In recent years, research has been conducted which shows influencer marketing has the potential to have a significant impact on SEO due to the collaborative effort of influencers promoting a brand and consumers searching for said brand as a result of increased familiarity. This provides an interesting and quite complex relationship between the two strategies and creates some definite overlap between the two.
SEO, on the other hand, is something that has been around for a long time, however, it is constantly evolving to stay relevant with changes in consumers and technology. SEO stands for “search engine optimization,” which involves a series of strategies to make a website appear higher on search engine results.
In recent years, one of the most important concepts in digital marketing has been influencer marketing. Largely utilized on social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, influencer marketing involves a brand building a relationship with a popular, well-established individual to collaborate on promotions to consumers. These influencers have a dedicated social following and are viewed as experts within their niche. When compared to traditional media strategies, influencer engagement is extremely effective. Consumers feel a sense of familiarity and trust with the influencer. When they endorse a product, it does not come across as a sales pitch, thus resulting in a higher ROI (return on investment). Statistically, 51% of marketers believe they acquire better customers through influencer marketing, and 11% of the marketing mix is made up of influencer marketing.
What is influencer marketing?
Specifically for SEO, influencer marketing shares a common thread with traditional link-building strategies. Any form of content that is hosted onsite can be supported by backlinks from other sources. In this case we are looking to quality posts from influencer blogs or social media channels. An ideal situation would involve the influencer willingly providing backlinks from their authored content to the similar brand-hosted content. This may also have potential to involve influencer guest postings on the brands site. As well as this, there is potential for offsite content to gain backlinks through influencers simply “sharing” URLs on their various social platforms. All of these tactics build the opportunity to leverage higher search rankings with the increased existence of quality backlinks to host content.
For traditional onsite SEO service, influencer marketing can be utilised to help encourage the amplification of onsite content (through shares and backlinks off the back of influencer distributed content). At the heart of influencer marketing is the content created by the influencers. For brands to make the most of the influencer-customer connection, it is important that quality content is produced and maintained which the consumer will benefit from. This is likely to take the form of a blog post, social media post, or video of some description. Usually this content will include the brand product or service within it, essentially offering an advertising function. At this point the brand can link to or host this content on their own site, having it serve as a method to engage the existing consumer base, and a way to attract a new potential customer through the quality of the content. This is where the influencers’ usual tactics can be a simple and effective solution. By providing the content creators with free products or services, brands can encourage the promotion of said content within the influencers network, aiming to giving the customer something that they truly find valuable. This “give and take” of quality brand content (crafted with consumer benefit in mind) being promoted through various influencer-channels, is an opportunity to create more valuable traffic from new and existing customers. This is already sounding like it has SEO benefit, and that is because it does.
Influencer marketing has proved to be an effective online marketing strategy, as businesses are able to leverage the large followings of influential people to reach a specific niche of potential consumers. Influencers typically have established their credibility and trust with their followers, thus when they endorse, review, or even just mention a product or service to their loyal following, it will directly affect the way consumers view the brand in a positive or negative light. This is beneficial for the brand wanting to connect with a target market, as consumers will trust the brand more due to the endorsement of someone they trust. It is agreed among the influencer-marketing community that their tactics are evolving with the current state of technology in 2016.
Importance of SEO in digital marketing
The benefits of leveraging SEO for influencer marketing are clear, and influencer marketing itself holds the power propelling SEO for years to come. Take a look at our next segment, which covers the benefits of influencer marketing for SEO, to understand how they all tie in.
Effectively, influencer marketing can act as a catalyst for more traditional forms of SEO, and the possibilities here are truly endless. From partnered promotions and giveaways to affiliate marketing, using influencers in creative ways can greatly increase ROI and cater to various dimensions of the sales funnel. SEO is a marketing investment, and influencer marketing complements this as a vessel for solidifying brand and product.
SEO plays a significant role in the consumer research and purchasing cycle. With the abundance of information at our fingertips these days, the average person will first turn to a search engine when attempting to learn more about a particular product or service. Whether it’s to weigh the pros and cons, read reviews, or look for the best deal, search is a vital step in the consumer’s journey. Creating useful content that is easily searchable by consumers is a surefire way to increase the likelihood of them finding you. The logical next step would be to create SEO-optimized content that employs search terms and phrases commonly used by your target audience. Now bridge this with influencer marketing. By using influencers to create content that links back to your website, you are increasing the opportunity for relevant link building. This is twofold. In the short term, having an influencer share a piece of content will increase its visibility and likelihood of being shared. This gives you a chance of attaining brand new feasibility and long-term customers. In the long term, that piece of content will act as a permanent advertisement when using evergreen content, and permanent means ongoing opportunities for new backlinks.
The importance of SEO in the world of digital marketing is no secret. A great deal of time and money is spent chasing those coveted high search engine rankings, and for good reason. Studies have shown that the first three organic search ranking positions result in nearly 40 percent of all click-throughs, while up to 30 percent of all results on Page 1 and Page 2 don’t get clicked at all. What’s more, an overwhelming 92 percent of search engine traffic goes to the results on Page 1; very few people make it to Page 2! The need to secure and maintain a strong ranking has only increased with the rise of internet commerce, and good SEO has become a staple in the competitive marketing realm. But how does this apply to influencer marketing?
Overview of the benefits of influencer marketing for SEO
For Google’s situation, it’s about the client experience. Google is not in the matter of advancing your substance or your image. Google is about its clients. Along these lines, you should make content for your clients. This is the reason Google compensates destinations which offer differed substance to a wide group of spectators. Google trusts that a shifted site is a pointer of a functioning site organizer, so making a wide arrangement of substance can expand your site’s positioning. Nonetheless, bear to note neither the web index or clients will offer leeway to average substance. Subsequently, it should be top notch.
The benefits of influencer marketing generally outweigh the extraordinary expenses. Besides, influencer advertising is a contribution to viable SEO ways. In this article, we will examine an assortment of attention strategies used to improve a business’s website or blog’s perceivability and how using influencers can be an exchange or enhancement to these techniques. Especially, we will concentrate SEO (site improvement), yet numerous techniques depicted here might be seen as site improvement or pursuit improvement in more extensive degree. Influencer Marketing makes great quality substance.
Finding and Engaging Influencers
There are a number of approaches you can take to find relevant influencers for your niche. A simple way to identify potential influencers is by using relevant keywords and hashtags to search for content and conversations that are already taking place in your niche. Influencers who are already active in your niche are more likely to be interested in the type of content you are creating and will be easier to persuade to mention or link to your content. Compile a list of potential influencers and keep track of their contact information, social profiles, and other relevant information in a spreadsheet for easy access later on. You can also use Buzzsumo to find popular content in your niche. The tool will allow you to see who has shared or linked to similar content in the past, which is an indicator that they may be interested in similar content. Compile a list of potential influencers and find their contact information. Other people in your niche can also be a good source for finding influencers, so don’t hesitate to ask for recommendations. Once you’ve got a list of potential influencers, the next steps involve efficiently evaluating if they are a good match for your brand and establishing contact with them.
Identifying relevant influencers for your niche
At the heart of influencer marketing is this: it’s about cultivating relationships and establishing connections. Because of this, brands who are looking to engage in influencer marketing need to understand the who – as in who are the people to influence our target audience. As such, the initial step is to identify who the right influencers are. Start with a good Google search. Looking online for lists of influencers in your niche is a good start. For example, if you are trying to reach people who are interested in fitness and nutrition, search for “Top fitness and nutrition bloggers” and see who comes up. Come up with a healthy sized list of potential influencers to work with. Another way to find influencers in your niche is to utilize influencer marketplaces or PR tools. Websites that help connect brands with influencers such as GroupHigh and Ninja Outreach are marketplaces that allow you to search for and connect with potential influencers in your niche. Other tools such as Buzzstream or Buzzsumo offer you PR tools or influencer identification tools to help find bloggers in your niche. Buzzsumo has a strong influencer identification tool that allows you to find influencers by topic and it shows who links to that person as well as who they influence. These can be extremely beneficial for brands looking to make a more genuine connection and find the right influencer fit for their brand.
Approaching influencers and building relationships
Next, sharing authentic praise for the influencer’s work and discussing specific things you admire about it can be a good way to generate a positive response. It’s important to note, though, that trying to force this praise can come across as insincere. Make sure that everything said is genuine to avoid any future complications.
Because influencer marketing tactics often require you to be unfamiliar with the influencer you’re reaching out to, you need to start by introducing yourself and the brand in a friendly, non-intrusive manner. This usually means trying to avoid a pitch in the first few interactions and instead aiming to establish a positive connection. Being a fan of the influencer beforehand and already engaging with them through social media can also be a great way to get on their radar, making your first direct interaction much more organic.
Negotiating partnerships and collaborations
It’s important to work out the specifics of the partnership. This will depend on the agreed goals of the campaign. For instance, if your main goal is to drive traffic to your site, a cost per click affiliate partnership would be most suitable. If you do have an ecommerce store and the goal is to promote a product or service than that is when a gifting arrangement or product fee can be arranged. And of course, if the aim is to simply create brand awareness and the influence has aimed to do that through social media, a sponsored social media post is the best way to go about it.
Negotiating an agreement that works well for both the influencer and the brand is important. You want influencers to be genuinely excited about the opportunity to represent your brand. A great way to do this is to invite them to be involved in the creative process and fully utilize their skill set. At the end of the day, influencers know what their audience responds well to and by giving them the autonomy to create a campaign that they believe in, the content is going to seamlessly slot into their current projects. This is also going to avoid the influencer promoting a brand product or service in an impersonal and disingenuous way.
Creating SEO-Optimized Content with Influencers
Influencer marketing is similar to content marketing. We are essentially creating content that the influencer’s audience will like with the hopes that it drives engagement and brand awareness, and possibly a link or two. There is a lot of overlap between the two disciplines. A good place to start is to give the influencer some examples of content that has worked well for them in the past. Have them explain why it was successful and who their target audience is. You want to gather as much information as possible to paint a clear picture of who the content is for and what it is trying to achieve. This will give you the insight needed to direct the influencer to the desired outcome. A content strategy or concept is often born from simply finding what already has worked and expanding upon it. Once you know the direction you want to take, you can collaborate on a content calendar outlining when and where the content will be published. Remember that the influencer’s goal is to drive engagement with their audience so try not to disrupt the posting schedule and find ways to make the content resonate with their followers.
Creating content that is optimized for search engines is a skill that most traditional marketers are still learning. When collaborating with influencers, it’s important to guide them in the right direction in order to get content that will be most effective for SEO.
Collaborating on content ideas and strategies
Producing content for the purpose of SEO leveraging is a process that requires careful planning between marketers and influencers. A keyword glossary should be developed to ensure that both parties understand which keywords should be targeted with the content. A good SEO page will be targeted towards a handful of keywords, so it is important that the influencer understands which keywords to include and where the priority lies. Developing a theme or storyboard can be helpful in ensuring that content is targeted and stays on topic. Marketers should provide the influencer with an outline of the content and identify the key areas and topics that should be covered. It is important that the content remains authentic and does not appear forced, so a degree of flexibility should be maintained. This may involve the influencers suggesting new ideas or improvised changes to the plan, and it is important that the marketers remain open to this. Finally, a clear specification of deliverables is important to measure the success of the project and ensure accountability for the work done by the influencer.
Incorporating relevant keywords and SEO techniques
Often, written content will include timely topics and trends. Therefore, the content will have a short lifespan in terms of search availability. This can be combated by re-optimizing the same page with new content at a later date and promoting this through the influencers’ social channels.
At Elite SEM, we have leveraged this with a number of influencers who have written on a variety of topics. In these cases, the usage of keywords has often been directly tailored towards a sale in a very soft and non-disruptive manner. This has proven to be effective with one particular piece of article content for a wireless provider client, contributing to a 1.6% increase in year-over-year organic traffic compared to the month prior.
The completion of keyword research by the inbound marketers will provide the influencer with a list of keywords to include in the content and a strategy on how to include them. This is particularly useful for the influencer as keyword usage will not disrupt the quality of the content. However, with knowledge of the keywords, the content can be tailored in a way that it can be found more easily through search.
For written content, one of the basic requirements to optimize content for SEO is the effective use of keywords. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the target audience and identify the main topics that the audience will be searching for that are related to your brand. For each piece of content, it is important to identify a target keyword to optimize for. The keyword should be a topic that is popular among the target audience and relevant to the brand.
Although most influencers will create good quality content, it is unlikely to be maximized for good SEO as it is not the influencer’s specialty and they will tend to write for the audience, rather than optimize content for search engines. Therefore, it is very important for businesses to be heavily involved in the content creation process. This will require a good brief with clear objectives of what is to be achieved and constant communication with the influencer during the content creation process. That way, businesses can ensure that keyword usage and on-page optimizations are in line with their overall SEO strategy.
Leveraging influencer-created content for link building
Of course, the links must appear on quality sites that are relevant to your brand and the influencer’s own personal brand. If the link appears on a site that is clearly unrelated to either, it will actually harm your SEO. To avoid this, we recommend you discuss and approve the sites with the influencer prior to placing the links. A final thing to consider with backlinks is longevity. It is an ongoing effort to generate new backlinks, so use influencers that you can maintain a relationship with over a long period of time.
Leveraging influencer-created content for link building. Influencers are content-creating machines. To get the most SEO value from your influencers, you’ll need to extract and share this content with a link to the influencer’s site. This can come in many forms, including a blog post on the influencer’s site on a similar topic to another. But the simplest way to do it is just to get them to write a guest post for your site with links back to their own. This content is pure gold for link building. By using influencers to generate backlinks, you will improve your site’s relevance for specific keywords. This link will also act like a vote in favor of your site in the eyes of search engines.
Measuring and Analyzing SEO Impact
In order to evaluate the impact of influencer marketing on SEO, it is best to identify specific pages or content that has been targeted in the campaign. Changes in SEO performance should be examined for this content in comparison to others. Influence on off-page SEO is also a significant consideration. An effective method of evaluating impact here is to measure changes in backlink and referral traffic to specific content from the influencer campaign. The importance of this is highlighted by a case study done by seoClarity on an influencer campaign by Land Rover. The data revealed a considerable increase in backlink and referral traffic to Land Rover content compared to a control group, with a total cumulative media value of £254,598. This confirmed the effectiveness of influencer marketing in improving off-page SEO and brand awareness.
Tracking and monitoring SEO performance metrics help marketers make data-driven decisions for future campaigns. This enables an accurate assessment of the SEO benefit of influencer marketing and helps in calculating ROI. Marketers can then attribute increased performance in organic search to the influencer campaign, and the targeted uplift in specific SEO performance metrics can be compared to the general SEO performance of the brand. This can be achieved using a split test, where a certain brand page is selected and the rest of the site is used as a control. Changes in specific SEO performance metrics for the selected page can then be compared to the rest of the site to measure the impact of the influencer campaign.
Tracking and monitoring SEO performance metrics
Tracking and monitoring SEO performance metrics is important for assessing the value of influencer marketing, as well as making a strong case to secure more budget for ongoing and future influencer marketing initiatives. As influencer marketing is implemented, brands need to keep a pulse on how their online web properties are performing. This includes tracking keyword rankings, organic search traffic to specific landing pages, and the overall organic traffic to the main website. A lift in organic traffic can be attributed to the influencer marketing initiatives, and even more so when there is a major increase in branded search. High quality backlinks are often a natural byproduct of influencer marketing, and these are also a valuable commodity for SEO. By utilizing a backlink analysis tool, brands can see exactly which links were generated and the associated domain authority. This will help to assess the overall quality of backlinks, but also to find new opportunities for leveraging the influencer content to acquire additional backlinks. In order to get a complete view of the impact of influencer marketing on organic search, it is important to compare the before and after of the overall SEO performance. We recommend taking a screenshot of the current organic search traffic to specific web properties and comparing this at a later date to see the increase in traffic. This snapshot can be supplemented with a report showing keyword rankings and the associated landing pages. By comparing this information to the new organic search traffic it will be easy to see which keywords had the biggest gains and which landing pages are most valuable. This exercise can also be repeated to compare the organic search traffic before and after specific influencer marketing initiatives.
Evaluating the impact of influencer marketing on SEO
Drawing causation between influencer-based strategies and SEO performance can be tricky. To accurately measure the impact of influencer marketing on SEO, it is important to identify whether these strategies have been successful in creating greater brand awareness and securing more high-authority backlinks. An easy way to track site traffic and user engagement is through Google Analytics. By creating a segment specifically for organic search traffic, it is possible to see whether there has been an increase in the amount of organic search traffic driven to the site during a specified time frame. This can then be compared to a timeframe before the influencer was used, providing a clear indicator as to whether the influencer has succeeded in improving SEO by raising brand awareness. It is also possible to use landing page URLs as a way to track user engagement. By creating a landing page specifically for the traffic driven by a certain influencer, it is possible to measure the behavior of this traffic in comparison to the behavior of the traffic received from other sources. If this traffic is more likely to browse the website and/or make purchases, it is an indicator that the influencer has succeeded in targeting a relevant audience and can therefore be considered a successful method of improving SEO.
Making data-driven decisions for future campaigns
An effective method to understand how influencer marketing is affecting SEO is to run a small website audit before the campaign begins. This should focus on the site’s organic traffic, keyword rankings, and backlink profile. This will give a clear understanding of the site’s current SEO presence. After the campaign has run, these tests can be replicated and compared to post results. An increase in organic traffic and a higher keyword ranking for the keyword attributed to that post would show an improvement in that post’s SEO value. An improvement in the backlink profile, including an increase in backlinks and an increase in the domain authority and page rank of the backlink location, would show an improvement in the post’s off-page SEO. The comparison of these results to the pre-campaign audit will give a clear understanding of how that influencer marketing campaign has affected the site’s SEO and will give an indication as to whether similar style campaigns should be run in the future.
In theory, influencer marketing is something that will help improve any online business’s SEO presence. This is not always the case, and even when influencer marketing is having a positive effect on SEO, it is important to know how and why this is happening. This understanding can help build refined future campaigns.