Influencer marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) have both become an essential part of the digital marketer’s toolkit within the past decade. Despite these strategies requiring different skill sets in certain areas, there is a surprising amount of overlap between them. In fact, influencer marketing can have a positive impact on a brand’s search rankings on Google, making it an effective aid to SEO campaigns. Influencer marketing campaigns can boost a brand’s SEO through both its ability to generate social results and evergreen content such as product reviews.
While Google denies social media’s direct effect on search engine rankings, SEO experts will say that social media profiles and content still rank highly due to high domain authority, relevance, and engagement. Furthermore, social media profiles are good for funneling users into a brand’s other websites and online content, which increases the rankings for those pages as well. With this in mind, branded content from influencers can boost a brand’s SEO by serving as relevant content that appears when specific keywords are searched. Furthermore, the backlinks generated by an influencer’s posts increase traffic to a brand’s websites and increase their rankings in search results.
Google’s search ranking algorithms are designed to prioritize high-quality content. This means that user-friendly content that displays expertise and contains multimedia elements such as images, videos, and well-written text ranks higher than spammy, low-effort pages. Because influencer marketing campaigns are highly creative endeavors that rely on an influencer’s ability to create engaging content, sponsored influencer posts are one way that brands can generate high-quality content without relying on cheap tricks and corner-cutting that result in Google’s algorithms ranking content lower during user searches.
As previously mentioned, influencer posts routinely generate high levels of engagement. Because of the way social media algorithms work, likes, comments, and shares result in a post being seen by more and more people. If an influencer’s post goes viral among the users of a specific social network, brands will typically see an uptick in searches for their products, which is another way that SEO rankings can improve.
Brands pursuing influencer marketing services should also be aware that Google is not the only search engine they can rank highly in after partnering with an influencer for sponsored content. Statistically, YouTube is the second-most used search engine in the world after Google, despite the fact that it only shows results for video content. By partnering with YouTube influencers or YouTube influencer marketing agencies such as HireInfluence, companies can be sure that their brands will be shown in a positive light when people search for keywords related to their products and services on YouTube.
In addition to this, sponsored influencer posts such as product reviews qualify as evergreen content, meaning that they will always be relevant. Regardless of how much time has passed since an influencer has made content related to a brand, that content will be on the Internet for everyone to see for a very long time. New users may be discovering previously uploaded content from years ago, which means that more people will become aware of what a brand has to offer simply through the exposure that sponsored content gives them.
The effects of influencer marketing on SEO show that the best digital marketing strategy is one that optimizes a brand’s content in as many fields as possible, using every opportunity to boost brand awareness and engagement in an organic and ethical manner. By combining influencer marketing, SEO, and even more traditional forms of digital marketing, such as Google Ads, brands can get the most out of their advertising campaigns and reap the benefits of all the strategies combined.
