Presenting Your Best Self – 5: Keywords

Part 5 of our “Presenting Your Best Self” series looks at how Affiliates find Merchant programs. The most common way Affiliates will seek out new programs to join is by utilizing the search keyword function in the Affiliate interface.

Today we’re going to discuss effective ways to ensure Affiliates can find your program utilizing the search keyword function.

There are four things ShareASale uses to find relevancy in keyword searches. These are represented by the green dots above. Each green dot signifies a match between the keyword searched and data entered on a specific Merchant:

1. Organization Name
2. Web Address
The first two are pretty straight forward. These are the organization name and website listed in the Merchant account.

3. Product Match
The system will also look for matches within the product datafeed in the product name and search term fields.

4. Program Bio
Populate your program bio with a content rich description. Be sure to populate your content with your company website, organization name, and relevant keywords in the text.

5. Program Keywords
The program search keywords are listed in the Merchant account settings. There are a few tips I would recommend when filling out the search keyword list:

• Use all 255 characters allotted in your search keywords
• Save characters by including the singular spelling rather than the singular and plural spellings
• Exact matches on phrasing will carry a higher score in the search results just like they would in a browser search. However, if you have particular phrases that are perhaps less relevant for your site, you could save some characters by breaking these up as singular words. For example, if you sell toothpaste and the most popular search for you might be: Crest Toothpaste. You would want to include that as a phrase rather than breaking up the phrase with a comma.Some other popular phrases might be: dental toothpaste, or fluoride toothpaste. But let’s say these are less relevant for you. You could break up the phrases with commas to save yourself the characters. For example, your keyword list would look like:
  Crest toothpaste, toothpaste, fluoride, dental. Rather than: dental toothpaste, fluoride toothpaste, Crest toothpaste.
• If you have characters remaining in your search keywords, include some common misspellings.
• Populate your program bio with a content rich description. Be sure to populate your content with your company website, organization name, and relevant keywords in the text.
• Don’t over think it! Include the phrases and keywords that best represent what you are all about. Remember that Affiliates have the ability to choose how they want to sort the list of search results, so relevancy is just one option for the results order.