SEO and affiliate teams often influence the same metrics, such as revenue, rankings, and visibility in the digital landscape. By aligning these teams, we can cut costs and significantly enhance brand performance.
In many businesses, SEO teams and affiliates—partners promoting our products for commissions—operate separately. While the SEO team focuses on rankings and organic traffic, the affiliate team is busy cultivating partner relationships and handling commissions. However, rarely do these teams collaborate, missing out on boosting their collective impact.
Cross-departmental cooperation is essential for business growth. Collaborating with other teams helps me understand their views on success, expands my perspective beyond SEO, and reveals new opportunities for leveraging initiatives for SEO advancements.
A harmonious relationship between SEO and affiliate teams is crucial. Let’s explore the importance of this alignment for brand protection, LLM visibility, and tool sharing, and how this synergy can enhance efficiency, save costs, and bolster business performance.
Protect Your Brand and Search Terms
It’s crucial to maintain control over brand-related search terms and not let affiliates dominate them. With my clients, anything affecting organic performance falls under the SEO team’s domain.
Consider high-intent terms like:
- [brand] + discount code
- [brand] + promo code
- And many other variations
Allowing affiliates to rank for these terms can redirect your branded traffic and sales back to you, incurring unnecessary commissions. This costly situation can be easily avoided.
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How to Reclaim Your Rankings
Brands can lose their conversions to affiliates as well, like Trainline. The term “trainline promo code” garners 17,000 monthly searches in the UK, yet Trainline fails to optimize their promotional page for this term, losing traffic and conversions to affiliates.
The fix is simple: a focused adjustment of the meta title, H1, and main content to reflect these terms effectively.
By reclaiming control over these rankings, we:
- Increased organic revenue.
- Reduced affiliate expenses.
- Enhanced overall business profitability.
For instance, one brand we manage saw a boost in Share of Voice from 14% to 31% after a strategic content update, all overnight.
These victories benefit the entire business, not just SEO. This is the true purpose of SEO — driving business growth through insight and strategy.
How SEO and Affiliate Teams Can Work Together to Compound Returns
Affiliates generally produce content that enhances reputational signals like “Best of” and comparison articles. LLMs heavily weigh these signals, increasing our brand’s authority when mentioned in numerous reputable articles across our niche.
Educating affiliates on including our brand in such articles can provide:
- Increased affiliate visibility, leading to traffic and conversions from those placements.
- Enhanced LLM visibility, boosting reputational signals that inform AI models recommending our brand.
Technically, we need to manage affiliate tracking URLs correctly. No-indexing these URLs prevents them from being indexed in search results, avoiding potential indexing issues.
I monitor this with SEOTesting, which alerts me about newly indexed URLs, allowing us to swiftly address any tracking URLs that slip through.
Dig deeper: What incrementality really means in affiliate marketing
Collaborate with Affiliates Today
SEO and affiliate teams should not work in silos. Their synergy can save money and increase visibility. Affiliates can boost LLM visibility, while SEO data can empower affiliate decisions, driving business success together.
The closer these teams operate, the more beneficial the results for the business.
Inspired by this post on Search Engine Land.
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