What is Influencer Marketing & Why It’s Great for SEO

The days of not understanding SEO are starting to fade away, as well as the black hat tricks that propelled businesses to the front page of Google search! With Google continually updating their algorithms, there has been an influx in the importance of social signals and what it means to rank within search engines. This brings us to the topic of today… “What is influencer marketing and why it is great for SEO”

Influencer marketing means to focus on using popular leaders in social media to deliver your message to the larger market. Often, this leader is either inspired by your message, hired to deliver your message or directly paid to deliver your brands message. This includes delivering your message to their website readers, Twitter followers, Facebook fans, Pinterest followers, Youtube subscribes, Email lists and any other large scaled following.

Why Influencer Marketing is Becoming a Must:

As Google has started taking in all factors of your online presence, Social Media Marketing has been on the rise and is steadily showing authority in Google’s eyes. With many more people understanding how and why it is important to optimize your website for keywords, links & great content – Google decided it’s also important to see how your website/company influences the population.

How Influencer Marketing Impacts Your Traffic & SEO:

Domain & Page Level Links

• These are referring to inbound and outbound links from your website and pages within your website. Google takes into consideration the quality of all these links by determining the authority of the websites that are linking to you. The higher the domain & page authority of these links, the more Google rewards you.

Engagement & Traffic

• Search engines also heavily consider the amount of traffic coming to your site and your ability to keep the users engaged. For example, if an influencer backlinks to your website and creates a high flow of traffic, Google will pay attention to what those users do when they find themselves on your website. Are they interacting? Are they spending time reading your content and clicking through pages to discover more? These are the things search engines want to see. Make sure your website is designed beautifully and the content is engaging. Design the content to have the right flow to it. Keep the users engaged!

Social Metrics

• Google and other search engines also really want to see how many tweets, shout-outs & other forms of social sharing your brand and website attain. Having these social influencers share your product, brand or message sends these social signals out to search engines. All improving your search engine rankings!

How to Get Influencers to Share Your Content:

Create Great Content

• This part is not only the beginning of getting influencers to share your content, but the most important factor an influencer considers when they decide to share your content. High quality and informative content makes all the difference. Spend time perfectly crafting what you are discussing. Make it interesting, engaging, emotional or downright funny! This makes it much more appealing to share from the influencer, as well as the people who read it! Thus, creating more social signals and boosting your rankings!

Find the Right Influencer

• Don’t just reach out to any influencer you see with a large following. This may get you a boost in traffic, but the kind of traffic you will be getting will not be the kind that interacts and engages with your website. For a quick example, if you are selling upscale cocktail dresses, do not reach out to a professional football player to share your content. You’re wasting their time and your money!

Create an Action List

When you find the right influencers, you need to decide how you are going to get them to share your content, idea, product etc. This action list can include:

• Email outreach – finding their contact info and asking them to share your content or letting them know you created a great piece of content related to their expertise and to share it.
• Pay for it – create a budget you would be comfortable paying to have them share your product, content or idea. Reach out the influencer and ask them how much it costs to get retweeted, mentioned & etc.
• Give it away – Say you have a product, contact the influencer and ask them if they would accept your product for free in exchange for a shout out or product review

There are many ways to go about having an influencer share your work. You just need to get crafty with it! Influencer marketing is quickly becoming a thing of focus to digital marketers and search engines alike! With your new-found knowledge on how and why influencer marketing works, you should now have at least a few ideas to get you going and making the most of this wide web of opportunity!