Influencer Marketing can be a source of great opportunities, saving your time to boost your SEO. Actually, collaborating with a network should represent a valuable asset for a brand and its SEO. This tactic brings you good visibility, improves your brand awareness and increases traffic to your website.
Working with influencers can make a difference by increasing your reach and influencing your SEO. Although the main advantage is to increase potential customers and therefore sales, there are some other positive effects: sharing on social media, backlinks, User Generated Content, and so much more.
This article aims to explain how collaboration with influencers can improve your SEO strategy and traffic results.
Impact of Influencer Marketing on your SEO
Before explaining how/why influence marketing can have an interesting impact on your SEO, let’s get back to the definition and the concept. An influencer is someone who has influence in your industry, thematic, depending on the size of its network, its engagement rate and the level of trust granted by its audience. Most of the time, influencers spread the word by sharing their content on their own website, blog or social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin …).
In the same time, link building remains one of SEO’s most important ranking criteria. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to acquire qualitative and trusting links. In this regard, influence marketing can help you get qualitative links, but also increase the commitment signals from your users.
Influence Marketing to create Inbound Links
Influence marketing can certainly help you generate backlinks. The only problem is that most influencers will reveal that they are sponsored links and you will lose credibility. One way around this problem is to create influential campaigns supported by content. Do not imagine influencers as an extension of your sales team. Instead, they play an ambassador role, highlighting your expertise and products in their own way. When working with influencers, why not create campaigns related to issues specific to your sector? Invite them to create content that reflects their thoughts or talk about your product as a solution to their problems, and so on. These are perhaps good ways to circumvent the obligation to make this sponsorship public.
Inbound links can actually increase the authority of your domain and thus your ranking and traffic. Depending on your budget and resources, you should start with micro-influencers (an influencer with a smaller scope, but with a high commitment rate) to develop your entry strategy. In fact, an influencer with two million followers may not be as powerful and engaging as a micro-influencer specific to your industry that has only 40,000 subscribers. Often, micro-influencers retain a certain authenticity compared to the greatest influencers who may have lost it with repeated partnerships.
Influence marketing improves brand awareness and commitment
Engagement and traffic are Moz’s ranking factors. But when it comes to building relationships with influencers, the toughest thing is to be heard amongst the competition. To increase traffic to your site, you need to hook your target audience. This is why influence marketing is very effective in maximizing your potential reach. Nielsen recently conducted a survey that found that “92% of consumers around the world trust word of mouth and friends / family recommendations before any other kind of advertising – an increase of 18% since 2007.” The recommendations Influencers are perceived as a primary source of user confidence on social networks. They are indeed supposed to say what they really think about a product or service. You can benefit from their community to improve the visibility of your brand via social networks, blogs or videos.
Sysomos shared an interesting infographic summarizing the value of influence marketing:
