using links in the search algorithm is not a new concept. The idea of link building as one of the most important parts of your SEO continues to be confirmed every time Google rolls out a change.

For example, PageRank was the original Google algorithm, and links were the foundation of that. Despite thousands of algorithm changes since that time, the constant is the reliance on backlinks as a rank signal.

We’re not guessing either—Google confirms it. Time and time again, Google representatives say that backlinks are among the top three most important factors to rank in search engines.

Great, you might think you can boost your affiliate content simply by trying to get as many links as possible.

Not so fast.

Not all backlinks are equal in terms of value. To rank higher in the SERPs, you don’t just need a lot of links back to your site. You need quality backlinks. One excellent backlink is going to be more effective and powerful than 500 low-quality backlinks.

So what makes a backlink high-quality?

  • Your backlinks need to come from sites that are authoritative and trusted. If you have backlinks from a spammy, low-quality site, it’s not going to do much to make your site any more authoritative. It doesn’t signify a vote of confidence in your site to have a bunch of links that are from random, poor-quality sites. That’s part of our research and analysis process. We don’t just get your links placed on any site. We use metrics like Domain Authority. The more authority a site has, the more authority it can pass to your site when it links to you.
  • Another signifier of a quality backlink? Your targeted keyword is part of the anchor text. Your anchor text is that part of a link that’s visible. We can help you identify targeted keywords if necessary and make sure these are what’s used for your links. Several industry studies show the relationship between a keyword-rich anchor text and ranking higher for that keyword.
  • The site linking to yours needs to be related to your topic or niche in some way. This is something else we handle at the Upper Ranks. We make sure that when we’re reaching out to sites, they’re relevant to your own. Google wants to see some sort of relationship when sites link to one another. If your link is on a random, irrelevant site, it’s not going to be as powerful for the Google algorithm.
  • Links need to be “do-follow.” If there’s a “no-follow” tag attached to the link it’ll be ignored by Google.
  • You need variety. It’s important as part of an overall link-building strategy that you have links from multiple high-quality sites. If you keep getting links from the same site over and over again, there will be the issue of diminishing returns, with each subsequent link being less powerful for SEO.

If everything above seems technical and labor-intensive, that’s because it is. With the importance of link building to your overall SEO strategy, it’s something you can’t afford to overlook, but you may not have the resources to manage it in-house or on your own.

Expertise

When you’re an affiliate publisher, you probably can’t afford high-priced professionals to add to your team full-time. At the same time, you also can’t afford not to invest in your SEO strategy because it’s the core of your business.

Link building is something requiring skills, knowledge, and also existing relationships to facilitate. You want to work with professionals who stay up-to-date with best practices and understand the current algorithms.

We offer a scalable, cost-effective solution for even small sites and businesses.

Don’t waste your time or money on things that won’t work or could even damage your rankings over time. Link building isn’t a guessing game. We know what works and how to make it happen.

Quality Control

As we mentioned, it’s not just about getting as many links as you can. An effective, modern SEO strategy relies on having quality links as well. If you have a lot of low-quality links it can end up hurting you and not helping.

We do the research and quality control, so you have peace of mind.

You Can Focus Elsewhere

Running a business isn’t easy. It’s time-consuming and if you’re an affiliate marketer, you have to constantly be thinking about what you’ll do next in terms of content and keyword research. If you want to grow, you don’t have hour after hour to spend emailing and doing outreach to get links or vetting sites.

Luckily, we do the lifting of link building, and you focus on growing your business in other ways.

Knowing When to Outsource

There might be other areas of your business you already outsource, and if so, you probably know the signs that you can’t do it at all. Signs you need to consider outsourcing link building include:

  • You’re overwhelmed, or you’ve gotten to the point where you dread working on your business.
  • You’re spending all of your time on administrative tasks like emailing websites with link pitches, and you’re not able to work on the parts of your business you’re passionate about as a result.
  • Your SEO is plateauing, or maybe your rankings are even going down.
  • Outsourcing could be a necessity if you’ve stopped coming up with innovative or creative ideas that fuel growth.
  • You’re turning down opportunities to keep up with things like link building.

We are a link-building service for affiliate sites.

We specifically understand what it takes to build services for affiliate businesses better than anyone in the industry. That’s all we do—we are passionate about the process of building links and the results we deliver.

Our process is tailored to our client’s individual needs, but the general steps can look something like this:

  • We’ll take the time to learn about your site and your industry or niche. By learning as much as we can during this initial phase, we can create highly targeted link-building strategies. We analyze your competition to see what their backlink profiles look like, and we start thinking about how we can find the best sites that are in line with your goals.
  • How are you different from your competitors? That’s what we want to know to empower our outreach experts.
  • Once we understand who you are, how you’re unique, and where you fit into your niche, we can start prospecting. Prospecting is when we find target sites for your campaign, and we aim high. We use prospecting tools, but we also have our own database of sites we’ve worked with in the past. We don’t sacrifice relevance or authority—we build on both. We know that we have to find sites that are a fit for your site and maximize your results.
  • We vet all of our target sites for quality and audience.
  • Outreach can be one of the most time-consuming and frustrating parts of link building. Sending out a template email isn’t going to get attention, but personalizing your outreach emails to every person can in and of itself turn into a full-time job. Our outreach experts know how to grab the attention of bloggers and publishers and take that element of SEO off your plate. We work to target our outreach to the people we know will be most interested and we leverage our existing relationships.
  • Our team of content creators will craft guest posts that follow all needed publisher guidelines. They’ll naturally work in your targeted links and keyword anchor text.
  • We’ll give you in-depth reports for everything we do so that you can see the results.

If you’re ready to see the difference a link-building service for affiliate sites can make in your business, reach out. There’s a reason Neil Patel and other industry leaders describe as one of the best at what we do.

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