5 Reasons Why Influencer Marketing is Good for Your SEO

If you run a website or write a blog then you probably know that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is essential to help you gain traffic to your site. But did you know that influencer marketing is good for your SEO? Well targeted and constructed influencer marketing can build up high levels of engagement, and that can flow through to improved SEO for your site.

Virtually every business that operates a website does it because they hope to convert in some way or other. Maybe they want to sell more of their product online. Perhaps they simply want more people to see their site, to encourage to buy some product in-store. They could possibly be trying to build up an online community and want more people to join their group. No matter the reason that a business chooses to have a website, the fact is they want as many interested people as possible to visit it.

The problem is that people won’t immediately flock to your site the moment you make it live. You won’t suddenly find yourself grabbing the Number 1 in Google. You need to do a combination of marketing your site and structuring it in such a way that you can compete with the millions of other websites attempting to rank on the front page of Google.

Search engine optimization consists of the process of correctly structuring your site, along with some of your website marketing activities, including building up quality links to your site.

SEO can, at times, be a cutthroat business. Your competitors will also be rapidly trying to win over Google’s favor. However, if you do it properly, following relatively straightforward processes, you have a good chance of outflanking the opposition. And influencer marketing can certainly help you with this process.

The key advantage of influencer marketing is that it has highly influential people directing potential customers to your site. Google recognizes this, and in turn, rewards you for being “more important” in its eyes.

If you operate a website it is important that you build up relationships with your niche’s influencers. This will usually be a slow, gradual process.

You might begin by simply commenting on their posts and mentioning them in your comments. You might then develop into asking them questions, and where relevant, providing suggestions to them and their readers.

If you provide valuable assistance it is likely that the influencer will eventually take notice of you. At this point, you may find that they begin to share your material via their social media accounts.

In this situation, they are sending people in your direction without any formal relationship being made. They simply recognize you for your valuable suggestions and tell their followers about your expertise.

Keep cultivating relationships with influencers over the long term. The search engines will come to recognize this and reward these connections.

One advantage that a brand with a blog has compared to a brand with no real online presence is that the online firm has more options for building up influencer relationships. Anybody can pay an influencer to talk up their products, but if you are willing to put time and effort into building up online relationships you may be able to have influencers help you out for free.

To be of value to you, any influencer you work with needs to have an audience who are likely to have a genuine interest in your product. Google is not silly either, they will know if you are using a wrongly-targeted influencer, simply because you’ve gone for somebody who will work with you for a few dollars and who you haven’t developed a genuine relationship with.

There was a time when bloggers and website owners chased backlinks too vigorously. People believed that chasing backlinks was the most important part of SEO, and they would take them from anywhere. People would happily pay for backlinks on dodgy sites, that existed solely for the purpose of sharing links — on any topic imaginable.

It didn’t take Goole long to spot this process and adjust their algorithms to penalize such unethical behavior.

Jon’s list of SEO blunders are:

Backlinking is still a very important part of Google’s SEO algorithm. Google’s system is now clever enough to tell when a backlink is genuine or not. Only those backlinks that Google believes will provide value to the users are rewarded.

One key way that brands (with websites) can build up backlinks is to write guest posts on relevant, genuine blogs belonging to influencers in your niche.

When you guest post on an influencer’s site, the influencer will usually let you include a small bio about yourself, including a link back to your own site. These guest posts can have a number of flow-on benefits.

You might want to think carefully about exactly where you choose to direct your incoming links. Yoast (who produce the Yoast SEO plugin for the WordPress platform) makes a real point of educating their users about the importance of cornerstone content. The cornerstone content on your website is your most important content.

These are the four or five pages that best tell your visitors what your site is about. They are pages, as distinct from posts, because they don’t date, and remain current over time. They will usually be your most visited pages.

Therefore it makes sense that any guest post you write (or indeed any links that you try and obtain from influencers) should direct towards your cornerstone content.

One mistake that many websites make is that they link to their Home page. The problem is that the Home Page can be a “Jack of All Trades” page. It is far better to use specialist cornerstone content pages for your important content.

Cornerstone content is very important for your SEO. Over time, particularly if you only sell a relatively narrow range of products or services, you are going to have a lot of content on similar themes. There is a danger that your main SEO competitor is yourself. Continually reusing keyword terms is called keyword cannibalization. By having clear cornerstone content (which can often be about relatively high-level keyword terms) and then linking all of your posts about similar topics, which chase longer-tail keyword terms, you make your structure very clear to Google.

You can then tie things together by ensuring that when you guest post or use other material with influencers, the link you share comes back to the most suitable item of cornerstone content

For instance, suppose you operate a website about sci-fi and fantasy. You might have cornerstone content pages for each of Star Wars, Star Trek, Game of Thrones and Doctor Who. Over time you might create another 100 posts about various aspects of those four shows, but if each post links back to the relevant cornerstone content page you won’t have any problems.

It can be difficult to continually come up with fresh, entertaining, usable content. Some brands have got around this problem by effectively crowdsourcing their content. This is particularly useful on platforms such as Instagram and YouTube — you don’t have to be a great writer to take a photo or record a video of an interesting event.

Red Bull, for instance, has been involved with many crowdsourced campaigns over the years. This includes inviting skaters and surfers around the world to post videos of their skills on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and YouTube, asking others to rate them.

As a result of years of crowdsourcing, Red Bull now has access to thousands of compelling stories, photographs, and videos. Millions of people have shared this content (including links to Red Bull) across the internet.

Google looks favorably at all of these shares and boosts their visibility.

Overall, influencer marketing can be an excellent way to improve your site’s overall SEO. Just don’t rush in trying to build relationships overnight. It takes time to build up relationships, just as it takes time to improve your Google rankings. SEO, guest blogging, and influencer marketing are all activities you need to be involved in for the long-term, where you can’t afford to become discouraged by a lack of instantly visible results.

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