Hello and welcome to Boost Travel Affiliate Revenue Using SEO. 

I’m Sharon Gourlay, and I’m partnering with Travelpayouts to bring you this super informative course to help you make more money from affiliate marketing using the power of SEO. 

In this lesson, How SEO Can Help You Find the Right Readers for Affiliate Marketing Success, we’re going to dive into the SEO part. Because for the last few lessons, we’ve talked about reader intent, and what types of articles work really well for affiliate marketing, you know the affiliate marketing sweet spot, the buying cycle, all really important things. But they have assumed that basically if we write the content that would attract people with the right reader intent, that those readers will just come. 

If you’ve been a site owner for any length of time, you know, it’s not just creating content and people just come without you doing anything else. So today, we’re going to talk about how we can use SEO to get those people that have the right reader intent that we’re looking for. 

You don’t have to use SEO to do this. You can use any method you know if you’re a Pinterest expert, great on Facebook, whatever you use to attract readers, you can try to use those platforms. But I do think SEO is the best way to go. And that’s because you can tell someone’s intent from the keywords they use. 

When people type into Google what they’re looking for, you know, they’re telling you what they’re looking for. What they already want to know is what they’re trying to learn. So you can guess their intent from what they’re typing into Google search. That means that you can target the people who have the reading intent that you want. 

In the case of making money from affiliates, you generally want to target what are called buying or transactional keywords – keywords where people already want to buy something.

Now, this is an incredibly powerful way to get readers to your site, who will want to buy through your links. They have that reader intent, you give them that content and those links, you can hit that affiliate marketing sweet spot. 

I think it is just extra easy using SEO, compared to something like Facebook, you know, where you can put a post out there but does everyone who likes your page care about that topic then? Nope, probably not. But if someone comes to you in Google search results, they 100% care about that topic because they just searched for it. So it’s really powerful. 

This is what can lead to what is often called “passive income”, although I do prefer the term Deferred Income, because obviously, this is work upfront. You got to do this SEO, affiliate marketing, write the article is certainly not hands-off. But what is great is that once you’ve got it working, you’ve got these articles getting traffic with SEO, you solve their problems, and you have those great affiliate links, you can keep making money month after month, year after year without you doing anything else, and it’s really powerful. 

Hopefully, I’ve sold you on SEO, so let’s talk about what is a buying or transactional keyword. 

There’s like a countless number of buying keywords. I really can’t list them all. I’ve just got lots of examples to get you thinking. A common one would have the “best” in it: 

So like “best juicer”, “best hotel”, “best day tour in Italy”, you know like any of those sorts of ones tend to be buying keywords. Okay, someone wants the best saying because it’s usually because they want to buy or book it. Much the same with “top”, “reviews” or “cheapest”, it’s “cheap”, “buy”, all of these words could be in a buying keyword.

But there are also other ones, right? Like “where to stay in Kuala Lumpur” t doesn’t have that, but it’s still a buying keyword. 

What you want to do when you’re working out if something is a buying keyword or not. It’s just asking yourself, would people search this if they wanted to buy or book something and if the answer is yes, that makes it a buying or transactional keyword, right? It is that simple. 

Let’s just look at a few examples. So we’ve got “Best suitcase”, “how to book hotels in Bangkok”, “London day tour reviews”, “cheapest hostel in Sydney”.

Hopefully, you can see from all of those if someone’s searching from that they most probably want to book or buy something. Why would you search “how to book hotels in Bangkok”, if you didn’t want to book a hotel in Bangkok. So it is very powerful to target these types of keywords. 

In the next lesson, we’re going to talk through exactly how to find these keywords that people are searching for. And that will work appropriately on your site.