How to Harness the Potential of Influencer Marketing for SEO

Intro

We all know and love social media influencers for their ability to captivate audiences and boost engagement rates and sales. However, not many of us know that our beloved influencer marketing campaigns have another use case — search engine optimization (SEO).

You heard that right! You can easily leverage influencer marketing to boost your SEO score and improve brand visibility. Confused about how that’s possible? Well, this article’s for you. Here, we’ll dig into how to harness the potential of influencer marketing for SEO.

1. Let’s cover the basics

Before we dive into the meatier stuff, let’s first discuss a few basic ways you can leverage influencer marketing to improve your SEO score.

(i) Backlinks

Influencer partnerships are excellent for generating backlinks, mainly because if an influencer makes a video about your brand or writes about you in their blog, they can easily integrate do-follow links.

For this reason, experts suggest partnering with influencers with a high follower count or domain rating (DR).

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(ii) Social signals

Google says social signals (e.g., likes, social shares, follower count, etc.) aren’t a direct ranking factor. However, experts say there’s a correlation between strong social signals and content being placed on Google Discover.

This means that partnering with influencers who have strong social signals also impacts where your content is shown and the potential traffic it can have.

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(iii) Social proof

Google uses the Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (EEAT) algorithm to identify how to rank which content. Because social proof, like testimonials and reviews from influencers, acts as “trustworthy,” high-quality content that contains them is pushed higher.

(iv) Authentic content

Search engines promote content that’s unique, relevant, and of high quality. So, what better way to boost your SEO content than to use influencer partnerships to create authentic and relatable content? And you can hire content writers to create authentic and personalized contents for you.

(v) Integration of keywords

Imagine yourself trying to capitalize on a keyword. You can use your website and social channels to promote that keyword. But you know what else you can use? Your network of influencers!

Experts recommend giving your influencers long-tail keywords they can try to rank for. To make the process even simpler for them, you can even provide them with access to AI content generator tools that can integrate keywords within any kind of script.

(vi) Multimedia content

Last but not least, influencer marketing can also be an excellent strategy to rank for the same keyword in different multimedia formats. This not only helps you gain visibility but also improves your customers' experience.

Besides, different influencers create content for different types of users — a content marketer, influencer, and software developer influencer will talk about different use cases of ChatGPT.

2. Run contests and surveys with them

Another way to leverage influencer marketing for your SEO growth is to get the help of influencers to bring attention to your contests, surveys, and giveaways (this will allow you to boost organic traffic by 10x).

Fawaz Naser, the CEO of Softlist, says, “Content creation can be challenging, and influencers bring fresh perspectives, an engaged audience, and new creativity. They can help make content go viral, like with contests and giveaways.”

“For example, we once saw Gloria Ferrer Winery run a #GloriousBites contest with micro-influencers, generating huge social impressions and clicks to their site.”

3. Identify influencers for local SEO campaigns

If you’re a local small business, you can do no wrong by partnering up with nano, micro, and macro influencers for your campaigns.

“Regional influencers can be particularly useful in improving your local SEO efforts. They can help you propel your brand visibility within a specific geographical location, which could thereby result in higher local search rankings,” says Mia Comic, Content Marketer at Instrumental.

Even if you’re a larger brand, you can consider using the same scripts for different kinds of influencers in different regions. For example, if you’re a brand that operates in a country like India (a place where there are state-specific languages), you can alter your influencer marketing scripts based on the languages your customers speak.

The same rings true even if you’re a multinational corporation — all you need to do is identify the right influencers to create local and regional campaigns.

4. Leverage their personal brand

We previously discussed EEAT — an algorithm that, among many other things, also rewards expertise and authoritativeness.

For example, if you were to create content with Neil Patel on a marketing topic, you'd have a better chance of ranking higher, even as a website with a low DR and even if you’re competing with big-name websites.

Well, if you partner with influencers, you can also leverage their authority and expertise and co-create blog, video, and podcast content with them. Content like this will get pushed faster on the search engine results page (SERP) as opposed to content that doesn’t have unique perspectives on influencers.

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5. Host social media takeovers with them

While this doesn’t correlate to an increased SEO score, hosting social media takeovers with influencers does lay the foundation for boosting brand visibility, building relevance, and generating authentic content — ‌all of which ultimately help improve your SEO score.

Utilizing advanced tools for removing objects from photos AI can further enhance the visual appeal of your content.

That’s to say, this one activity raises so much hype for your business that you can easily capitalize on all the backlinks, user-generated content (UGC), and increased brand awareness it brings you.

Holger Sindbaek, the owner of World of Card Games, shares, "In our journey to strengthen the brand, we discovered the unique impact of hosting social media takeovers with niche influencers. These events weren't just about showcasing our game; they were opportunities for influencers to narrate their gaming experiences, creating a relatable and engaging narrative for our audience. This strategy led to a surge in direct traffic and strengthened brand awareness. More importantly, it resulted in new users trying our game and becoming part of our regular player base. The key takeaway was clear: authentic influencer collaborations on social media can be a powerful tool for driving engagement and building a community, which is vital for any brand's growth."

6. Partner with SEO influencers

There are multiple influencers on social media who specialize in different niches. While your first thought might be to partner with influencers who belong to the same niche as you, you can also partner with SEO experts who are influencers on social media.

For example, consider names like Rand Fishkin, Neil Patel, Lily Ray, Jeremy Moser, and Alyeda Solis. (If you’re a smaller brand, you can look at local SEO influencers and/or micro-SEO influencers.)

These partnerships can either be on a barter basis or completely paid, and they’ll essentially help you:

• Get the insights of these experts on how to boost your SEO score and create a name for your business.
• Build tons of marketing material around such partnerships (you can consider a build-in-public model for your SEO efforts, where you regularly update your target audience on the efforts you’re taking to create an improved experience for them).
• If your influencers are up for it, they can create case studies around your brand and the steps they took to improve your SEO score (which will also result in tons of high-quality backlinks and improved visibility for you).

8. Leverage trending topics

Christine Corbin, a social media strategist, suggests capitalizing on trending topics during influencer collaborations.

In her own words, “SEO-optimized content can take a while to gain traction, but if you capitalize on something that’s currently taking off culturally, you may see traffic much sooner.

I’d suggest using social platforms like TikTok to research your industry’s current trends and work from there. You can also use sites like Google Trends to see what people are searching for now.

For example, I worked with a fine jewelry brand that makes a line of skull jewelry that we promoted heavily around the time of the Wednesday show’s launch on Netflix. This content could have been so powerful with an influencer partner to style the pieces!”

9. Use websites like HARO and its alternatives

James Taylor, an SEO strategist at Embryo, explains why using websites like HARO can be an excellent strategy for helping boost your SEO score:

“I think small businesses often underestimate just how much press they can get by working directly with influencers and, to a broader extent, industry publishers looking for gifting opportunities.

Using platforms like Qwoted, HARO, and Press Loft, you’ll be able to find influencers actively looking for brands to work with for a gifting guide they’re putting together (many of which are seasonal).

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If you’re a small brand that sells products and is looking for exposure to a relevant audience, then gifting items for a product roundup or providing high-quality imagery alone (Press Loft is great for these types of requests) not only guarantees inclusion and exposure to the audience itself, but you can also stipulate that you want a backlink as part of the feature.

The result is a massive increase in authority over time from publishers, influencers, and websites relevant to your industry, at a fraction of the cost of outsourcing your link building and PR to a third party.”

Leverage Ranktracker to find the impact of your SEO efforts

Let’s be real: Even if you’ve tried and tested different influencer marketing strategies to improve your SEO results, you may never know which one is effective unless ‌you track results.

And‌ now might be the right time to introduce Ranktracker, a solution that, as the title gives away, allows you to track your search engine rankings.

Not only that, but you can also track your quality backlinks, find keywords, check SERPs, do web audits, and more with Ranktracker.

Safe to say, when it comes to leveraging influencer marketing for SEO, having a tool like this in your tech stack is necessary to capture potential customers.

Create a free account today to take advantage of our offerings and improve your SEO strategy with your social media posts.