Please note that affiliate links may be included in some posts.
In this post, I’ll take a look at the Chewy affiliate program. I’ll show you the earning potential, some keyword research and promotional strategies.
About Chewy
According to Wikipedia, “Chewy is an online retailer of pet food and other pet-related products, owned by PetSmart and based in Dania Beach, Florida. In addition to its headquarters in Florida, Chewy also maintains fulfillment centers in Texas, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Florida and Indiana.”
They’re pretty active on social media as well- check out the recognition I got promoting this very post:
Thanks fur sharing the #ChewyLove! 🤗💙🐾
— Chewy (@Chewy) May 7, 2019
How Much Can You Earn With The Chewy Affiliate Program?
Their affiliate page doesn’t discuss commission structure, but one person I know who is familiar with their affiliate program told me that they are paying $15 per sign up, as of April 2019. If you have pet traffic, I would recommend filling out their application and getting up-to-date information about their commission structure.
Keyword Research
Below, I extracted 1,000 of Chewy’s top-performing organic keywords. I filtered out a bunch of branded search queries that included the Chewy keyword. This list of high volume keywords that they rank for is incredibly impressive.
It can also help you formulate a content and traffic strategy if you are trying to monetize your website or even a social media account using Chewy’s affiliate links.
You can see that some of their top-ranking keywords include:
- pet meds
- revolution for cats
- dog tags
- diatomaceous earth
- dog food
- dog harness
- victor dog food
- taste of the wild
- kong
- bravecto for dogs
- apoquel
- self cleaning litter box
- cat tree
- dog beds
- dog crate
- trifexis
- bravecto
- dog dna test
- cat trees
- trifexis
- dog crate
- cat toys
- cat window perch
- carprofen
- nexgard
- cat trees
- dog backpack
- nexgard for dogs
- best dog food
- kong
- merrick
- wisdom panel
- dog sweaters
- dog crates
- blue buffalo
- merrick dog food
- denamarin
- nexgard
- dog costumes
- dog house
- diamond dog food
- nexgard for dogs
- dog clothes
- cat food
Promotion
SEO
Currently, they rank #6 for the term “best dog food“. It gets 49,000 searches a month and has a keyword difficulty of 39.
This is obviously a great keyword for them to rank for. It’s a review keyword with high buyer intention behind it. It’s also similar to the sort of website or social media content you should be creating to push converting traffic to Chewy.
Google is very smart these days and it doesn’t rank websites for terms like that unless visitors are satisfied and converting on the page. That means, their dog food pages are probably performing pretty well so you would also want to be sending traffic to them:
Now, I wouldn’t necessarily target such a big keyword right off the bat, especially with a new site.
Instead, I would do some deeper keyword research to tap into some longer tail dog food queries. If you’d look at their dry dog food category page, you can see a variety of different brands. All of these brands will have their own universe of long-tail keyword.
Just doing a quick and dirty Google auto-suggest search, you can see that the Keywords Everywhere extension shows some significant volume for these terms including “Blue Buffalo dog food reviews” and “Blue Buffalo recall”:
The general idea here is to produce content around some of these lucrative terms. You can see that if you do a little bit of digging there is great opportunity inside of larger, primary keyword terms like “dog food” or “best dog food”.
One way to target this traffic would have one single post dedicated to the Blue Buffalo brand with subheadings that correspond to all of the large keyword search terms like recall, careers, coupons.
Here’s a site that does this well- especially around the ‘recall’ keywords.
You would obviously want to create something that people want to read and not just an SEO exercise- but you get the idea.
Creating content online nowadays requires somewhat of a balance between satisfying the user as well as optimizing for the search engines.
Product Reviews
When it comes to writing product reviews, I prefer employing listicles.
For example, I would write something like the “10 best dog foods for large breed dogs”. I would instruct the writer to write 200 words per dog food brand, for example, and end up with at least two thousand words very easily.
This is a great SEO and user engagement strategy. It’s a recipe for creating long-form content without blathering on idiotically just to satisfy an SEO word count.
As well as attracting clicks from the search engine results page.
People like listicles- it’s the promise of easily digestible and organized information that encourages clickthrough.
Social Media
They also rank number 4 for “dog backpack”. This term has a keyword difficulty of 4, so it is an easier to rank opportunity compared to “best dog food”. It’s another example of an interesting pet-related keyword with some decent search traffic.
If you type that query into Pinterest, you’ll see that there are a lot of Pinterest users optimizing their content for this keyword:
Doubtless, they are trying to push traffic to their affiliate content which logically could include Chewy as well as Amazon affiliate links.
One of the top Pinterest images links to this website that showcases a pretty badass military-looking dog backpack.
This is not a Chewy product, but obviously, you could do the same with a Chewy dog backpack: create some captivating visuals and acquire traffic from Pinterest to your website.
Pinterest has also eased up there restrictions on using affiliate links directly in your pins.
This is another strategy you might want to explore to see if you can get Pinterest users to click through to Chewy using your affiliate link and convert directly without any intermediary pre-selling.
Summing Up
A lot of online marketers complain that certain niches like dogs or cats are completely saturated. It might seem that way- you probably know off the top of your head a variety of dog authority sites that seem overwhelmingly big.
I don’t necessarily agree with the oversaturation hypothesis, however.
When it comes to organic traffic, even if you never rank for the really juicy, big-time keywords, if you produce long-form content that is decent quality, over time you will get traffic to your website and conversions on your affiliate links.
You don’t need to be ranked number one for the term “dog food”.
You could make a nice living online ranking for thousands of long tail keywords like “dog food for weight loss”, “best dog leash for large breed dogs”, etc.
If you are monetizing with Amazon or the Chewy affiliate program, there’s enough traffic to go around, especially when you include other social media platforms, to earn a couple of thousand dollars a month as an affiliate in the pet niche.
Last Updated on March 14, 2021 by Ryan Nelson
