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Constant changes in Google’s algorithm make it difficult to climb to the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) but here is one thing that just changed the way and it is Influencer marketing.
The influencer market’s power has more than doubled in recent years, with the global influencer market valued at 13.8 billion US dollars in 2021.
Moreover, in the age of social media, the importance of driving quality traffic to your website cannot be overstated.
According to BrightEdge, organic searches account for more than half of all traffic across a variety of industries. According to the same study, organic traffic accounts for more than 40% of revenue.
Other Influencer marketing stats that you need to see:
This is the reason why brands are seeking increased awareness and reach influencers to generate and join relevant conversations. Using influencers in your digital marketing is a tried and true method for improving your Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
So, how can you use influencer marketing and SEO to help your business grow?
Let’s better understand it in detail.
What Is Influencer Marketing?
The strategy of collaborating with influential people in your brand’s current industry or location, as well as prospective verticals or locations, is known as Influencer Marketing.
These influencers are well-known and respected in their respective fields, and they have large social followings and platforms of their own. Whether they became famous through their use of social media or use it strategically to promote themselves now, their fans follow them religiously.
Influencer marketing increases the visibility and awareness of your brand. Brand trust is at an all-time low. Meanwhile, consumers are increasingly trusting influencers as much as (or more than) family and friends.
Fans are much more likely to listen to sponsored content about your brand because they admire and respect what an influencer has to say, even if they are aware that the recommendation is paid for.
Furthermore, they will see the recommendation in the first place. Influencers introduce your brand to customers who haven’t heard of you or haven’t had a compelling reason to learn more about you if they have.
Influencer Marketing And SEO
Influencer marketing and SEO are now collaborating to increase traffic and sales, but here’s how you can take it to the next level. In social media, SEO is defined not only by the number of shares you receive but also by the influence of who retweets or shares your content.
Key social media influencers can greatly increase your reach on those networks.
One of the most underutilized SEO techniques in marketing is identifying your key influencers and ensuring that they share your content.
Building an influencer marketing program within your company can have obvious benefits like lead generation or sales, but don’t overlook the “small” (but extremely important) benefits like increased social shares and continuous improvement of your website’s SEO.
In most industries, the majority of website traffic is still generated through organic search.
In the long run, using this technique increases your chances of getting spontaneous mentions from the people you’ve been building relationships with. Furthermore, this will allow you to have your content reblogged or reposted on the blogs of some of your key influencers, resulting in even better SEO due to quality backlinks!
How Influencer Marketing Can Boost Your SEO Game
Influencer marketing can directly influence the SEO game as they both influencer marketing and seo both run side by side.
Collaboration with influencers increases visibility and sales while improving the public perception of your brand. Influencer marketing also influences search ranking factors such as links, traffic, and engagement metrics.
Influencer Marketing Drive Backlinks To Your Website
Google’s algorithm checks the backlinks a website has received. Link profile, page authority, domain authority, and other link-related factors dominate lists of “top search ranking factors” across the web.
Unfortunately, because your influencers’ backlinks are paid for, they should be tagged as no-follow links. Even worse, many short-sighted SEOs dismiss these links as a total waste of time, which couldn’t be further from the truth.
No, follow links continue to drive traffic and social media engagement, both of which are important for SEO. They generate clicks, social shares, and sales in the same way that regularly followed links do.
Furthermore, even though influencers must no-follow their links, the size of their platform increases the likelihood that others will naturally link to you with a do-follow backlink.
Influencer Marketing Make Your Brand Popular On Social Media
Influencers rule social media and therefore SEO. Their promotion of your brand does not generate engagement that is limited to their channel. It also helps your brand gain more followers, which leads to increased engagement on your channel.
The data given below should be enough to make you realise the channel utilization of Influencer campaign. The higher the percentage of influencer campaign utilization channel, the more will be the growth of your social media account.
We’ve all heard that social shares lead to traffic. When influencers create content for your website and then promote it on their channels, their fans will re-share it, resulting in increased traffic and even links.
Grow Your Social Media And Make People Brand Advocates
Growing your social following indirectly improves your SEO. Although the number of followers has no direct effect on how well your website ranks in search engines, having more followers means more people visiting your website.
This may not seem like much, but it accounts for over 5 million new monthly visitors. So, while social traffic may not constitute the majority of your total traffic, increasing your social following has an impact on the amount of traffic your site receives each month.
Working with influencers on a long-term basis can turn the followers into brand advocates is Brand advocates go beyond a single brand-influencer relationship.
When you first start working with an influencer, you may work on a campaign basis, in which the influencer must create a certain number of creative assets in exchange for a free product or payment. Brand ambassadors, on the other hand, are typically paid on a monthly or affiliate basis and produce content about your brand regularly.
Brand advocates are beneficial to SEO because those who constantly mention your brand in their daily lives are likely to drive a lot of traffic to your website and social channels.
Read More: How To Turn Customers Into Brand Advocates To Grow Your Business
Influencer Marketing Increases Social Links And PR
When an influencer shares content about your brand, it reaches a large and engaged audience in a matter of minutes.
It assists you in cutting through the noise to increase social links and signals. Google has stated that social signals do not have a significant impact on SEO rankings, but they do take them into account.
When people share your content or website on their social networks, you receive social signals. For example, someone may tweet a link to your product, and their followers may retweet it.
This does not generate backlinks in the same way that someone sharing a link to your site on their website would, but it does indicate to Google that people are interested in your content.
Or it may help you in getting Press Release for your brand or else, you can make influencers talk about your published PR.
Furthermore, as more people share your content on social media, a greater number of people may click through to your site.
Leverage The Long-Tail Search Gains
Influencer marketing is more than just using celebrities to promote your brand. You can also use influencers who are relevant to the long-tail keywords you want to target.
Long-tail keywords are essential components of any influencer marketing SEO campaign, accounting for 70% of all web searches.
Every influencer or celebrity will be associated with a set of long-tail keywords. These could be high-traffic, low-competition keywords. Consider interviews, hair tutorials, workouts, makeup lessons, and so on. All of the content related to these topics contributes to the development of authority.
A good rule of thumb for leveraging this is to look at long-tail SEO keywords that you’ve proven to generate search results, traffic, and conversions. The same keywords can be applied to an influencer database.
Look at the image above, the short-tail keyword has high search volume but the conversion Rate is lower through such keywords because of the unclear intent. We don’t what this keyword, “dog food” really want. On the other hand, if I take the keyword, “how to make dog food at home”. Such keywords has high conversion rate because of the clear intent.
This is exactly how keywords work.
For example, if you’re looking for influencers in the cycling niche, look for those who frequently discuss “black mountain bikes with dual suspension” rather than just “black mountain bikes” You also want to make sure that these influencers have an audience that is actively listening to them and searching for the long-tail phrases they use.
Data, like other digital marketing decisions, can only help your influencer marketing. So, make use of influencer analytics to track and collect data on the impact each influencer has on your brand’s online presence.
How To Create An Influencer Marketing Strategy
Here are the 7 steps to launching a successful influencer program for your company.
Set Your Objectives
As with any good marketing strategy, the first step is to define your objectives. Defining your goals for influencer marketing will help you develop an effective strategy throughout your campaign. It will also help you understand the metrics you should track to determine the success of your campaign.
The primary goal of influencer marketing is typically to reach new potential customers. This makes sense because an influencer campaign allows you to reach the followers of the influencer.
Notice how the top priority isn’t to increase sales. Influencer marketing’s third most common goal is to increase sales.
Consider how influencer marketing can help your overall social media marketing strategy when setting goals. Make your goals “smart” once you’ve decided what you want to achieve.
Know Who You’re Trying To Reach
A successful influencer marketing campaign requires reaching the right people at the right time with the right tools and influencers. Doesn’t that sound precise?
Create buyer personas to better understand who you’re trying to reach with your campaign. Outline specifics about your target audience, such as:
- Their age
- Their ideal spending plan (if you want to drive sales with your campaign)
- their objectives
- Their location
- The times they’re online, and so on.
Knowing your target audience will make it easier to find the right influencers to reach them.
Let me show you a template of a buyer persona:
This is how a buyer persona looks like. You collect detailed information about your audience and use it to influence them.
Consider The 3Rs Of Influence
Relevance
The right influencer for your campaign shares content about your industry and brand. Their target audience must be similar to yours. So the first step is to reach out to an influencer that can add importance to your content or page.
Reach
The number of people who could potentially see your content through an influencer’s audience base is referred to as “reach”. It should be noted that having a large follower base does not necessarily imply having more reach.
A small audience may even be more effective for your objectives, but you must ensure that the influencer has enough followers to match your objectives.
Resonance
The influencer’s potential level of engagement with an audience that aligns with your brand is referred to as resonance. As previously stated, bigger is better (not always, at least). A large number of followers is meaningless if those followers are uninterested in your offer.
Niche influencers, on the other hand, have fewer followers, but those followers are more engaged and dedicated.
Shortlist Influencers
The key to a successful collaboration with influencers is trust between them. Whoever you collaborate with must have your audience’s trust and respect. Without trust, the results you obtain are unlikely to have a measurable impact on your business.
The best way to tell if a potential influencer is trustworthy is to look at their engagement. Check out if the influencer’s Instagram content is liked, viewed, commented on, or shared by your target audience.
A high engagement rate indicates that the influencer has a loyal following rather than a follower count that has been inflated by bots and fraudulent accounts. You must find someone whose content aesthetic and tone correspond to what you intend to present to your audience.
You need to shortlist the influencer on the basis of the above criteria.
There may be many influencers who meet these criteria, so make a shortlist of potential partners and choose from it.
Conduct Your Research
Your research does not end with the creation of a shortlist. There’s still work to be done.
First, determine how frequently your potential influencers post sponsored content. If they share a lot of paid content, their engagement rate may be low. So look for a lot of non-paid content and see if it has a similar level of engagement.
When considering the posts you’ll ask the influencer to share, keep the influencer’s posting schedule in mind. If you tell them to share too many sponsored posts in a short period, the influencer will reject your offer, even if you pay them well.
When approaching an influencer, you must demonstrate that you have taken the time to learn about their accounts, who their audience is, and how they handle paid content.
Reach Out To Them
Invading a potential influencer’s DMs and asking for a partnership may not be the best way to start a relationship. Don’t get me wrong: it can be effective at times, but there are better ways to communicate.
Begin by naturally responding to the influencer’s posts. They share, like, and comment on their content. After some time, you can enter their direct messages (or inbox, if you find their email).
Try to be as personal as possible in your message. Send a generic DM or, even worse, a mass email. Writing a personalized message to each influencer may take more time, especially if your list is long, but a personalized message shows that you’re serious about partnering with them.
Here, I would like to give you a template that shows you how to write a personalized message to a influencer.
This increases the likelihood that they will accept your offer.
Tell the influencer everything you know about your brand. Tell them what you want to accomplish through a partnership. And, most importantly, tell them how they will benefit from working with your brand (beyond the paycheck, that is). When you have done all this, you can choose the best.
Measure Your Results
When you launch your influencer marketing campaign, the number of likes and comments on your branded content may overwhelm you, especially if your influencer has a large following.
Likes and comments, on the other hand, are vanity metrics that don’t do much for your brand.
You must calculate your actual return on investment to determine how effective the campaign is (ROI).
UTM parameters are an excellent way to track visitors who arrive at your website via the influencer’s content. They can also assist you in determining the level of engagement in your campaign. You’ll be able to see your results clearly and calculate the impact on your business if you give each social influencer their special link with UTM codes.
You can also provide influencers with a unique discount code to track the number of sales generated by sponsored content.
You’ll have access to analytics for both feed and Stories content if you use sponsored content tools on Facebook and Instagram for your influencer marketing campaign. If none of these options are viable, you can request that the influencer send you detailed reports on the reach and engagement levels of their posts.
Conclusion
Remember that in order to have a positive impact of influencer marketing on your SEO, you must work with the right influencers.
You want qualified traffic, so make sure your audience is similar to your target customer base. Find influencers in various niches and levels of influence to build a diverse profile of positive mentions and links.
The more content about you there is on the web, the more likely it is that your brand will dominate the SERPs, whether or not the results are all from your own website. Engage with influential people. Their reach extends far beyond social media.
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