Why your affiliate site is not performing as desired

Affiliate marketing is not - and never will be - a quick or easy way to make money. To make a good business out of it, you have to be willing to invest both time and money. It's not just about finding the right theme. You also need to put energy into generating content, building links to your website, working on conversion optimisation and much more. In other words, there's plenty to get started with.

In this article, you'll get our most educated guess as to why your affiliate site isn't performing as expected. There's typically not just one reason why you're not generating as much traffic and profit as expected.

Site does not have enough content

It's more or less impossible to drive organic traffic without content.

Google and other search engines crawl your content, including your texts, images and other elements, to understand what your site is about. Therefore, it's critical if your website doesn't offer a lot of quality content. Quality content is not only appreciated by search engines, but also by users, who will be more likely to interact with your site if they feel they get something out of the visit.

Solution: Write informative and search engine friendly texts (hire a copywriter if needed)

The page has few or no inbound links

You can't work with affiliate marketing without thinking about link building.

A link is basically a recommendation, which is why you should naturally try to get, build and trade as many links as possible. Note, however, that quality is emphasised more than quantity. For the following reason, 5 quality links can in principle benefit your website more than 30 links at the low quality end.

If you work with link building, it's a good idea to look over your competitors' shoulders. For example, you can check bingoplay.com's link profile if your website is about online bingo. It is quite permissible to copy left.

Are you using honoursyou can search your domain and see your inbound links here:

It is possible to get a 7-day trial account with Ahrefs for 7$ if you would like to see what links your site has. 

Solution: Build and trade links (emphasise relevance and authority in your selection)

The site has no common thread

Unfortunately, we can't avoid this factor; the classic common thread.

You confuse both users and search engines if your website has no common thread. We're not just referring to the design of your website, but also to your texts, your images, your internal links, etc.

Ask for feedback in your network if you are unsure how to improve your website. You will certainly be presented with a lot of optimisation suggestions that you can either implement on your own or outsource. One site that works a lot with this is GreenCasino.dkwhere you follow the elf all the way round the page.

Solution: Review your website and create an optimisation plan

Page loads slowly

A slow website is a bad website.

The reality is that internet users are less patient than they used to be, which is why it's critical if your website content takes too long to load. In fact, it shouldn't take more than 3 seconds from pressing enter to being on the website.

GreenCasino.dk is a good example of a website that has started to rank and perform better after the website has been speed optimised. The current page load time is 1.43 seconds. You can find your website's load time here.

At the end of the test, you will get a result like this:

Below you can see the areas where you can actively do something to improve the speed of your site. Note, however, that there may be many elements that may have little or no impact, which is why you will almost certainly never be able to remove all "errors" that the site may report. Some elements may also be so necessary for functionality that it wouldn't make sense to remove them.

Solution: Run a speed test and take care of heavy files on your site

We hope that this quick guide has given you some useful tips on how to get your affiliate site to rank better on Google.

If you would like a major review of your website, please contact us and we will be happy to take a look at it.

 

Bonus tipTry downloading the Chrome extension: SEO 1 CLICK META - it can provide some good tips on which areas may be lagging in your on-page optimisation of the site.