How influencer marketing and SEO work surprisingly well together
Over the last decade, influencer marketing has become a popular phenomenon and part of digital strategies. Mainly associated with social media, influencer marketing can also be extremely helpful in improving your organic SEO strategy.
So what exactly is influencer marketing? Well put simply it is the practice of having people with influence over audiences promote a brand’s products or services. This can be extremely beneficial as it allows brands to reach wider and new audiences.
How can influencers support your SEO?
The main benefit of influencer marketing for SEO is increasing your online reach and visibility. This is because the whole purpose of influencer marketing is to reach new audiences. However, there are other benefits for your SEO.
Backlinks
By using influencers your brand will be receiving links from their page and content. These links are extremely important as they help improve your domain authority by showing Google that your website can be trusted. The more high-quality links you have the higher your domain authority can be and therefore the higher your brand will show on the SERP (Search Engines Results Page).
New social signals
As mentioned, influencer marketing is more popular across social media channels, where influencers tend to share regular content with their followers. By having an influencer post content about your brand that links to your website you can drive more traffic. Search engines like Google then see high volumes of traffic being driven from the influencer’s social media account and assume that the content must be high-quality and therefore consider this as a ranking factor.
Access UGC
Influencer marketing is a great way to gain user-generated content (UGC). This content helps build authenticity for brands and meets Google’s E-E-A-T criteria, something which is really important to help boost a brand’s search rankings. Want to know more? Take a look at this article on UGC and SEO.
Keyword Research Opportunities
By working with influencers you’re creating new ways to engage with audiences. This can give you lots of amazing insights that can enhance not only your digital strategy but also your overall business and customer experience. Listening to feedback or reviewing comments can give you access to lots of interesting terms and phrases that could then be added to your keyword strategy.
For example, if you’re a travel agency and you use influencers to share content about safari holidays and then users are asking comments such as ‘What time of year is this?’, ‘Where did you stay?’ and ‘What else did you do?’. Then you’ve just gained three pieces of content that your audience wants to see.
How to add influencer marketing to your SEO strategy
First things first, make sure you have a detailed organic strategy. This is because there are so many different types of influencers out there, micro-influencers (following between 1,000 and 100,000), macro (following above 100,000) and even those which operate in particular industries and niches.
By having your strategy already created you can ensure the influencers you want to work with actually align to your goals and will be beneficial to your business.
Once you’re happy with your strategy the next thing is about approaching your chosen influencers. As mentioned, there are influencers with huge followings and to work with these you often have to approach their represented agency and you might even have to pay a fee.
For influencers on a smaller scale, you could probably reach out directly to them and ask about a partnership, again you might have to offer some sort of compensation or contra deal in exchange.
Or some influencers might just be invested in your business as existing customers and fans, in which case you can align them as brand ambassadors which again is extremely useful for your digital strategy.
Sounds good, what’s the catch?
The risks of influencer marketing
Well like with many things, implemented incorrectly and you’re not going to see the benefit. This is why a strategy is so important. It’s also good to know that using influencers will open up your brand to new audiences and that can have a range of impacts. Some things to be cautious of:
- Keeping up with demand – using influencers can be extremely powerful, and it’s common that when smaller brands work with people with such influence they see their stock quickly decline, and no stock isn’t good for your business or doesn’t make customers happy. So be prepared for this and manage client expectations.
- Communication – again reaching a bigger audience means more people to engage with. Do you have a team that is prepared for this? You should also prepare a communication strategy for how to speak to those happy users and potentially those unhappy users.
Overall by planning accordingly you can mitigate the risks and ensure you reap the benefits.
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