How Influencer Marketing Can Boost Your SEO
To help you appreciate the SEO benefits of working with influencers, we asked content marketing professionals and business leaders this question for their best insights. From working with a podcaster to boost brand awareness and authority to backlinking from an influencer’s high-authority domain, there are several examples and insights shared about how best to take advantage of influencer marketing to boost your SEO rankings.
How Influencer Marketing Can Boost Your SEO
Tip 1
Work With A Podcaster To Boost Brand Awareness And Authority
Antreas Koutis, Administrative Manager, Financer
Our company collaborated with a famous financial podcaster three months ago. The goal was to get our clients on his show so they could be interviewed and we could use that content to improve our SEO rankings. It worked like a charm! The podcast was downloaded millions of times and we got tons of new clients from it. Not only did it improve our SEO, but it also boosted our brand awareness and made us look like experts in our field. If anyone is looking for a way to improve their SEO, I highly recommend working with influencers. It’s a great way to get exposure for your brand and build relationships with people who can help you promote your content.
If you can partner with an influencer who is a known expert in their respective field, they can help to write, edit, or approve content that you publish on your website or can also collaborate with your website to create video content. This helps to boost your E-A-T score, which stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Google is pushing up websites with high E-A-T scores, especially in websites that sell products or provide information or services that affect readers’ health, finances, safety, or happiness.
Influencers are always onto something; doing something out-of-the-way to steal their audiences’ attention. This is why you’ve probably seen those influencers making their way to the headlines of Forbes, New York Times, or Entrepreneur. When they get featured on these massive websites, it’s you who will also steal some attention because you’re the one sponsoring them. This will result in brand awareness, brand queries, and new relevant audiences on your website. I know it’s sneaky, but attention is the currency of today’s time.
Tip 4
Spread Your Content To New Prospects Through Influencers
Natalia Brzezinska, Marketing & Outreach Manager, PhotoAiD
Some influencers have such a massive following that any collaboration can help spread your content to new people and thereby help boost your SEO rankings. I like to say they are their own solar system, with various different elements gravitating around them. If you can get an influencer with a relevant audience to mention or link to your content, that’s valuable signals for Google that can improve your ranking. You could also do a guest post swap, where you write for their blog and they write for yours. Just make sure it’s a quality blog with decent traffic and not some low-effort site where anyone can post anything.
Influencer marketing and SEO might seem miles apart, but influencer marketing can provide valuable indirect benefits to any SEO campaign. Specifically by creating brand awareness and most importantly, more branded search volume. If people are searching your brand name, that’s a strong signal to Google that you’re a trustworthy brand and ultimately your rankings will be rewarded.
Tip 6
Boost On-Page Engagement On Your Website
John Ross, Chief Executive Officer, Test Prep Insight
One of the most critical components of SEO is on-page engagement. The longer visitors spend on your page reading your text and interacting with visual elements, the more engaging and helpful Google believes your content is, and in turn, will rank it higher. And working with influencers is a powerful way of boosting this on-page engagement. Whether it is embedded YouTube videos, GIFs, images, or callout boxes with quotes from influencers, creating branded influencer content can really help elevate your page’s content. Every second on-page matters for SEO purposes, so don’t underestimate the effectiveness of influencer content for generating engagement.
Though it may not show immediately, one of the more dramatic impacts that influencers have on SEO is their ability to gain brand advocates. Influencers, due to their followings, have an enormous reach and as their name suggests, can encourage their audiences to try a product that they showcase.
Through working with an influencer over an extended amount of time, often the result is turning followers into brand advocates. These are individuals who will reference the use of your product in their everyday lives on all of their social media platforms, and this repetitive mention has a direct positive effect on your SEO. By establishing long-term partnerships with influencers, the more likely it will spawn more brand advocates and boost your SEO in the process.
Influencers can promote branded keywords for optimization. These include brand names, product names, or product lines. Influencers who mention our branded keywords in social media posts or user-generated content helps increase awareness of what we offer as well as our website traffic. Followers who become curious or impressed with our brand, will likely visit our site and learn more about our services. As our online presence improves on around the web, it generates more traffic for our own website.
Social sharing improves engagement. If you work with the right influencer to represent your brand and have quality content you want to be shared, working with an influencer can really help you grow. More and more people are reaching out to social media for information and entertainment, so if you have a respected influencer spreading the word about your products, you will earn more social links. With these external links, you will gain authority on search engines, which means you will be easier to find on places like Google or Bing. Social traction is an essential part of an SEO strategy and is a great way to increase your audience.
Influencers provide new content that is highly valuable in terms of SEO ranking. The reach of a popular influencer has the capability to reach layers and layers of audiences. When one influencer spreads brand awareness through newly created content, all their micro-influencers become aware and spread it as well. Between the initial influencer’s larger audience and all those new micro-influencer audiences, the content spreads around even faster, boosting SEO rank and brand equity simultaneously.
If growth in your SEO ranking is one of the objectives you wish to achieve through an influencer collaboration, reviews are a great route to take. As part of your collaboration, ask the influencer to share their views of your product and encourage customers or potential customers to express their opinion by writing reviews on your website to receive an incentive. Their wide reach will help you garner the reviews you desire and increase your SEO ranking thereon.
With an influencer on your team, your organization’s chances for success increase exponentially, and for a good reason. An influencer can help to keep your website relevant with a steady stream of new content. It’s a known fact that Google watches for fresh content when ranking a website, and yours will start ranking high with an influencer working at your side. They’re great at attracting traffic by constantly creating shareable content, which will keep your site running smoothly. Reach out to an influencer today, and they’ll maintain your brand presence with a strong loyalty base.
In our experience, a one-time mention here or there only had a short-term impact on our metrics. We wanted the benefits to last longer than a week. Our approach to this was twofold. Our first strategy is to partner up with several micro-influencers whose brand, audience, and strategy resonate with our own whenever we want a quick boost to our backlink profile, direct traffic, and social media traffic.
The other approach is to work with fewer, more targeted influencers for sustained results. Importantly, we work on projects in series with two or three different influencers for weeks at a time. This has a longer SEO impact on both the influencer’s side and ours. The process does require a bit of extra planning and results may not always be as expected, but this approach has helped influencer marketing become a credible part of our marketing mix beyond vanity metrics.
Tip 14
Backlink From An Influencer's High-Authority Domain
Joanne Eberhardt, Founder, CEO Futur / VP Marketing EverX, Futur / EverX
Influencers and social media are inextricably linked to SEO and will only become more so in the future. One example would be adopting an influencer marketing strategy that includes bloggers–they can be an excellent source of links pointing back to your own domain, building trustworthiness and authority.
If the bloggers are well-known in your industry and share the same target audience, their followers can be driven to your site, and engage with your content, which in turn tells Google your domain offers valuable content. Influencers are also known for being great content creators – videos, infographics, articles – all of which Google’s algorithm prefers. Backlinking from an influencer’s high-authority domain will only help your SEO.
Leveraging influencer marketing for SEO
Now that you know what the experts think, it’s your turn. Drop a comment below about your favorite tip shared about influencer marketing and SEO.
