Below is a sample of work performed for a banking client to identify qualified affiliate partnerships for existing promotions and offers the company runs for new client accounts.
Objective
Perform SERP analysis to identify domains with pages that are highlighting offers, promotions, or offers for products that currently aren’t participating in an affiliate partnership with the client.
Post-Delivery Results
- Indexable, evergreen promotion pages for specific offers were developed to ensure the client had dedicated pages that matched the target intent for promo / offer / bonus searches. These evergreen pages generated and incremental 2,000 organic clicks and 500 leads per month.
- Paid search diverted spend to other areas of the organization, saving tens of thousands of dollars on budget otherwise allocated to branded promotional searches.
- 20 additional partnerships were created, driving an incremental 4,000 monthly leads for the organization; 5 of which were through news organizations, such as USA Today.
- 10 .gov backlinks were generated through PR outreach where the client was mentioned, but unlinked.
Methodology
1. Created keyword cartesian for 39 sample queries using %brand% + %product% + %offer/bonus/promo% combinations.
2. Scraped top 100 results from Google for each of the sample queries using BrightEdge platform; discovered 4,120 total pages.
3. Removed any URLs that did not contain variation of “%brand_name%” in the scraped meta title or description; 2,056 total pages remained in the data set.
4. Leveraged SimilarWeb API and Python script to automate bulk domain analysis to estimate total domain traffic, keyword rankings, and domain authority scores to help gauge value of identified relevant domains for affiliate partnership.
Findings
1. 211 domains were discovered and met initial filtering criteria for affiliate partnership potential. When accounting for current affiliate partnerships, this number is reduced to 187 domains. Irrelevant URLs / competitors in the landscape were also removed, narrowing the list to 134 domains.
2. In the keyword landscape, the client ranked in position 1 for 25 out of 39 total terms. The pages that the client ranked for were hub pages and weren’t offer-specific, while the other affiliate pages in the SERPs were offer-specific / better aligned to anticipated user intent.
2a. There were several keywords in which the client ranked in position 2 or lower, with Forbes occupying the top spots in several instances.
3. Several news websites were referenced, having a number of pages stood up as reviews about the clients products.
4. A number of affiliate / publisher websites host dedicated reviews about the client’s products.
5. Several .gov state domains had published FAQs or pages regarding the client’s products, serving as a strong SEO opportunity to request that these .gov websites link directly to dedicated pages hosted on the client’s domain.
6. Some individual influencers talked about the client’s products in the form of LinkedIn Posts or YouTube videos that may be worthwhile to explore if follower counts are high.