Finding Affiliates with SEO Strategies

“Do not judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant” is a quote by Robert Louis Stevenson to which I am deeply attached and which I have tried to make my own over the years.

When I started my business, Sviluppo Franchising, in 2008, from a small town in Abruzzo, Teramo, I thought more about planting seeds than harvesting. In those years, there was increasing talk about SEO and the importance of content. So, I immediately started writing content myself on the subject that fascinated me the most, franchising.

In the world of innovation, people often talk about “killer apps.” I could say, without exaggeration, that SEO was my killer app. It was the first content that generated contacts from companies or wannabe entrepreneurs that allowed my entrepreneurial career to take off. Without the “unconscious” SEO strategy, I probably wouldn’t have been successful with my company and would have spent my life in a small provincial law office.

Today, intercepting potential franchisees can be done in many ways, but there is one way that less experienced franchisors underestimate. So, let’s try to understand in this article how to find franchisees with SEO.

Franchise Landing Page: Clear, Fast, and Engaging

If you’re launching a specific campaign, before you focus on online content, you’ll need to focus on the container. The key phrase here is user experience, creating a website that users can easily navigate, finding what they need quickly. The first frustration that many users experience online (I’m sure it’s happened to you too) is going to an article that interests you, clicking on the link, and waiting 3-4 seconds for it to open. These three or four seconds are crucial and will cause you to lose many readers. A potential franchisee arrives at the article, but the loading is slow, and they leave the page. You’ve lost a potential franchisee.

In short, to be concise, there are three elements that make your online home welcoming:

1. The server hosting your website. Make sure it’s performant;
2. Mobile optimization: today, everyone will view your site from their phone, so make sure it’s readable on smartphones;
3. Pay attention to images: they are a sore point for many sites. Inserting images that are too large, in the wrong format, without alt tags. Generally, an image optimized for the web should weigh less than 2 MB, preferably in JPEG format.

These three “rules” are known by every good professional who will handle putting your site online. To take a first step towards SEO, a well-optimized site must have at least two elements:

1. The snippet, which is the part of the text that appears in the search results below your site’s URL, describing the site well.
2. The sitelinks, which are links that always appear below your site in Google’s SERP and help speed up user searches. Unfortunately, there’s no way to create sitelinks because it’s Google’s algorithms that choose how to display them. However, there are a series of techniques to use to favor them, such as having a sitemap, which is a clear site architecture, and creating internal links that reference different pages of your site.

Content Marketing.

Once you’ve created a good container, you can move on to creating content. In my new book Let’s DIGITALize (www.letsdigitalize.it), there is an entire section dedicated to content marketing and SEO for those who want to delve deeper. The first rule of SEO: satisfy the specific needs of the target audience with fluid and simple writing techniques.

Let me give you an example: suppose you want to write a landing page or a blog article about your affiliate project. Do it by clearly answering all your users’ questions. How can you imagine such an article? Here’s a possible outline:

1. Market data;
2. Your affiliate proposal;
3. Benefits;
4. Why they should choose you;
5. Figures on how much investment will be required;
6. Reviews from your affiliates who have already tried your formula.

Once you’ve created such an outline, if you want to write an SEO article, you’ll need to do some research before you dive in. The study involves keyword research, i.e., those keywords that users use to search for that type of topic. There are software tools to help you; the most famous on the market are Seozoom and SemRush. Once you’ve found your keywords, you’ll need to use them intelligently within your text, without making the text mechanical or unreadable. A good practice is to create subheadings in the text, usually H3, in which to insert them.

A well-written SEO text generally has these characteristics:

• The main keywords are included in the article’s URL;
• The article has an optimized meta description (i.e., the description of the topic that appears in Google’s SERP) that contains the keyword and does not exceed 160 characters;
• Subheadings are essential to make reading easier and clearer;
• Photos and possibly also videos.

SEO alone may not be enough. For finding affiliates, SEO alone is not enough to position yourself. It must always be accompanied by other multichannel marketing actions, including SEM (Search Engine Marketing), which includes, in addition to technical SEO, also the advertising channels that Google offers, which you will need to use correctly, such as Google Adwords, which we may explore in the next article.