How To Do Keyword Research for Affiliate Marketing

While all the talk is about making money online, keyword research for affiliate marketing can make it easier for those who want to make money with affiliate marketing.

You may be a beauty blogger, a food blogger, a mom blogger or just starting a blog to share your stuff. May be you are making few dollars from the products you are promoting (by affiliate marketing) and you’re excited to make it big!

That’s good! What if you knew the right way to make it big in short time?

Or rather, if I say, you could make more money by targeting the right keywords for affiliate marketing?

Keyword research is like a magnetic compass for your digital campaign. Share on X

They help you figure out your target market’s thoughts, fears and desires when they’re searching their innermost thoughts into that little Google search bar.

You can choose to promote digital products or physical products in affiliate marketing. ClickBank, ShareaSale, Amazon, Commision Junction Junction are few that provides a wide variety of products to choose from and promote.

So, if you are looking to promote products and get a commission from each sale you make, I will show you the easiest strategy to target the right keywords with very little work.

Now you may have read a lot about keyword research, but this article is different because I’ll show you keyword research for AFFILIATE MARKETING – how to find buyer keywords after choosing a product to promote.

Keyword Research for Affiliate Marketing

The first thing you have to do is sign up with an affiliate network like Amazon or ClickBank. For this article, I am going to find a product on Amazon and research few potential keywords that can generate some income for me.

Step 1: Dig Into Amazon

Start with a search on Amazon. I’d recommend to start with any of the following categories.

• Beauty
• Health and Personal care
• Electronics
• Baby
• Sports & Outdoors
• Home & Kitchen
• Tools and Home Improvement

For this article, I’ve chosen Beauty.

Click on “Beauty” department and scroll down to choose price points.

To start with, I’d suggest to start with either $25-$50 or $50-$100 range.

 

We’re looking for an unexpected product that sells a lot.

I’ve come across this product “Conair Supreme 2-in-1 Hot Air Styling Brush”. Clicking through the product listing into the product details tells that this product’s Amazon Best Seller Rank is at #4,767.

So, the selling rate per day is good enough. The product also has 100+ reviews with an average rating of 4 and price of $25.26, so a good product to promote.

The keyword “hot air brush reviews” has a search volume of …….. and KC ……. So, this keyword is good enough to rank even using white-hat methods.

Aim to spend 3 to 4 hours to find your keywords and the niche.

Step #2: Analyze Volume and Competition

Now that you have got a list of potential seed terms, it’s time to explore deeper.

I usually do it manually using the Amazon auto-fill feature.

Head over to Amazon search bar on the top of the page and enter your seed keyword “Foot Spa”. Now hit space and slow down your typing. If you are not getting any suggestions yet, type the letter “a”. You will get suggestions of various long term keywords people generally search for in Amazon.

Proceed with other alphabets “b”, “c” as much as you can.

You will get a ton of keyword ideas and possibly some amazing keywords you can target as your main keyword.

You can alternatively use the Amasuite software to do this within seconds. It pulls out all this information and displays it in a nice sortable format.

I’ve included a video tutorial of using the AmaSuite software in conjunction with Long Tail Pro.

I’ve found a long list of keywords and it’s time to analyze them now.

Analyze the volume and competition of these terms with Google Keyword Planner and Long Tail Pro.

You’re looking for five keywords that you can rank for. These are your core keywords to target for a start.

Let’s continue with the Foot Spa.

Some of the keywords I finally decided on are:

• Hot air styling brush for wet hair
• Hot air thermal styling brush
• Round styling brush
• Best hot air styling brush
• Best hot styling brush

This topic seems too specific but not that bad. Hair styling is a niche you can expand on to include such as hair design styling tools, pins and spiral curls.

The amount these small terms generate can help your site grow to a larger one.

You’ve got the main keywords for the niche site. But you need to expand your list to publish 50+ articles on the site. Google loves content-rich sites.

I generally publish 3 types of content on my Amazon affiliate sites.

Review content, Product List Content and Resourceful Content.

You have to research keywords for these content types separately.

Review content keywords are terms people use to search product reviews on Google. They are at the buying stage with credit card at their hand.

If you were to search for “MacBook Pro”, what term will you use?

You will search for the Specific Product Name + Review, right?

You already know what exactly you want; you’re just reading some reviews for a final say.

You can quickly find a list of products on Amazon on your niche and use the Product Name + Review term to filter review keywords.

We need around 20 review content for the site.

The next content type – the Product List – are terms people use when they are still on the deciding mode about which product to buy on maybe a particular brand or type.

These types of keywords generally start with “best”, “top”, “budget” with the product type followed by an adjective that describes the noun.

“Best hot air styling brush for wet hair” is an example that describes the Product List Content keywords.

You can use the Keywordtool.io to find these terms. Put your primary keyword and it will generate hundreds of long-tail keywords in seconds.

We need 20 articles on this content type.

A general misconception is that a search volume of >1000 per month is necessary to make money. Even an SV of 50 per month will be good to go.

I know, the more search volume, the better.

But adding small amounts also increases the average volume.

The last Resource Content keywords are terms people use when they are becoming aware on a niche. They are at the first stage.

These are educative terms and make people aware about the niche.

You can use the tool above to generate these keywords.

These are not commercial intent but niche awareness terms.

Find a Product of your Choice

I’m assuming you’ve already decided the niche. If not or still confused, you can find here: How to find your niche market?

Find a product with specific keyword but on a broad niche to help you grow.

Results can be motivating. So if you start out with a low hanging fruit, you will be able to see results within a short time.

A broad niche in addition will help you grow rapidly.

Another example: Cosmetics

Cosmetics is a ultra competitive niche. Yet, there are great sub-niches in this highly competitive niche.

Best airbrush makeup: 720 / KC 27

Luminess air reviews – 9900 / KC 29

Airbrush makeup reviews – 1600 / KC 22

I’m confident that we could rank for the keyword “airbrush makeup reviews” in the Top 5.

I think Air Brush Makeup is a big niche by itself and there is enough room to grow in the makeup vertical with foundation, compressors, brands and makeup application techniques.

Having said that, it’s time to find those golden keywords for your niche.

Golden keywords have 4 features:

1. Buyer Search Intent
2. Average to High Search Volume
3. Low Competition
4. High Commercial Value

You can rarely find a keyword with the perfect combination above. So, we have acceptable levels for each to find a keyword that works.

The most important factor is search intent.

Keywords that have lower search volume but solve a bigger problem are more profitable than those that have high search volume but don’t solve anything in particular.

Searches for “funny weight loss pictures” are higher than “weight loss supplements” but people are willing to spend money on the latter term.

Ready to Purchase Terms

Buyer keywords are terms that people often search for when they are ready to search a product.

• Cheap + Product Type
• Best + Product Type
• Top Rated + Product Type
• Best + Product Type + Review
• Quality + Product Type
• Bargain + Product Type
• Best + Product Type + Online
• Product Name + Review
• Product Name + Discount
• Product Name + Coupon
• Best + Product Type + Year
• Where Can I Buy + Product Name/ Product Type
• Product Name + VS/Or/Compared To + Product Name 2
• Buy + Product Type + Online

Key Takeaway

Choose a specific keyword on a broad niche. Find keywords with search volume of greater than 250 and KC below 30.

I usually target a term with 250 SV / KC 20 than 5000 SV / KC 30.

The topic should be large enough to write at least 50+ articles on the subject, especially if you’re sticking to white-hat link building.

How to Finalize a Keyword for a Niche Site

Keyword research is not straight-forward.

It’s not simple.

It’s super-important.

So the question – how to finalize a keyword for a niche site – still remains.

The best answer I can give you is to reduce as much risk as possible.

Check On-page SEO

Keyword in Title: Check if the first 10 results on Google have the exact keyword in Title.

Content Length: Longer content with embedded multimedia is tougher to outrank.

Content Design: A well-designed content that gives great user experience doubles your reader and it will be harder to outrank.

Social Signal: Social signals affect search engine rankings. More social signals, the harder to outrank.

Internal Linking: Relevant internal linking to strong sites that gives more informative to the user about the subject ranks better.

Check Off-page SEO

Analyze the first 50 results on Google for your targeted terms.

If you see a lot of niche sites struggling to get a Top 10, avoid the keyword straightaway. You will face a lot of competition.

While a lot of weak or low quality sites or marketplaces signals you can outrank them.

Note: Make sure that there are at least 2 domains under DA 30 and at least one domain under 1 year in the Top 10. Take into account the juice page parameters of your competitor websites.

I should warn you that some marketers are using PBN links as one of the quickest methods to rank a niche site and make some earnings.

As these marketers own the PBN, they sometimes block access to link tools bots such as Ahref, OpenSiteExplorer and Majestic.

What does this mean?

Your competitors have powerful PBN backlinks but the tools such zero backlinks when they are ranking on the top of Google. So, you assume that you could also rank some the same term with no links.

So, check with multiple tools and also do some manual research when finalizing a keyword.

Tools I’ve Mentioned

Long Tail Pro

KeywordTool.io

Google Keyword Planner

SEMRush

Common Misconceptions About Keyword Research

I’ve to solve a problem – True, it is! Rather the problem can be as simple as helping someone choose the right product.

Pick a eCommerce term – If you are to pick a local eCommerce term, you ought to have a local eCommerce website.

Quality content ranks itself even for a hyper competitive term – No! Content does not promote itself because you have to either earn links or build them.

Your Turn…

This keyword research process has been working for me ever since I started running Amazon affiliate niche sites.

Believe me, there’s nothing more important than a perfect keyword research.

If you follow this step-by-step, you should be able to do profitable keyword research for your next Amazon niche website.

Do you dig deep into a sub-sub-niche with low search volume keywords or pick a broader niche with above-average volume keywords when doing keyword research for affiliate marketing?