If you want to play fair and reach the top place in the SERPs without penalties, your website may need a slight boost. SEO efforts make a huge difference and can take you much higher than where you started. You can build links by creating wonderful content and optimizing your pages for relevant keywords to increase rankings.
But where’s that boost?
The answer is the combination of influencer marketing and SEO. The two work perfectly together, each playing their role. Search engine optimization makes your website highly usable and pleasant for both Internet users and search engines. On the other hand, influencers help with brand awareness to ensure those SEO efforts skyrocket for you.
In this how-to article, we’ll overlook the common traits of influencer SEO and see how you can combine the two approaches to achieve the best results for your brand.
Influencer Marketing and SEO: What They Have in Common
Influencer marketing and SEO fit well together in one strategy and are also somewhat similar in terms of results. Collaborating with niche-specific influencers with your target audience as their readers, viewers, followers, etc., boosts brand awareness.
People hear about you once or twice and get interested. Then, they either intentionally click on your link in an influencer’s post or stumble upon your blog post or a landing page on Google, remembering the name. As a result, you may get lots of potential buyers, readers, viewers, etc., depending on who you’re looking for.
Speaking of clear common features, both influencer marketing and SEO:
- Boost online visibility
- Increase traffic
- Amp up sales
- Improve the perception and reputation of your brand
- Boost awareness
A great marketing integration and SEO in an influencer’s blog will also bring you a high-quality, valuable backlink. Inbound links are an effective off-site optimization approach for increasing relevant traffic and improving traffic quality since the people who click on them are likely to already be interested in your niche.
All of this can improve engagement metrics such as time on page, conversion, bounce rate, etc. Of course, this will only work if you collaborate with the right people and combine influencer and SEO approaches properly.
Combining Influencer Marketing and SEO Efforts
Let’s see what you can do to use these two great brand marketing approaches together.
#1 Inbound link building
First of all, what are inbound links?
Also called backlinks, these are references on other websites to your pages. Whenever you see a link on one site leading to another one – it’s an inbound one. These are like recommendations from other sources saying that your source is credible and high-quality, worth referring to. Such links are also a Google ranking factor.
So, backlinks work as reputation boosters in the eyes of both users and search engines. High-rank website visitors see a link to your product or blog post there and realize you’re worth checking out. Search engine crawlers or “spiders” see your link on that page and consider your source relevant and top-quality because that high-rank site vouched for you.
Improving, checking, and maintaining your backlink profile is very important. High-authority, relevant backlinks will improve your situation, but spammy, low-quality ones will ruin those good results. To analyze your profile, use a do follow backlinks checker like the one by SE Ranking.
The tool shows all the essential link metrics, including:
- Domain and page trust
- Total number of referring domains and backlinks
- Total number of new and lost referring domains and backlinks
- .edu and .gov links
- The ratio of do follow/no follow links
- The ratio of links to your homepage and other pages
- Top anchors
- A distribution map, etc.
Full knowledge of your profile will help you see which influencer collaboration works for your SEO.
But first, you need to engage in those collaborations. Connect with several popular influencers in your industry who have high-ranking websites with active audiences. Arrange to get a backlink from each of them. This will give you the following benefits:
- Within a large audience, there may be people who will repost your link to their sites as well, multiplying your results.
- Influencers will promote your link along with their content.
- They will build links to that article with your link, multiplying your efforts.
- They will share the content on social media and can mention your account there.
By the way, you can also repost your content on social media to reach more people and get more backlinks. And if the influencers you work with do the same, you’ll increase brand awareness and multiply the number of backlinks to your pages.
Three out of four of the most popular platforms are owned by Meta, so it’s wise to pay attention to them. With the smart use and promotion of social media, you can find more platforms for backlinks. For example, often, when you search for a brand, aside from the official site, you’ll find its social media ranking high:
Sharing any news or posts on those platforms will be good for the brand. And if it’s your link, you get only benefits.
#2 Keyword promotion
Another approach to using both influencer marketing and SEO is arranging keyword promotion. When discussing your cooperation with relevant influencers, you can provide branded keywords for them to use in their blog posts, on social media, in videos and images, etc. Or, if you provide a ready-to-use copy, just include those queries there.
This will amplify your SEO efforts and promote those keywords, improving your online presence.
This approach works well with niche terms. For example, if you own an upcycled jacket brand, using niche-specific keywords will help you stand out and reach out to the most precise target audience (people looking for clean living and upcycled brands).
Use keywords like “clothes from upcycled materials”, “upcycled jacket brand”, etc. Thus, you’ll promote your brand in the niche and make a statement. All of this happens through the combination of SEO and influencers.
#3 Unique, curiosity-spiking content
Content is what sparks curiosity in your target audience. Its quality has to be top-notch, its creativity has to draw attention, and it should have lots of social shares. While you can definitely create such content, how about trying influencer marketing?
Influencers are people who create engaging content for a living. So, it’s only fair to assume they know exactly what to do.
The content on your website should aim to appear in search results by providing clear answers creatively. Google doesn’t only count the keywords you place in your copy but also content quality, how well you use those queries, and how readable the copy is.
So, the influencer-SEO combination in this case is:
- Influencers helping you create content for your website
- Influencers creating sponsored content on your behalf
- Influencers encouraging your target audience to create UGC (user-generated content) with your branded keyword(s) and/or hashtag(s), which you can later use to build social proof
UGC is increasing in popularity due to the desire of potential buyers to seek other consumers’ opinions on a product, service, or business.
So, by collaborating with niche-specific influencers, you can create traffic-boosting content for your website, have great content about you on their blogs and/or social media, and receive more user-generated content to increase brand awareness and build a reputation.
We’re not only talking about written content. Your influencers can create aesthetic pictures that will garner just as much attention. For example, Daniel Wellington, a pioneer brand of Instagram influencer marketing, collaborates with micro- and nano influencers, getting not only profit but beautiful content out of the collabs.
#4 Traffic boosting
61% of people trust influencer recommendations. At the very least, they will click on the link to see what that person liked so much about the brand. So, by including influencer SEO in your strategy, you’re going to boost traffic through the vast reach of the person you work with. To improve the quality of that traffic and intensify its flow, you need to reach out to your target audience.
Influencers can do that for you by encouraging their active followers to visit your pages, engage with them, and take target actions.
So, through their channels, you can talk to your potential buyers, improve brand visibility, and build your own community based on the already existing ones from the bloggers promoting your business. And the best thing is, it’s not only done through their blogs and websites but also through social media.
Continuing the topic of upcycling brands, if you own one and want to get maximum traffic, choose someone specifically working in your niche. For example, Lily Fulop is a niche author who talks about sustainability and upcycling in fashion. Her Instagram project Mindful Mending has over 40K followers, which means collaborating with help won’t strain your budget too much and can get you more prospects than just passersby.
Summary
Combining influencer marketing and SEO can bring you more benefits than if you were to use either of the two approaches alone:
- Brand awareness boost
- Reaching out to the right audience
- Faster ranking increase
- More user-generated content
- Improve content quality
- Improve the rating of your branded keywords and niche terms
- Boost traffic
- More high-quality backlinks
Choose the right people and keywords to work with to combine SEO and influencers properly. Relevant influencers will turn your target audience’s attention right to your brand.
Build links through the influencers you collaborate with and ensure the target, niche, and branded keywords are present in the copy you provide, or their usage is arranged otherwise. Keep track of your backlink profile using digital tools and use your collaboration efforts to draw traffic to conversion pages and other important pages of your website.
