Affiliate SEO in 2025: Data, Brand, and Doing the Work with Martin Calvert

Show: Revenue Optimization with StatsDrone
Episode: Affiliate SEO in 2025: Data, Brand, and Doing the Work with Martin Calvert
Host: John Wright
Guest: Martin Calvert
Published: Tue, 22 Jul 2025 01:50:00 +0000
Duration: 18:50

Speaker labels are a two-speaker split from pauses (host vs guest). Timestamps are `[HH:MM:SS]` from the episode audio. Light ASR; names and brands may need a pass.

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[00:00:00] John Wright: useful pressure for affiliate to consider how are they owning the customer, if at all, are they able to not just pass traffic on, but are they able to build up their own sources of recurring traffic, whether that's email, whether it's other forms of subscription and other ways to demonstrate value to their partners. I guess it's truthful. You want to make sure you know what

[00:00:25] John Wright: your value is so you can back yourself, but also make sure that you are actually doing the job that your partners are trusting you for, you know, that'll help you negotiate better deals and hopefully result in better kind of lifetime value if that's the kind of model that you're on.

[00:00:53] Martin Calvert: Welcome to the affiliate BI podcast. Today we're chatting with Martin Calvert, who's the marketing director at ICX Digital and an SEO I've known for quite some years. Martin, welcome to the show. Thanks John, really appreciate being here. Yeah, my staff has been speaking about SEO with a more in-depth format than you're often going to chance to when we meet up at events and things like this. So yeah, nice to have the opportunity. And every once in a while, I like to have a podcast where I just come up with no questions in advance, but I think this one's easy for me. SEO is something that I kind of study and talk to a lot of people and it's

[00:01:29] Martin Calvert: constantly changing. The best we can do is just keep up with the news, talk to people. And then of course, in the best case scenario, like if you're running experiments on websites, you're able to test. So the question I'm going to ask right off the bat is one that I'm getting asked constantly. People keep asking me, like, is affiliate marketing cooked? Is it not completely done, but is it not as fun as it used to be? Which maybe is true. What's your take on this? I think it's all relative depending on when people started in the industry. Certainly, I know some people who started in the 2000s and now things seem like much more of a grind

[00:02:06] Martin Calvert: to those guys because they know what the really good times look like. I think for those who are starting later on or maybe pivoted from some other career or some other niche, they might be used to having more of the scrappiness that you need at a smaller Australia these days. And I think sometimes that also comes down to your personal energy levels and your appetite for the experimentation and paying attention to what's going on that you mentioned earlier. So I definitely think it's got a lot harder. I think certainly there's going to be a squeeze both from conventional AI development, but also just what consumers are searching for, how they evaluate information, of how they evaluate information driven sites that affiliate

[00:02:45] Martin Calvert: marketers are creating. So that does create a bit of a pressure, but I think there's always room to grow when it comes to affiliate marketing because there is always some kind of a niche, some kind of an angle, but it just might take a bit more experimentation and homework than in years past. I'm an optimist when it comes to that. I'm the same, but trying to explain this to potential investors, this is like the number one question they have when I'm talking to them. And the one thing that I think I believe to be part of the changes is that I think everyone, all affiliate sites need to care more about the click. So I think there's two parts to it. You can't just create your just another affiliate site with

[00:03:22] Martin Calvert: your basic reviews and have no life or no energy to the site. And then the second part of it is I think for every click that comes through the door, you need to care about it. You need to nurture it. You cannot have pages that disappear. You can't have links that just break for whatever reason. You can't be sending traffic to a brand that's closed and not know that they're closed for the next eight months and things like that. I'm actually seeing a trend where some teams are basically saying we're now extracting the max value of the click. And they think that rather than trying to double traffic, they're trying to double the conversion rate and somehow touch

[00:03:57] Martin Calvert: player value. Yeah, absolutely. I think you can't be casual about traffic. And no one's ever going to admit that they were casual about traffic. In the good times, you can afford a bit of leakage and all that type of stuff. And in the good times when the sun is shining, you might be able to trust your affiliate or your operator partners more implicitly, I suppose, and not worry about what's happening after that click. This is where we've talked about this before. When you have companies like Stadstrom providing some greater clarity and granularity over what might be happening, that helps all parties. They actually are generally motivated to be collaborative. And I think it does create that useful pressure for an affiliate to

[00:04:37] John Wright: consider how are they owning the customer, if at all. Are they able to not just pass traffic on, but are they able to build up their own sources of recurring traffic, whether that's email, whether it's other forms of subscription, and other ways to demonstrate value to their partners. I guess it's true. You want to make sure you know what your value is so you can back yourself,

[00:05:03] John Wright: but also make sure that you are actually doing the job that your partners are trusting you for, you know, that'll help you negotiate better deals, and hopefully result in better lifetime value, if that's the kind of model that you're on. And then you mentioned first party data, but even having newsletters or apps that where you can subscribe and join and be part of an ecosystem. And I think it goes without saying the old way was you create your affiliate site, you rank on Google, the user clicks on it, you make your commission, and you have zero interaction with that user. And I think now it's a change where you don't know if Google's sending you

[00:05:39] John Wright: that next click. So that next click is coming, you at least want to capture their data and say, hey, don't ever forget about us. Yeah, for sure. And for multiple reasons, because yes, you want to make sure you have that granularity to make sure you know where your money is coming from, what's happening with this traffic, but also to make sure that you're not, again, I suppose, it was like really coming back to being too casual about traffic and too casual about the customer. When there are these competing crashes where you might be getting the affiliate tier might be getting less traffic overall, because of some of the development of AI overviews and

[00:06:13] John Wright: other ways that Google will help the customer by directing them to something immediately rather than be an affiliate. So mistakes are a bit higher when it comes to making sure that you're getting a good share of traffic, but then also making sure you're propping as much as you possibly and reasonably can. I think that's the biggest challenge though. I do understand why old people actually might think, look, it's cool. And I also understand why sometimes people on the, I guess, the venture capital side or kind of the outside individual might see that the channel is less compelling, but I think people can be very tasty and can write things off far sooner

[00:06:53] John Wright: than they should. We see that when people are going into new markets and everything isn't rose if immediately think, oh, well, the market's no good or macro trim. Maybe it's just, we have to do more work, sadly. And do you think that there's more of an opportunity for paid media where once you have this traffic, one thing you could do is basically start retargeting those same users. I'm assuming that's a thing. And I haven't heard so many affiliates say that they do this, but I think there's some that we know when you click on their sites, you're like, wait a minute. I'm on some other random site. And the most common one I see is casino.org. You visit their site once and it's like, you're retargeted really well. Yeah, I think it's a really

[00:07:32] John Wright: interesting one. I I'm, I've always found like kind of PPC, arbitrage stuff, a little bit scary, to be honest, because the people that do that really are really good at it. Obviously, if you get that wrong, you're actually costing yourself money in a way that both free SEO is not quite troubling, I suppose. But yeah, I think if you are able to own the customer in a more substantial way, take control of the user journey without interrupting them, without making it an obnoxious experience to be retargeted. I think that makes perfect sense. In terms of retargeting in general, I've always been a big fan of it. Like my career prior to agency life was B2B

[00:08:08] John Wright: marketing for software companies and with a long sales cycle. See, retargeting was such a good thing to do because the chances of somebody being ready to buy immediately in that type of sector is very low. And it's also quite a dry sector where people are all saying more or less same things.

[00:08:26] John Wright: So you've got to build up familiarity and trust in other ways so that when they do

[00:08:30] Martin Calvert: shrug and go, okay, I guess I need to pick a new solution. Your name is one of the five that they think of. And I think that retargeting approach does work well for affiliates who are able to invest more in brands and have more of a reason for people to come back to their site. And I think that's also where even without the ownership of data, ownership of the mailing list and all of that, and without necessarily the granularity of traffic understanding that we've been talking about before, at the bare minimum, you should have some reason for people to come back to your site, not just be a waypoint along the way to something else. I think that seems to be

[00:09:06] Martin Calvert: a really important part if you are getting into this for the first time or pivoting current operations. Yeah, I think a brand is a keyword that's thrown around a little too easily. But I think when the things that you mentioned before, not just building a brand, but it's like taking things pretty seriously. There's not, I think there's been just too many affiliate sites that have existed and they put no effort into the logo, not to say the logo's everything, but you can just tell that it's like they put minimal effort on that. And I think the new world of Google and search in general is I think we've always wanted quality. And I think Google finally

[00:09:40] Martin Calvert: said, all right, regardless of what happened, whether it was accidental Google's failure or intentionally trying to move people towards paid media, I think we're now in the new age of quality. Yeah, and I think we can definitely critique Google's ability to detect quality, and I guess their definitions of quality. But hopefully we all agree that if quality is an inherently subjective thing in many niches, you then at least need to have some kind of markers or indicator of quality. Yeah, I think logo is one. Sometimes it takes just as much time to create a good logo as a bad logo. So you might as well do it the right way. Likewise, there's not really

[00:10:19] Martin Calvert: any HPCs data for us to be rendering poorly or offering that kind of per user experience on mobile type of thing. And we do see, we do still see it. It's not the majority of sites at all, but you will occasionally ask working on it that you will see some sites you think objectively this is not so good. Likewise, when it comes to tone of voice and brand personality, I will not talk about a brand here in terms of McDonald's or Coca-Cola, you're just talking about having some kind of a substance that aids recall for the customer and gives them some type of experience that differs from somebody else. So maybe that you have a more

[00:10:55] Martin Calvert: authoritative way of writing or videos or subtitling or whatever it is you're helping that helps to get your message out there. Maybe you're more silly, maybe you're more playful, but having some kind of a marker of who you are and what you're about and who you're for should help that kind of stickiness. But I think some of these topics are things that people haven't really wrestled with before necessarily, whereas some of the newer affiliate,

[00:11:21] Martin Calvert: they're doing this from the outset because they're not really beholden to any of the older way to do anything. With one exception that, and I run into this quite often with new affiliates or ones that they've been in iGaming for quite some time and they're like, okay, I'm going to start an affiliate site. But they come to me and they come to me with four to five ideas that they want to do at the same time. I'm like, no, I'm like this, maybe we all have a couple of friends that have done it well, but then we also don't always realize that sometimes they've done one site really well and they made a lot of money. Then they've done the second, third and fourth site. I just keep telling them, let's just focus on one site, be like a quality

[00:11:56] Martin Calvert: site. Yeah. And I think from our side, we do so much internationally and in many languages, sometimes people come up to us and say, I want to do something in like Colombia, but also Thailand, but also Ivory Coast. You've got to say what's your understanding of these countries? What's your affinity with the customers in these countries? Because it's probably going to be pretty tough for you to carve out a niche of your base, though diluted in terms of your attention, but also you don't really know what customers are responding to. And certainly it's going to be some commonalities in particular industry niches, but there's also some important differences technologically in terms of legality, in terms of just cultural preferences in terms

[00:12:35] Martin Calvert: of communication. So I think that's one of the challenges. And also sometimes for such a

[00:12:41] John Wright: potentially big money industry like iGaming, sometimes people seem to want to start an operation, but invest less than you would in a really small local cafe or really small local store.

[00:12:56] John Wright: If you want to be a global player in this sector, but you want to invest less than it would cost to do a really micro business with four part-time staff, you can think, is that really sustainable at that level? Certainly for hobbyists, hobbyists and geeks are always going to be a part of this industry, which I really enjoy. But those guys are a different breed because they'll do things for the love of the game. And there's so many people of that nature, but for people who are more

[00:13:22] Martin Calvert: looking to build a business and they're not necessarily in love with the intricacies of everything, I think you need a bit more of a roadmap and a plan and a more traditional approach to business growth, I suppose, even if you bake in all of that experimentation and curiosity and basis that we talked about before as well. And then let's pivot to AI, SEO, and all the fun stuff that goes with it. Do you think that we're in a new era already in a short period of time of not just parasite SEO, but basically going okay, rather than doing your typical parasite SEO, you're basically trying to get all these chat chappies and Google to

[00:13:59] John Wright: understand things the way you want them to. So rather than even doing link building, you're creating articles and you're basically preceding the ideas that it's like, this company is the best or this company is along, be honest, sometimes we do this intentionally, but we've done this intentionally on our side for years where it's staff shown is similar to other businesses like Vunix and Rowdy and Nifty Stats. And by doing that content for years without even realizing what I was doing, I was like, oh, we're commonly mentioned in chat GPT.

[00:14:29] John Wright: Yeah, I think it's really interesting. And I think it's sometimes it reflects what we've always been doing anyway, not being too diffuse in terms of how you describe your company and your product services, which sometimes something that we sometimes struggle with the idea of digital, because we do lots of different things. We do translation, we do advertising, but we don't want to be known just as an advertising agency or just as a translation agency. So that can make it a bit tricky. But you know, really, most companies shouldn't be putting content up for themselves. For example, link building that is on wildly unrelated topics or doesn't get across those USBs. I think there's always going to be a good thing to do. However,

[00:15:07] John Wright: when I see some of our competitors offering some of these AI over e-services, it puts me in mind of some of the really low level SEO agencies who will go to local businesses and say, we promised to rank you number one for X number of keywords. And the keyword will typically be the brand name of the company plus the city they're in. And yes, you can get into an AI overview for a very specific term and your company, but nobody else is trying to do that. And you've got to think how many people are actually searching for your company name. And that might be changed advantages. That certainly can come back to my time in B2B software. When people are in that

[00:15:45] John Wright: evaluation phase of enterprise stuff, that might be quite good. But for most businesses, it might seem good, but be at least less good because there are a proportion of searches that will be pretty small. That said, I do think, I think before some of the things you've been doing all along can feed into AI overuse. Also making sure that there's a certain discipline when you're how your press releases or PR or the bio of people, like you might be speaking for your company, having certain themes and hot button traces or hesitate to use the word keywords because it might sound like keyword stuffing, but similar concept. Whenever you talk about yourself,

[00:16:22] John Wright: that should filter in really to these AI overuse where people will struggle in the affiliate world will be if it's a site that just does top 10 reviews for casinos and sports books and so on, because there might be less, less differentiate in that situation. And then that most people are most at risk of think of Google just taking traffic or the AI overview, directing people immediately to a bookmaker for a book. Yeah. And do you think like this whole sentiment analysis is going to become a big thing where some magical way, I don't know how this is going to work, but it's going to be like a weird driving force behind helping players

[00:17:02] John Wright: understand what are best products to use, whether it's casinos, sports books, bingo, SaaS products, et cetera. I think probably a spectrum of customers,

[00:17:14] John Wright: you know, a lot of the people who are searching for like top 10, 15 or their best new games or whatever,

[00:17:20] Martin Calvert: they're not necessarily looking for that considered opinion and in depth review with screenshot and screen recordings and so on. They just want to know where can I go? Give me something I can take a look at. And I think that's always great portion for the people that are more drawn towards more in depth, personal, real content. I think that's where they can be a part of differentiation. And I think it's also where I can being an optimist, unusually, not in my personal life, but in my professional life, I think Google will start to play fair or more fair than it has been in terms of rewarding that type of more qualitative content, not least because they need something to

[00:18:00] Martin Calvert: feed their AI on. If people just totally give up on organic search, then it's going to be very difficult for Google to sustain. And I think that's one of the bigger challenges for everybody

[00:18:12] John Wright: is what is the nature of search and future? Google definitely wants to be the dominant entity. They have more money than probably, I don't know, almost any entity known to man in the history of the world. So if they want to make a change, you can do it, I think. So I'm broadly optimistic about that. And just an idea that popped in my head just from having affiliate sites for quite some time. We'd always put in a search bar and then we'd always look at what were people searching for inside there. Do you think a lot of these give me the top five best games for whatever is going to be something that's going to be done more on affiliate sites?