How Influencer Marketing Can Improve Your SEO

It’s 2022 and we are no strangers to seeing our favorite celebrities raving about their preferred brands when scrolling through our social media feeds, or coming across bloggers promoting their favorite products when searching the web. 93% of marketers utilize influencer marketing and nearly 90% of marketers believe influencer marketing is effective. 

Brands have increasingly relied on guest bloggers and popular social media influencers to  catch customers' attention,  build customer trust and boost sales. It also helps brands bolster their reputation in their sector when it comes to being a reliable source of information. US influencer marketing spend is forecasted to reach $4.14 billion in 2022, according to Insider Intelligence. 

The Organic search channel is extremely valuable to influencer marketing initiatives, as they both underpin goals of reaching new audiences and generating attention and amplification, whether through links or shares.  The rise of social media has created a vast landscape for people to access content, from stories on Instagram or tutorials on TikTok. The need to focus on tracking, strategizing, campaign creation, and especially search engine optimization (SEO) has become vital to influencer marketing.

How Influencer Marketing Can Improve Your SEO

Influencer marketing has the ability to impact both on and off-site SEO. Utilizing influencers in your marketing strategy is beneficial to your site’s engagement, ranking in the SERPs through a natural off-site strategy, and ensuring customers trust your brand. Here are a few elements of SEO that can highly benefit from the use of influencer marketing.

Backlinks 

When an influencer features your product or brand on their social platform, they help generate better backlinks for your website, and more traffic to your brand, leading to more authority. In addition to sharing on social, most influencers are likely to have their own platform, providing another chance of referral traffic or link.

Backlinks, or any inbound or incoming link from another site, have a high level of impact when it comes to your site’s ranking. 

When an influencer creates content revolving around your brand and includes your website’s link, this creates the opportunity for others to share your link on their platforms, thus creating a domino effect of engagement. This is generally how viral content started. With more engagement comes more exposure, which could even lead to higher authority brands adding your link to their site. This all leads toward improving your “E.A.T” (expertise, authority, trustworthiness), a very important part of Google’s ranking guidelines.
 

Content Creation

When influencers create content about your brand, your website benefits. Not only is utilizing influencers for content creation both time and cost-efficient, but it can also benefit your ROI while increasing your brand presence. Influencers can create clickable content by sharing links on their social platforms or websites since they have an audience of their own. 

They also can use your brand’s keywords when posting their content, helping associate your brand name with certain phrases you want to be associated with and help build recognition. By providing influencers with a handful of long-tail keywords, your brand’s name will have consistency in being represented in a certain way by the targeted audience.

Some influencers encourage their followers to create content of their own but link it with a specified hashtag. This user-generated content keeps your brand’s name out there and also creates a sense of community around those who value and trust your brand. 
 

Engaging With Your Audience

Influencer marketing impacts the way people look at and feel about your brand. It also opens the door to a potential new audience that might be unfamiliar with your offering. This will generate raw exposure and in turn help build authority in the space, improving brand recognition the next time people are in search and run across you.

When influencers share your content with their network, folks who may be unfamiliar with you become exposed to your brand, capturing their attention and leading them to your site to learn more. Or, if the audience is already familiar with the brand, their trust  may be reassured or strengthened because someone they look up to or as an expert said so. 

Influencers typically have a large following, ensuring an interested and engaged audience, which almost makes it a turn-key solution for marketers. This allows for companies to reach a niche audience that is already interested in their industry, with fairly low-opportunity cost..

When seeing an influencer explains how a product or brand has impacted their life or shares a positive review, consumers are more inclined to make a purchase. 8 out of 10 consumers have purchased something based on the recommendation of an influencer.  

Examples of Influencer Marketing Success

Let’s take a look at how different industries have utilized influencers to create and execute successful SEO strategies. 

Adobe Uses Ambassadors to Drive Content Creation and Engagement

Adobe uses a form of influencer marketing through its Adobe Express Ambassador Program. This is a group of individuals who are social media marketing, business, and creativity leaders in the Adobe community. Through their different crafts and projects, they help others in the community find their voice and help inspire and validate their passions.

On social media and in other digital spaces, Adobe Express Ambassadors share their creations using Adobe products with their audiences, demonstrating how they use their various software in different examples of their art. 

“Our ambassadors aren’t just product evangelists; they’re experts in social media marketing and design, eager to share their knowledge, and strategies so you can quickly create with confidence,” - Adobe Express Program

In leading by example, not only are consumers able to get a better understanding of how Adobe’s products are used but also become inspired by the endless possibilities of what they can create. 

Adobe benefits from ambassadors creating content and generating engagement with their audiences. 

Adobe’s SEO strategy benefits from its ambassadors creating content and promoting it in their networks. With more content circulating, there is a greater chance that links will bring back signals to your site, boosting your authority, with another benefit of exposure. Adobe’s keyword reach is bound to increase with the amount of new content plugging in popular keywords. When searchers include certain keywords in their search queries, both Abode’s site content and ambassador content can rank higher. 

Hallmark Increases Reach Through Sharing Product Links

Hallmark created a campaign around the holidays called #KeepsakeIt. This campaign featured various influencers sharing their favorite holiday memories. Each image featured a Hallmark ornament. 

The content included links to Hallmark’s account and site, encouraging others to participate with them and buy ornaments from Hallmark. Not only did Hallmark generate engagement through the influencer’s content, but the greater community was invited to participate by sharing their memories and traditions. 

In terms of marketing performance, their site’s exposure benefited from the increased impressions and reach. With each post that was shared with the #KeepsakeIt tag and link, more and more exposure was generated, resulting in more chatter around Hallmark. When searching for holiday decor, these product links became visible in the SERPs.

Evolution of Smooth (eos) Increases Influencer Marketing Budget and Sees Significant Spike in Traffic  

Evolution of Smooth (eos) is an example of a company that went all in on TikTok by dedicating a substantial portion of its marketing budget to working with influencers. In addition to having highly-regarded beauty influencers create content, they also leveraged them for sponsored posts, new product launches, advertisements, and more. 

Eos also launched a campaign recruiting different artists to create art out of their widely-recognized lip balms. Each post had a boosted advertisement within it, linking to Target.com to purchase. Not only did millions participate in engaging with the content, but eos received a huge increase in site traffic, backline quality, and sales.

The Bottom Line 

Influencer marketing presents time and cost-efficient opportunities that can lead to increased traffic, quality backlinks, and strengthened trust between your customers and brand. Its relationship with SEO is that it helps build brand authority through external elements and helps with short-term referral traffic. Influencer marketing continues to evolve as new platforms surface, allowing organizations to grow their brand and reach in new and creative ways.