Mobile Affiliate Marketing SEO: What You Can Do?

Affiliate Networking and SEO are often tricky to balance together. This can be because affiliate networks have a bad reputation and are often blamed for a drop in traffic.

However, affiliate marketing works only if the affiliate network is properly SEO optimized. There are various networks and programs that can help you market through affiliates efficiently.

However, affiliates have a new challenge that they must rise to – Mobile SEO. Mobile SEO has been notorious for affiliate marketing since Google announced its preference for mobile back in 2015. Let us explain why, find out how you as an affiliate can make your website mobile-friendly and how businesses can ensure that their affiliate network is mobile-friendly. But first, let’s segway to an infographic.

Back on April 21st, 2015 Google had announced that it would start ranking websites separately for desktop and mobile. What this meant is that if your pages weren’t ready for mobile, rankings would drop. Many feared a complete restructure of rankings and some even said that it would destroy their rankings that they had built up over years. It was called the ‘Mobilegeddon’.

So, what happened…

It turned out that Google started rolling out its changes a week before the date. There was a definite shakeup in the rankings. Thankfully, it wasn’t as bad as originally predicted. Sure, rankings for some websites fell but those who had foreseen the shift to mobile coasted through this change.

The mobilegeddon, however, did drastically change the ranking game. Websites now rank differently on PC and Mobile. Affiliate marketing took a big hit originally. Its popularity waned fast. Most affiliate marketers weren’t ready for this change. Fast forward 5 years, affiliate marketing is yet to recover from this ordeal despite having so much time.

A Business’ Guide to Analyzing Their Affiliate Network

If you are not an affiliate marketer, but a business owner with an affiliate network of your own, you might want to know if the affiliate’s SEO you’ve hired is any good. In our experience, it’s not that difficult to analyze this. Here’s how you can find out:

• Hire an affiliate
• Analyze their results for the 1st month
• Differentiate between the traffic for desktop web pages and mobile webpages

Right now, almost 50% of internet traffic can be directly attributed to mobile. If your increase in sales and leads can directly be attributed to mobile affiliate traffic, your affiliates are doing good. If the majority of leads are from desktop websites, there may be shortcomings.

One thing to remember is that Google assesses individual web pages meaning instead of changing the affiliate simply optimizing your page on their website can lead to better results. That’s all there is to it. One key disadvantage of affiliate marketing is that you lack direct control over your affiliates.

Advice for Affiliate Marketers on How to Make Their Website Mobile SEO-Friendly

Many affiliate marketers have turned their websites and pages mobile-friendly over the years. However, some affiliate marketers are yet to make their websites mobile-friendly and this is hurting their chances of attracting businesses and brands.

What affiliate marketers need to do is make their websites mobile-friendly. Before you try anything you must first check if your website has kept up with the times. Here’s Google’s mobile-friendly website checker. If your website is not mobile-friendly, here’s a few tips to help you turn your website mobile-friendly:

• Ensure that your website has a ‘responsive design’. Responsive design is one where all your text and images adjust to different screen sizes. Such an interface design will already adjust your website as required.

• To make your design responsive, use standardized fonts. Fonts like Roboto are a great choice for a content-heavy affiliate marketer.

• Work on your images. Images often cause pages to resize haphazardly. It is recommended that you use proper images and set a resolution that works well both for mobile and desktop. For example, a 600-pixel wide image can fit almost all screen sizes.

• Simplify your menus and ensure that your website is optimized for mobiles. Take cues from other websites and get it done on your end. Sidebar menus are a great option.
  Display your CTAs well. Always ensure that your CTAs are clearly visible for users to click.

There are many other tricks that you can use. We are linking a blog here that can help you make your website mobile-friendly. If you are new to affiliate marketing and want to become an affiliate, we suggest creating a website of your own. Try out Appy Pie’s website builder.

Appy Pie’s Affiliate Program

Before we end this blog, let me introduce you to Appy Pie’s new affiliate program. Appy Pie has recently launched an affiliate program with Tapfiliate. You can join it and help promote Appy Pie and assist in its goal to democratize app development. The affiliate program is simple. Promote Appy Pie and get paid! You can join it today!

Conclusion

Affiliate Marketing is on a recovery track. While it may not be as effective as it was, it still remains a proper online marketing channel. However, affiliate marketers need to maintain their SEO and update their websites. It’s not an easy process but it is necessary to keep yourselves up-to-date with Google’s ever-changing search algorithms and crawlers.

However, there is not going to be a platform that can disrupt search algorithms for a while. Screen sizes won’t go below the standard smartphone so for the time being, SEO no longer has to worry for device optimization once they have done it for mobiles.

Citations:

Quicksprout