Influencer Marketing for SEO Success: What is It and How to Leverage It Effectively?

eSearch engine optimization is one of the most powerful tools for making a business thrive in today’s world. When people go online to look for information, products, or services, they often start their journey with search engines. Thus, by making your website visible in search results, you can gain recognition and drive organic traffic to your site.
There are many obvious ways to improve your SEO, such as keyword research, building quality backlink profiles, and providing impeccable user experiences. However, there are also many less obvious ways to level up your SEO, and influencer marketing is one of them.
What is it? How does it work? And how can your business leverage this tactic for success? In this guide, we will answer all these questions and help you achieve the outcomes you are aiming for!

What Is Influencer Marketing?

In a nutshell, it is a form of advertising that thrives in the social media era. It involves a collaboration between brands and online influencers to increase outreach, improve brand recognition, and promote the company’s products and services.
Then who is an online influencer? It is someone who has an established audience and credibility in the online environment. It could be a celebrity, a content creator with a large following, or a small creator with highly engaged audience.
Celebrities with loyal followers who watch them and trust their opinions have a significant impact on their audiences’ decisions, hence the name influencers. That’s why such collaborations can be very effective. First of all, they get your brand in front of new, well-established audiences. And secondly, they increase your credibility because those audiences already trust the creators you are collaborating with.

How Does Influencer Marketing Work?

Although every company may take a different approach to this type of marketing, in general, the process can be broken down into the following seven stages:

• • Step 1: The brand identifies the short-term and long-term goals it wants to achieve. Typically, the most common goals are to increase awareness, expand outreach, and generate more sales. Then, the company defines a clear target audience that it wants to reach.

• • Step 2: Once the goals and target audience are clear, the company researches the potential content creators it can collaborate with. At this point, it’s crucial to find influencers who perfectly align with your niche, product or service and overall brand reputation. Also, it’s important to find creators with a engaged audience and proven authority.

• • Step 3: After identifying potential partners, the company needs to reach out to them and make a collaboration proposal. Most often, this is done via social media or email. During this stage, the partners discuss their vision, goals, deliverables, compensation, and other important details.

• • Step 4: This stage is often skipped. But it’s no less crucial than others. After agreeing on a collaboration, the sides must work together to develop a thorough plan for their campaign. It’s important to plan everything from the content type to any creative elements that will be used in the campaign. Careful planning helps align the efforts of partners and bring the best outcomes.

• • Step 5: The next stage involves creating the content and delivering it to the audience according to the plan determined earlier. The process can vary significantly depending on the discussed terms of collaboration.

• • Step 6: Finally, the last stage of partnership is the most important. It includes monitoring and measuring the outcomes, engaging with the audience, and analyzing the effectiveness of the campaign in order to make the necessary changes to achieve the desired result.

How Can Influencer Marketing Impact SEO?

The link between SEO and influencer marketing might not be very obvious. Yet, it’s there.
This form of advertising can bring you a variety of benefits, including a boost in SEO. Here’s how it can affect your site’s ranking:

It Can Improve Your Backlink Profile

Backlinks make a significant contribution to your website’s ranking. Quality links from top websites build your authority and trust, respectively, bringing you higher in the search results. And teaming up with creators can help you significantly improve your link profile.
The majority of online leaders either have their own site or have access to other high-authority websites. When they link back to you or help you earn mentions on other sites, you earn quality backlinks that can increase your ranking.
Furthermore, publications made by famous bloggers are more likely to be shared by others. Thus, there is a good chance that other high-authority domains will pick up your link, too, and share it on their sites. As a result, your link profile will keep expanding, improving your SEO. At this point, you will likely need a reliable backlink checker tool like the one offered by SE Ranking. With its help, you will be able to keep track of and analyze your backlinks. This will help you fine-tune your SEO and influencer marketing strategies for maximum outcomes.

Creators Will Craft Unique and Resonating Content

Content is the key to effective search engine optimization. It must drive attention, intrigue the audience, and encourage your prospects to take action. The more relevant and engaging your copy is, the higher you will rank. However, crafting winning content isn’t easy. And that’s the first effect of influencer marketing.
Online leaders are real experts in content creation. They know how to craft captivating and shareable content that your target audience will love, and they can craft it on your behalf or help you do it better.
And that’s not all. Creators can also promote your branded hashtag and encourage their audiences to craft their own content for your business. This will bring you a lot of user-generated content and even more awareness.

It Can Increase Brand Awareness and Mention

When you partner with an established content creator, you get a chance to tap right into their audiences. Simply put, you gain a chance to get your brand noticed by a larger number of people, which can make your brand awareness skyrocket.
Moreover, followers tend to trust their favorite bloggers. Thus, they are more likely to share the content they post. That is, apart from being exposed to large audiences, you can also gain more brand mentions. As a result, more people will learn about your company, which will also affect your rankings.

It Can Boost Social Engagement

Famous creators typically have well-established and highly active audiences. This is because they have already built a strong bond with their followers. Due to this reason, influencer-led campaigns can gain much more engagement on social media than other forms of advertising.
Thus, by teaming up with influencers, you can tap into their relationship with the audience and boost your own social engagement level too. You will be able to get more likes, shares, comments, and other social signals. A study by the Harvard Business Review found that a 1% increase in influencer marketing spend can lead to an average of a 0.46% increase in engagement. That is, this strategy can definitely yield positive ROIs for your company.
According to Google, these signals don’t directly affect your ranking. However, they can affect it indirectly. Higher social engagement contributes to brand awareness and creates more buzz around your company. As a result, your business gains more trust, which will affect your position in SERPs.

It Can Drive Plenty of Traffic

It is no secret that the amount of traffic you receive on your website directly impacts your SEO. By sharing links to your website on their social media and blogs, influencers can potentially drive a lot of new visitors your way. This will naturally increase your overall traffic. And if you make those new visitors stick around and engage with your website, it will also have a positive impact on your position in the SERPs.
But wait, that’s not all. On top of that, according to a study by Inmar Intelligence, modern consumers tend to trust influencer recommendations a lot. In 2021, 84% of consumers made purchases based on the recommendations of their favorite bloggers. Thus, apart from bringing more traffic, this form of advertising can also boost your conversion rates. And this might be one of the most crucial answers to the question “How can influencer marketing impact your SEO?”.

Pros and Cons of Influencer Marketing for SEO

As you now know, influencer marketing can affect your SEO in a number of ways. Nevertheless, this approach has both its pros and cons that you must be aware of.

Pros:

• • Collaborations with the top bloggers can give you instant access to large, loyal, and active audiences who can convert into your brand advocates;

• • Unlike paid ads, this approach allows you to reach out to your prospects in a more authentic and natural way;

• • By teaming up with influencers, you can tap into their content creation geniuses and gain a lot of high-quality materials for your brand;

• • Bloggers tend to have a lot of trust and loyalty from their followers, and partnering with them means earning some of this trust and loyalty for your business too;

• • If done right, this form of promotion can bring you impressive traffic and conversion rates.

Cons:

• • Some bloggers cheat when building their audiences and might have “ghost followers”, who are inactive or fake;

• • According to Statista, the global influencer marketing value is $21.1 billion in 2023, which means that this field is very competitive and finding the best partners for your business can be rather challenging;

• • There are several types of bloggers, and they are distinguished by the size of their audience, as well as the loyalty and engagement level of their followers, and partnering with well-established creators can be very pricey.

The Bottom Line

So can influencer marketing impact SEO? Without any doubt! Now you know more about this form of promotion, its work from the “inside”, and its pros and cons. The conclusion is obvious – this form of advertising can indeed bring you higher traffic, better conversions, and more trust. As a result, it can positively affect your ranking in search results. But only if done right.
In order to get the most out of this approach, businesses need to follow a number of simple tips:

• • Have a clear goal in mind;

• • Identify your target audience;

• • Carefully research different content creators in your niche and contact the ones who match your needs best;

• • Reach out to bloggers personally and privately to set up a productive conversation;

• • Develop a thorough campaign plan and identify the core deliverables for measuring success;

• • Collaborate with the chosen partner closely to develop excellent content;

• • Keep an eye on the results and marketing dashboard metrics to find areas for improvement and hone your strategy for success;

By following these simple rules, you should be able to build a winning influencer marketing campaign that will help you expand your outreach and boost your SEO.