A quick web search of the keywords “influencer marketing” and “SEO” will show you multiple articles that state:
- The benefits of influencer marketing
- The benefits of SEO (search engine optimization).
Both these strategies are treated as the be-all and end-all of the marketing world, but what happens when you leverage one of them (influencer marketing) to grow another (SEO)?
The short answer: You improve your search visibility, trust, and ranking.
If you’re wondering how to make this happen, this article is exactly what you need. Here, we’ll dive in to learn how brands use influencer marketing to improve SEO.
1. To create content and improve visibility
Influencers are among the best people to collaborate with to create unique and engaging content for your brand that doesn’t see high bounce rates and makes your target audience stick and watch.
And since your SEO score relies on how well you craft content, how relevant it is, how valuable your audiences find it, and how apt the topics and discussions are, leveraging your influencers for content creation is a must.
For example, consider Hims as an example. The brand partnered with Instagram influencer Kyle Russell to promote their hair regrowth solutions.
Because he published real before-and-after results (aka, information deemed helpful to the reader), it became an engaging post that got more likes than Kyle’s average Instagram posts and raised several questions about the brand’s pills, too.
For reference, this post saw increased engagement rates with 1,394 likes, whereas his recent posts are seeing anywhere between 15–500 likes.
Pro Tip: Turn your customers into influencers
To replicate the same results for your brand, consider partnering with your existing customers to show real results to your prospects across your social media channels.
Aside from just before-and-after results, other content templates you can consider using are testimonials, case studies, and user-generated content.
Such partnerships with your customers will also help you:
- Understand the unique use cases where your product has been beneficial
- Find potential customer pain points you might not be aware of
- Pinpoint how your customers talk (so you can use the same language in your marketing materials)
2. To build high-quality backlinks
Another excellent way influencer partnerships can be powerful for your SEO is due to backlinks.
For example, any links to your website through an influencer’s bio, video description, guest post, social media captions, etc., can help the search engine think of your brand as trustworthy.
While these backlinks help improve your visibility on the search engine results page (SERP), another SEO-related area it’ll help you with is increasing your website’s domain rating (DR).
These days, brands are thinking out of the box and partnering with influencers who can make their backlinks look authentic.
For example, Cruise America, a company that offers RV rentals, often partners with travel influencers to create exciting road trip content.
These influencer campaigns not only showcase the benefits of opting for an RV rental but also help build valuable backlinks from travel blogs and influencer platforms (aka people who have niche authority), thereby boosting SEO.
Another example to consider is LeatherCult, a brand specializing in genuine leather jackets.
The company consistently partners with up-and-coming influencers who get a PR package to review their leather jackets on various social media platforms. These posts include links to their product pages in the video descriptions.
These backlinks, originating from popular social platforms like YouTube, serve a dual purpose. They drive organic traffic directly to LeatherCult’s website and positively influence the brand’s search engine rankings.
3. To adhere to EEAT standards
Many search engines have algorithms that help them decide which type of content to push forward. In that context, Google has an algorithm that recommends using the Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness (EEAT) methodology.
Basically, what this means is that if the Shopify blog were to produce e-commerce content vs. a marketing agency were to produce e-commerce content, it’d push Shopify’s content higher, even if they have similar ideas.
Why? Mainly because Shopify has more authority on the topic and a better DR.
This logic applies to people creating blog posts, too. For example, if both a professional writer and Wes Anderson were to write about filmmaking on a blog with the same DR, the algorithm would likely rank Wes Anderson’s content higher because he has more topical authority and experience.
Screenshot by Vergine Melkonyan
You can leverage EEAT when partnering with influencers, too. For example, if you’re competing on the SERP for the same relevant keywords, you can partner with influencers with authority and experience with the topic (e.g., travel influencers for travel topics) to rank your content higher.
Here are a few examples of brands leveraging EEAT and creating high-quality content that might serve as inspiration:
1. Reliable Couriers
Logistical companies, such as those offering courier services, often partner with influencers from complementary niches, such as small business owners who ship a lot of products and have many orders to keep track of.
Since these influencers already have experience dealing with courier providers, their insights come across as trustworthy, and the search engine believes they’re partnering with someone who has experience writing/talking about the subject.
2. Custom Frame Store
Custom Frame Store, a company that sells wholesale picture frames, has partnered with local artists and art influencers to increase the visibility of its products. These genuine recommendations convince the search algorithm that the company is trustworthy.
In turn, the artists gain exclusive access to custom frames to complement their artworks at a generous discount.
4. To improve social signals
SEO and search algorithms also (indirectly) account for social signals. That’s to say, your likes, dislikes, subscriber list, engagement, comments, social shares, reach, etc., all play an integral part in improving your visibility.
Since influencers have larger followings and can boost awareness for your brand, they can help with social signals. For example, if an influencer promotes your brand on their Instagram, a decent size of their follower list may check out your brand and follow you, too.
While the impact of SEO in this scenario is low, it does help increase sales and impressions for your brand.
Plus, if you partner with an influencer who also targets the same demographic as you, you can access newer leads and/or increase the frequency of your interactions with your existing customers.
5. To target specific keywords
Influencers can also be excellent collaborators to increase your share of voice for specific topics and/or keywords. For example, if you’re a company that offers document management services — that’s a strong long-tail keyword you might want to target.
While you can increase your content production for the same keywords, you can still only produce content for your website and social channels, which does lead to certain restrictions in your content production efforts.
However, if you partner with influencers, you can use their social channels and blogs to target the same long-tail keywords. For example, if your brand name is ABC, the long-tail keyword you can ask your influencers to target is “ABC document management services.”
When you create a website, it is essential to strategically incorporate relevant keywords into the URL. This practice not only improves the overall user experience, but also contributes significantly to SEO.
6. To get analytics and insights
Truth be told, building your SEO score requires a whole bunch of trial and error. Because of this, Google Analytics on content topics, keyword traffic, backlinks, and customer intent help a lot in improving your SEO strategy.
While insights from your own tools will no doubt help, insights from other tools your partners (such as influencers) use will also help you make sense of your existing data as well as provide you with newer insights.
For example, to reach a newer, more engaged demographic, some companies found that they could target millennials by focusing on undiscovered content topics and by finding ways to connect with this audience on social media.
When in doubt, use your analytics to unlock a treasure trove of information and drive data-driven decisions to build a robust content curation strategy.
Improve your SEO score with better content creation
We previously said this, but your SEO efforts start and end with content creation — you need your content to rank and make the content valuable to justify the time and effort put into your SEO efforts.
At Scoop.it, we understand this very well — we’re a content curation solution, after all, so why couldn’t we? Our tool specializes in helping individuals and organizations curate and publish well-written content.
In fact, here’s a small testament to our capabilities:
“We use Scoop. to easily curate and organize all the industry content impacting our business.
We analyze and add our expert insight in clicks and share with decision-makers in customized weekly newsletters.
When performing a performance analysis, we found that these newsletters are already opened and clicked more than 80%. Not a bad payback after approximately three weeks!”
- our client operating in the SaaS space
To learn more about Scoop.it’s capabilities, and to enhance your content marketing strategy, sign up for free!
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