The dark days of SEO are gone. You no longer need to compete against businesses that are using black-hat SEO methods to win the search engine race. After several updates to Google’s search ranking algorithms, social proof, and social signals play a significant role too. While this means that you can have a fair competition, it’s still a challenge to climb to the top of search engine rankings.
In fact, the challenge is even bigger as website owners are more SEO savvy and they continually become more aware of how to optimize their SEO activities to get best results. This is why you should be working on creating friendly relationships with influencers in your niche too.
One of the main pillars of today’s online marketing is influencer marketing. Influencers help you create valuable, shareable content and promote it in front of followers who would want to share the content.
Instead of relying solely on keywords and link-building, you’ll be counting on the influence and reach of these individuals to leverage your marketing efforts. In this post, you’ll learn about the importance of influencer marketing and how you can make the most of the influencers to boost your rankings.
Impact of Influencer Marketing on Your Traffic and SEO
You may be wondering how exactly influencer marketing affects your search ranking. To better understand the correlation, you’ll need to understand some of the most important search ranking factors and how influencer marketing can positively impact those factors.
Positionly has prepared a list of some of the most important Google ranking factors to gain more insight into search engine algorithms. From this data, you can get some ideas about how to adapt your SEO campaigns to the changing rules and updates.
Let’s find out which of these factors of the influencer marketing can impact and how, so you can better understand what you need to do to boost your ranking:
Domain- and page-level link features
These refer to links coming to and from your website and web pages. Google considers the quantity and quality of those links by determining the authority of the sites linking to you. This means that when several high-authority domains link to you, it could sharply boost your search rankings.
Influencers from your niche who own a website or blog are likely to have a high domain authority. So when they organically talk about your brand and link to you, they help you build quality backlinks to boost your SEO.
Content-based features
This is concerned with the relevance and quality of content on your site. It also refers to several other factors like keyword usage, topic-modeling algorithm scores, etc. You could work with influencers to enrich your content reserve by having them come up with topics and ideas for fresh content and having them write useful, unique, and shareable guest posts. Then you can be sure they will come up with the high-quality educational resource, and the popularity of the author will help create a natural buzz when it comes to content distribution.
Engagement and traffic
Google also considers the quantity of traffic coming to your site and your ability to engage those visitors. Let’s say an influencer organically links to your resources, talks about your brand and encourages their fans to visit your site.
This will be sending in plenty of traffic to your site. The massive referral traffic can engage and convert well when combined with high-quality content, well-organized, fresh design and clear website structure. High engagement rates will clearly be a reliable quality indicator to Google, resulting in ranking boost.
Page-level social metrics
Another important ranking factor refers to social signals. Search engines look at the quality and quantity of tweeted links. They will also consider the number of your social shares linking to your pages. When an influencer shares your content in his/ hers social channels or creates guest posts that draw in their fans, they help in encouraging more people to share your content on social media.
Getting Influencer Marketing to Boost Your Performance
Now that you have a better understanding of how influencer marketing works for your performance, you can start leveraging influencers to help you boost your traffic and rankings. Here are a few tips to get you started:
1. Encourage social shares from influencers
If you have collaborated with the major influencers in the relevant industry, have them share some of your content on social media. It’s ideal if they share co-created content. Otherwise, you could have them encourage their social media followers to check out some interesting piece of info on your site.
Since Google search results have started displaying tweets on a real-time basis, this is especially great for visibility on search engine result pages. Here’s how it looks:
Let’s say a key influencer in your niche tweets about you while several followers of that influencer happen to search for the influencer’s name on Google within that timeframe. They’re going to notice their tweet about your brand/product immediately.
Additionally, social shares by influencers can help you gain more visibility and raise awareness about your brand amongst the influencer’s followers. There’s a high chance of influencer social media shares boosting your CTR and driving visitors to your site.
2. Get featured on their blog/channel
You’ve learned that natural, high-quality links play a significant role in your search ranking. One of your influencer marketing tactics should include building quality links through influencers.
You can encourage them to write about you or just mention your brand on their blog.
This will affect your referral traffic positively passing new visitors to your site, so you will have a chance to keep them engaged and convert them to leads. But, getting back to the newest Google update, reviews will demand to add nofollow tag to the link. As a result, the SEO juice won’t pass. Unfortunately, this tactic won’t be useful to strengthen your domain and page authority regarding SEO.
3. Co-create unique, shareable content
Once you have attracted visitors to your site, you want to keep them engaged. As pointed out earlier, engagement is an important search ranking factor. So you wouldn’t want people to leave shortly after visiting your site because the content wasn’t relevant or captivating enough.
Work with influencers to enrich your content reserve and provide your audience with fresh content from a new perspective. Have them come up with a quote/ quotes or perhaps they can have any new ideas that you hadn’t thought of before.
The idea is to add unique and intriguing content to your site so you can engage visitors and encourage them to share the content with their friends.
Additionally, co-creating content with influencers will help you gain access to the influencer’s existing readership or follower base. There are plenty of ways to co-create content. Maybe you can have a Q&A; interview; blog post or video.
Example:
Twitter’s Influencer Q & A pieces are some great examples of co-created content. They regularly create pieces for their Influencer Q & A section, interviewing industry influencers and brands. The idea behind these pieces is to show readers what the influencers think about using Twitter or other social media platforms for marketing.
4. You could also work with relevant YouTubers, and Boost Traffic
have them review your product. Other than honest reviews, you could also collaborate with influencers to create sponsored posts for their blog or channel. These influencers can add nofollow links to your product page or website, sending visitors your way and improving your visibility.
Example:
PUIG harnessed the power of influential bloggers to promote the release of Prada Candy Florale. They got together with several bloggers in the lifestyle category to create sponsored blog posts explaining and reviewing the new products.
5. Promote giveaways through influencers to strengthen your referral traffic
Every marketer knows that giveaways can help promote brands and boost engagement. And promoting a giveaway through an influencer can improve visibility and bring in more potential customers. But what does that have to do with traffic? You might be surprised to find that hosting giveaway contests through influencers can have a significant impact on your website performance.
When an influencer shares information about your giveaway, you can use the opportunity to send visitors to your site. Have the influencer give details about prizes and then inform their followers to visit your site for more information on the giveaway. Even a simple link to your site without the additional invitation to visit could still encourage people to visit your site.
Example:
Fashion brand DSW did just this and created a giveaway contest where fans will have the opportunity to win a $250 gift card. They promoted the game through different style bloggers, who hyperlinked to their site for readers to easily visit the brand website.
You can additionally benefit from this opportunity by adding some rules that require contestants to follow you on social media. So this means you can kill two birds with one stone and grow your following on Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, or any other social media channel you’re on.
For DSW, the rules required contestants to follow the brand on Pinterest and create a board, especially for the contest. And then they need to pin some shoes and outfits from the brand’s pin board. Contestants will then have to submit their name and info to qualify for the giveaway contest.
So giveaways hosted through influencers result in growth in social following and website traffic and engagement.
Conclusion
Now you have a thorough understanding of the impact of influencers on your search engine ranking. The tips and ideas highlighted here should be able to boost your efforts to a significant extent and ensure you make the most of the influencers to do so. Which of these ideas will you implement next? Do you have any more ideas you’d like to add to the list? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.