10 Ways How Influencer Marketing Impacts Your SEO

Influencer marketing involves brand managers cultivating relationships with influential bloggers and social media personalities, to generate conversations about their brands and secure written or video testimonials or reviews of their products or services. 

SEO involves a wide range of activities aimed at improving the organic Google rankings of a website’s content, thereby generating more organic traffic to the website and more conversions (that is, sales leads or online orders).

Because influencer marketing has a heavy emphasis on branding, SEO campaign managers, who are focused on producing revenue, tend to regard influencer marketing as something on the periphery of what they’re doing, or not relevant at all.

This tendency is a mistake, because influencer marketing can have a strong positive impact on SEO campaigns. Here are 10 of the most important ways it helps.

Impact of Influencer Marketing on SEO

1. Linkbuilding

When influencers blog about your products/services, that content may contain links to your website and, in all probability, the product/service pages you’ve targeted for your SEO campaign. These links diversify your link profile by adding to it the highly authoritative domains associated with influencers. That combination of quantity and quality is hard to beat.

Social media conversations generated by influencers do not produce links directly, but indirectly, people who are being influenced may in turn blog about what you sell, adding diverse links to your profile.

2. Increasing Trust

Trustworthiness is a major factor in Google rankings and is also a major factor in turning a prospect into a customer when he or she visits your website. Many SEO campaigns generate organic traffic but fail to convert that traffic. A lack of trust is frequently the problem.

When influencers talk about what you sell, your credibility soars. People trust the influencers, and by extension, they come to trust your products, service capabilities, and expertise. When influenced visitors come to your site, whether from search engines or elsewhere, they are more likely to buy. 

3. Creating High-Quality Content

Outreach campaigns — that is, building influencer relationships through social media dialog or content marketing pitches — work best for SEO when the main objective is to persuade them to write about what you sell, thereby improving the overall quality of the content Google associates with your domain.

Influencers tend to be very talented and creative writers — in addition to having high authority. This matters to Google crawlers as well as human beings. When crawlers see content that meets Google’s E+A+T standard (Expertise + Authoritativeness + Trustworthiness), links from that content back to your site carry more weight.

4. Targeting Longtail Search Terms

Influencers often inhabit specialized niches within the markets you serve. This high degree of specialization helps SEOs tap into longtail search terms that are otherwise hard to optimize. The process works as follows:

• Conduct keyword research focused on every longtail term that comes to mind.
• Look for product-related, market-related, and/or application-related keyword clusters with more than enough volume to target.
• Match these keywords with influencers dominant in those specialized areas.
• Begin your outreach campaign.

5. Optimizing Video Search

Because of budget restrictions and lack of necessary creative talent, many SEO campaigns are unable to optimize for Google video search. Targeting influencers who use, or whose primary medium is, video enables you to establish or improve organic visibility for video search with minimal, if any, budgetary impact and no creative effort at all.

Video content is more engaging than text, and organic traffic from a video search may have higher conversion potential than from other sources. 

6. Optimizing Image Search

Like video, many SEO campaigns are forced to bypass image search optimization — and again, influencer marketing outreach can fill this gap.

When a company’s product is complex or has visual characteristics that affect the buying decision, its best prospects are likely to use Google image search rather than rely on general results. Photo optimization should be a high priority in these situations.

7. Optimizing News Search

Influencer marketing often leads to news media coverage, because when a powerful voice speaks — it’s news. SEO campaigns for small and midsize organizations have trouble obtaining editorial links from highly authoritative news sites, so influencer outreach again fills an important gap.

Links from news sites not only enhance a company’s backlink profile, but they are also a game-changer for brand awareness and trust-building.

8. Creating Keyword Demand

What if you are trying to optimize for a product or service so new to the market no relevant keywords are associated with it? By working with influencers to have them promote what you sell (with some coaching on keywords), you may be able to popularize those keywords and eventually create a critical mass of search volume.

Influencers may be especially open to working with SEOs on innovative products or services, since they are inherently newsworthy and highly interesting to their audiences.

9. Repurposing Influencer Content to Drive Conversions

Content created by influencers — whether text, video, or audio — can be repurposed in its entirety or with excerpts to improve conversion rates on target SEO pages of a company’s website.

Influencer content, which amounts to an endorsement, provides powerful social proof that reassures prospects that making a purchase is the right decision.

10. Repurposing Influencer-Inspired Content to Drive Conversions

Social media comments and visual postings generated by influencer-generated content can be used in a similar fashion. Displaying positive reviews and/or photos of people using your product or service supplies the social proof that is so important for generating inquiries and orders.

User-generated content, along with influencer-generated content, strengthens a company’s marketing when it is repurposed in:

• Contact forms
• Email campaigns
• PPC landing pages
• Print advertising
• Sales collateral
• Shopping cart checkout pages

Integrating Influencer Marketing into SEO Campaigns

As with any other strategy in an SEO campaign, the best results come from having a systematic execution and adequate resources. For influencer outreach, this means:

• Clearly defined objectives
• A system to identify and vet relevant influencers
• Talented personnel to handle influencer outreach and relationship management
• An active social media presence, especially on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, if possible

The rewards of cultivating influencer involvement in your SEO campaign are great, even though influencers have high standards and high expectations. However, with persistence, professionalism, and strong ideas, even unknown brands can win over influencers and accelerate the success of their SEO campaigns.