This week’s Ask an SEO question is a bit different. The person wants to know how they can keep relevant and feel secure in their jobs with AI replacing people. In addition to this question, someone at the Digital Marketing EU conference in Lisbon asked, “How do we pay affiliates so we can use them for AIO/GEO?” during my presentation.
If you’re worried about losing your job because of AI or feeling like your role is less relevant, there’s always a chance AI will replace you, but it could be less likely if you make yourself valuable and use it as a booster vs. something that can replace you. This post is specifically for the cross-overs between affiliate marketing and SEO, with some touchpoints for PR and other channels.
First, here’s a quick definition of both to define roles specifically for this post:
- Affiliate marketing is a combination of content creators (influencers), bloggers, media company listicles, detailed guides and blog posts, as well as coupon and cashback sites. Each of these can be used as a source and reference by large language models to retrieve information, determine sentiment, know what the brand does, and generate an output.
- SEO is finding ways to gain visibility in search engines and now in LLM outputs/results. This is done through the context around a brand mention, websites, and creators, including links that can be followed or crawled if an affiliate link or marked as sponsored to discover new pages, and to help ensure the algorithm knows what the company does or sells, and for which types of audiences.
1. Be Aligned With Presenting The Brand Benefits
We’re already seeing customized outputs in LLMs and AI Overviews (to an extent) based on what the system knows about the person. It’s one of the reasons why a manager and an executive see different results for the same question about a company, and the executive assistant as well. Eventually, we can expect products that surface in a search result or output to be similar.
They could be based on:
- Estimated income level.
- AI-known gender (especially in retail) based on shopping habits and engagements.
- Location.
- Language level, accent, slang, and tone used for the question.
- The interactions in past sessions.
By having an aligned strategy and knowing what the important talking points about the brand are, this is a way to ensure that the LLM knows how to feature you when your service or product is relevant to a user. If you don’t make it clear and concise to who your audience and customer base is, there is a very likely chance the LLM will ignore you and share a big brand or a competitor that does.
For example, the user could ask which T-shirt is best for them without including price, designer, activity, age, gender, etc. The LLM or AIO will then look at the data it has on the customer and determine which brands match based on the information it has. In SEO, you would get a generic result, with machine learning and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), the system is going to evaluate a factual and more relevant answer based on what it has from external sources combined with what it knows about the person.
SEOs can say, “Here’s what we’re not showing up for,” and list multiple selling points that are relevant for a user. The affiliate manager can then take this and ask affiliates doing reviews, creating videos, and building listicles to incorporate more of these selling points into the content to help the systems learn who the product or service is for, to build the knowledge base.
The above will likely help the SEO as there are now more references to these attributes, and the affiliate manager may benefit because the content is more relevant to a reader. If that reader is in the audience demographic, they now know the product or service is right for them, and there’s a better reason to click through and shop. In turn, the affiliate manager can have the SEO combine the talking points affiliates are using to sell into the website and app experience, which carries a more consistent flow from click to page and should help increase conversions.
2. Update Payment Models
The old affiliate model of paying a percentage or flat fee when a sale is made is outdated and has been for more than 10 years. That model doesn’t account for lifetime value of a customer, touchpoint attribution, or other conversions like email sign-ups that turn into sales with no commission, as it’s after the cookie life, and social media follows that also don’t track to affiliate when they convert.
More importantly, media buyers, link builders, AIO/GEO specialists, and PR people are now buying space on websites for their channels, but not engaging with a way that works across multiple channels. They focus on their channels, so suddenly, there are keyword-rich backlinks vs. natural ones and with unnatural language, or branding statements and talking points vs. actual context about the feature and link.
This is where SEO and affiliate can combine forces to set the brand up for long-term success:
- SEO can identify the affiliates that are getting sources regularly in the LLMs and AI Overviews and track the list.
- The affiliate manager can then reignite the relationship with the partner, and focus more heavily on them.
- Sometimes the partners are dormant or don’t drive revenue, so the managers don’t pay attention.
- SEO & affiliate define a strategy that includes a media fee for a guaranteed placement with natural language on sourced pages and for advertorials or inclusions in topically relevant future content.
- This is pay-to-play and likely will be something that harms you in the future, but for now, it seems to be working well.
- If done organically and through actual, normal, and unbiased coverage (even with a payment), this could be legit and not harm you. It will depend if there is honesty in sharing negatives, ways to improve, and full editorial discretion.
- Monitor and track progress.
The goal is to pay the affiliate for their work while ensuring that they continue to feature you as the LLMs are trusting them as a source of information for your industry or niche. This can include Facebook groups, social media influencers, blogs, associations, white papers, and studies, etc.
Updated payments and multiple options can generate more people signing up for your affiliate program and more active promotions. In some of the affiliate manager groups I participate in, one of the biggest questions we have is how to convince our companies or clients to update payment structures for modern times. This is the opportunity.
3. Cross-Recruit Link Building And Affiliate
Affiliate links are not backlinks; they are normally 307 redirects, have parameters on them, or have tracking set via JavaScript upon the exiting of a site. Search engines know what affiliate links are and will not count them as a trusted source like a solid natural backlink. They can follow them, so it is a safe bet that if LLMs will follow suit and identify what is a natural mention vs. a paid placement, they’ll weigh the website, mention, context, and value differently.
Affiliate managers can help clean up bad link profiles by inviting the websites where the links are harmful to become affiliates. The pitch is easy: “You’re already linking to us, why not get paid for the work you already did?” SEOs can stop losing backlinks and organic mentions by sharing their lists of sites with the affiliate managers, so the affiliate managers do not replace quality links with affiliate links.
In cases where the SEO cannot get the coverage, they can invite the person to the affiliate program, where, if they link from content that is relevant and has a person in the decision-making process, they can now make money. This blocks competitors from getting into the space and drives the user to your website when there may have been no brand mentions for anyone or links previously.
On top of this, it gets the website crawled and new pages discovered if it is a new product, vs. waiting for a spider to find it or a manual request to crawl and index.
This Is How You Can Use AI To Remain Relevant
There’s a lot more the two can do together to grow the company and the brand. Yes, AI can email for links and make recommendations on content and placements, but it will likely be seen as AI and cause the affiliates, creators, and publishers to ignore your brand.
Showing how, as a team, you’re increasing brand exposure, building a user base, and driving revenue while using AI to evaluate data and simplify the processes, is how you can secure your job because you are scaling the company in a way AI cannot, and using AI to be more efficient.
More Resources:
- Will AI Replace SEO Specialists?
- Google Says AI Won’t Replace The Need For SEO
- Google: Use AI in the Best Possible Way for Search
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
