1. How to do SEO like a
Super Affiliate
Patrick Altoft
Director of Search

2. My definition of a super affiliate
• An affiliate business that has made the transition into
being one of the following:
o A well known brand
o A business driving substantial revenue & profits
o A business with perhaps 20+ employees
o A business with real offices

3. EXAMPLES

4. Finance

5. Travel

6. Voucher Sites

7. CHARACTERISTICS

8. Become a great business
• Google wants to rank the best sites at the top
• What can you be the best in the world at?

9. Superaffiliates are great at 2 things
Digital Sector
Marketing Expertise
Superaffiliates are generally very knowledgeable about
their sector & products but so are a lot of brands.
Digital marketing expertise is what makes them stand out
– need to beat merchants & all the other affiliates.

10. Some thoughts
• Affiliates are always competing against other
affiliates as well as merchants
• Barriers to entry are low – markets are competitive
• SEO campaigns need to be very aggressive but in a
natural & controlled way
• You need to show Google you are a trusted brand
before you get aggressive with SEO

11. SEO is not your marketing strategy
Superaffiliates do everything

12. High level SEO is about rankings
True high level SEO is not about conversions, brand
awareness, sales, leads, revenue or profits.
Separate your SEO team from your commercial teams
and let each one focus on what they do best.
Select a keyword, rank for it & move on to the next.

13. Strategy
• Regular keyword selection based on extensive
opportunity analysis
• Do this over lots (100,000+) of keywords
Opportunity = Search Vol. * Max CTR * Conversion Rate * Revenue Per Sale

14. TEAMS

15. Structure
Designers
Content
Developers
Writers
Marketing
Department
Analytics SEO
Conversion
Rate PPC
Optimisation

16. Ideal SEO Team Structure
Head of Search
Strategist Strategist Content Manger Agency
Linkbuilders Linkbuilders Content writers Agency team

17. Talent

18. Research
• To SEO like a superaffiliate you have to learn what
they do & how they do it
• Year end financial reports
• Investor calls
• Press releases
• Events
• Google Alerts
• Twitter/Facebook

19. COMPETITOR ANALYSIS

20. Searchmetrics

21. Searchmetrics

22. spyfu.com/uk/

23. Google Trends

24. Open Site Explorer

25. Open Site Explorer

26. Majestic SEO

27. LINK ANALYSIS

28. Competitor analysis
• Identify 20 target keywords
• Record domains ranking in top 20 search results for each keyword
• Remove duplicate sites

29. Competitor analysis
• Export all links to Excel

30. Competitor analysis
• Repeat for all competitors to create one giant Excel document
• Remove duplicate linking domains
• Sort by Domain Authority or Page Authority

31. Competitor analysis
• Use filters to find valuable links
o URL contains .ac.uk , .edu , .gov , .nhs
o Anchor text contains target keyword

32. Anchor text visualisation
• Wordle.net

33. Booking.com

34. Booking.com
• Pivot table
• Find top 10 anchor
texts by count

35. Brand link authority Booking.com
• Add up Domain Authority of all brand links – 125518
• Add up Domain Authority of non-brand links - 26757

36. Link Profile Booking.com

37. Building links
• Press release every week
• Pitch to bloggers, give quotes etc
• Write guest content for blogs & news sites
• Pay for links if you can make them look 100%
natural
• Become an authority by being a voice in your sector

38. Systems & Processes

39. Linkbuilding process
Competitor Search Shortlist QA
Analysis Google sites process
Content Pitch
Place links Story ideas
production stories
QA Promote
Track links
process links

40. Content syndication
When looking for brand anchor text this is highly effective
• MarketWire
• PRweb
• PR News Wire
• Etc
• Article syndication systems
• Blog networks that syndicate content

41. Questions?
• www.blogstorm.co.uk
• www.branded3.com
• twitter.com/patrickaltoft
• patrick@branded3.com