Top 5 Reasons Why Affiliate Marketers Need SEMrush

SEMrush is a powerful and versatile competitive intelligence suite for online marketing, from SEO and PPC to social media and video advertising research.

Affiliate Marketing is expected to be a $6.8 billion industry by the year 2020, according to reports.

This lucrative type of marketing connects customers through a bridge of bloggers and website owners who either by influence or sheer educational tactics convince a visitor to either purchase a product from a third party vendor, fill out a lead form, or take another type of action such as making a phone call requesting more information.

The best affiliate marketers in the world have a grasp on many facets of online marketing, but perhaps none more important than the almighty search engine positioning.

As a pioneer in the search engine optimization space and a mentor to many aspiring affiliate marketers across the globe at Affiliate University, my educational course that teaches affiliate marketing tactics, I’m well versed in all of the components that marketers need to succeed in this growingly competitive space.

For my money, there is no more important tool to have in your arsenal of internet marketing tools than SEMrush. It’s the quintessential Swiss army knife of research and development for affiliate marketers, and today I’m going to show you the top five uses for SEMrush in regards to making money with affiliate programs.

1. Keyword Research Allows You to Hone in on Potential Customers

With people browsing search engines every day in hopes of finding information about their favorite products, there is an almost infinite number of ways people can type in similar search phrases and come to the same conclusion - landing on your website.

SEMrush allows you to type in a keyword and not only see the estimated search volume on a monthly basis, but it will also suggest related keywords that are very near the seed search term.

This allows you to know the type of content you need on your website and when optimized properly, it gives you a puncher’s chance at having those potential customers land on your website.

2. Find Out Where Your Vendors Are Spending Advertising Dollars

This is one of my favorite features of SEMrush. Using the “Ads History” function, you can essentially plug in the landing page of an e-commerce website and find out which keywords they are targeting in their Google PPC campaigns.

If you are an affiliate marketer, what better information could you arm yourself with other than having the exact blueprint of which keywords are potentially relevant to the company whose product you are trying to earn commissions selling?

To me, this is one of the most powerful components of SEMrush.

3. Finding Keyword Value

This builds onto what I stated earlier in #2.

You can use the Ads History tool to not only find which keywords are being targeted by any vendor using PPC campaigns, but you can also find the respective value of the keywords they are bidding on.

When you see a higher value assigned to a keyword or set of keywords, you know that term has a great potential to convert into sales. Attack it with a vengeance!

4. Find Patterns In Your Niche

This is a very underutilized tactic that can be one of the best ways to find out the hottest trends in your niche. My five-step process shows you how to identify trending keywords in your niche.

1. Identify the top five players in the niche you are in. Let’s just say we are in the weight loss space for example's sake.
2. Enter the URL of the landing page used for each offer (company).
3. Once you determine which companies are running PPC advertisements, and have a view of their respective ads, simply export their keywords into a .csv file. (SEMrush allows you to do this with one click.)
4. Enter the data of all companies who are running PPC ads into columns. Do this side by side so you can view a) the depth of the number of keywords used and b) eyeball the list for similarities.
5. Make a list of the keywords that are being used by more than one company. These keywords should be of the utmost importance when you create site content and optimize your site for search engines.

5. View the Top Performing Keywords and Pages

SEMrush automatically spiders any keywords that appear in the top ten pages of Google. This data is simply incredible for numerous reasons.

First off, you can attack a long tail keyword on a brand new page, perform some SEO (or not), and by simply inputting your URL into SEMrush, you can find out if any of the targeted keywords are showing up in the top ten pages of Google.

I chart my progress on a monthly basis by running my domain name through SEMrush and seeing how many keywords are showing up in the top 100 results. I make note of this number, add content, and check back each month.

When you see this number increase every month, you know that your efforts aren’t going unseen. Continue to do this and over time, you’ll have a lot of targeted traffic coming to your site that should result in some affiliate commissions.

Additionally, you can also do this for any competitor or vendor of yours. It’s up to you to decide if you do this every month and chart progress for their campaigns or not, but if you decide to go the extra mile and do this (I suggest outsourcing it) you could find out which competitors of yours are putting forth a solid effort in your niche.

Finally, you can also use the information from any competing domain name (or vendor) to see what type of new content they are putting out each month. The best way to do this is to make note of which URL’s are showing up every month.

When you see a new URL show up in SEMrush, make notes on which keywords are ranking for that URL and if you deem it pertinent to your niche, go out there and make a similar piece of content on your site.

Not a day goes by where I don’t use SEMrush. It’s helped me become one of the top affiliate marketers and SEO strategists in the world.

Using these five tips will certainly help any struggling affiliate marketer get a better grip on their business and at the same time push any advanced marketer to new heights.