Most of my affiliate website pages rank on second page search engine results.

How do I make them appear on the first page?

All of that trouble and to be so close. Such is the life of an affiliate marketer. When a page is close to driving traffic from achieving the top results of organic rankings, it can be frustrating when it is either at the bottom of page 1 or sitting on page 2. I call these bubble pages. You are just waiting for them to pop and be right there in the top 3.

On average, the lower you are from the top result for a particular keyword, the less click-through you get. That is, with all things being equal. Let’s discuss why you may not be ranking and what can be done about it.

The intent of your page does not match the SERP

Sometimes affiliates are so anxious to get their conversion page to rank, they miss a key element. It is easy enough to diagnose. If yours is a product page or service page, you need to take a look at the results in Google to determine if they are ranking any other similar pages.

  • Informational
  • Navigational
  • Transactional
  • Commercial Investigation

If you want to spend a few minutes getting a deeper understanding of these, here is a really solid breakdown of how to categorize search intent. But tin a nutshell, most affiliates think they can always get their landing page to rank not knowing if the search results have any purchase intent pages ranking.

Sometimes all of the work in six months cannot overcome the fact that your page will not rank because it does not match user intent. In this case it could be as simple as adjusting the intent of your page or creating a different post that is more likely to rank for that term and being sure to provide a link to your landing page.

You need more links to your page

While it is debatable in many online communities the overall necessity, you cannot discount the value of backlinks. Yes, some pages do rank without them, while some results are full of pages with backlinks. If you use a product like Ahrefs, you will easily be able to see the SERP and its accompanying metrics to conduct this kind of analysis.

While getting backlinks is an article unto itself, we are only trying to troubleshoot issues and provide possible solutions in this post. That being said, never neglect the easiest links of all. Internal linking is every bit as valuable as ones for other websites. So if you haven’t spent time on this task, it could be the easiest ten minutes you could spend.

The content could be the problem

Your competitors could just have better information and possibly more of it. Go back to the results and look at their pages. Are they in depth articles while yours has 200 words? A simple fix can sometimes be to rewrite your thin content.

On the flip side and going back to intent from our s above, perhaps your page is a dissertation while your competitors are ranking with a product page that gets right to the point.

Make it a stronger resource

In reviewing those competing pages, look them over carefully. Perhaps they provide a multitude of additional media or information that you are not.

Embedding relevant YouTube Videos (even if they are not yours) can help. Do you see other resouces such as a quick on page calculation tool or a quck way to request a PDF. Are there customer testimonials or 5 star ratings? Any way you can provide more helpful information is going to definitely be a way to enrich your page and make it stronger.

Make sure your website is legit

I am going to have to leave you with a bit of reading here. A lot of factors go into the algorithm. This includes human reviews of your pages. If your website does not meet certain criteria, Google may not see it as legitimate.

They have recently updated their Quality Rater Guidelines to include Experience. If you are doing SEO for your website and are unfamiliar with these guidelines, I would definitely take time to get a better understanding. In short, Google wants better quality in their results and this helps them to validate this.