Influencer marketing can provide great opportunities when it comes to SEO. Actually, working with influencers’ fan base is valuable for any brands and for their SEO as it can bring you brand awareness, traffic and sales.
This is where influencers can make the difference by increasing your reach and positively impact your SEO. While the key benefit of working with influencers remains the increase of leads and sales, the smaller part of it does matter too: social shares, native mentions, visibility, backlinks and more!
This article aims to show how working with influencers can help you improve your SEO.
Impact of influencer marketing on your SEO
Before digging further into how influencer marketing can have a nice impact on your search efforts, let’s talk about the concept of influencer marketing.
To be simple, an influencer is someone having influence in your industry regarding the size of his network, the engagement rate and level of trust of his audience. They often have their own content platforms or simply post on social media but in most cases, they are authorities in their field.
On the other hand, link building is still one of the most important ranking factor in SEO. But the difficulty of acquiring qualitative and trustful links is getting harder. Influencer marketing can help you get authoritative links but also increase your user engagement signals.
Influencer marketing creates inbound links
Influencer marketing can help you build backlinks. The main issue is that most of influencers will disclose links as sponsored and you will lose some credibility. One of the most effective solution to get around this is to create content-driven influencer campaigns. Don’t think about influencers as an extension of your sales team but more as ambassadors that can embrace your topics and product in their own way. When working with influencers, why not create campaigns that are related to specific issues in your industry? Invite them to create content that translate their thoughts, solve issues they are facing by mentioning your product/ service as a source or problem solver. This may be a way to bypass the need for disclosure.
Inbound links can really increase your domain authority and thus your rankings and traffic. Depending on your budget and resources, you would have to start with micro-influencers (an influencer with a smaller reach but high engagement rate) to develop your inbound strategy. In fact, an influencer with two million followers may not be as powerful and engaging as a micro-influencer in your niche with 40,000 followers. Micro-influencers still have that kind of credibility and authenticity bigger influencers might have lost doing partnerships with a lot of brands.
Influencer marketing improves brand awareness and engagement
Engagement and traffic are key ranking factors according to Moz. But when it comes to build relationships with influencers, the hardest part is to get heard over the crowd. To increase traffic to your website, you need to engage your target audience. This is why influencer marketing is truly useful to maximize your reach potential. Nielsen has conducted a survey that shows that “92% of consumers around the world say they trust earned media, such as word-of-mouth and recommendations from friends and family, above all other forms of advertising—an increase of 18 percent since 2007”. Recommendations from influencers then work as primary source of trust for users on social media as they are supposed to say what they really think about a product or service. You can take advantage of their community to enhance your brand’s visibility via social media, blogs or video.
Sysomos has also created a nice infographic summarizing the value of influencer marketing:
Influencer marketing keeps your content on track
Building relationship with influencers can help you drag new content to your own website. In fact, creating fresh and regular content can be challenging and time consuming especially if you don’t have enough internal resource.
Influencers are often keen to write for external blogs, so see this as an opportunity for content development. Influencers can also leverage their followers to produce content for you by encouraging their community to share unique images or thoughts associated with your brand. Impressions are valuable to increase your social visibility and brand engagement.
Any additional thoughts about the impact of influencer marketing on your SEO? Please share with us your best tips to approach influencers in the comment section.
