Influencer Marketing: a strategic growth lever for your SEO

While boosting your SEO with KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders) may not be a well known concept (yet), it is still a great link building tool that deserves to be added to your arsenal. We’ll tell you why right now.

SEO and Influencer Marketing: common objectives

When you think of Influencer Marketing or SEO, you quickly realise that both share very similar main objectives: improving visibility, generating acquisition or boosting awareness among your core target audience. So why not combine your SEO and Influencer Marketing strategies?

In the early days of the Internet, it was possible to attract visitors to your site with a few relevant keywords, but as more and more websites appeared this technique became much more complex and almost obsolete. Today, the competition has become so strong that the simple use of quality keywords or meta tags is no longer sufficient to get your website listed in the major search engines.

The latter have, moreover, made their algorithms more complex so that the old SEO techniques no longer work as well. Today, and more than ever in recent months, the Internet has become a social space where the websites that are best “connected” to others are listed first. And this is where Influence Marketing comes into its own. Relying on content creators and social networks to boost your SEO and therefore traffic to your website is an excellent technique, for various reasons.

Use KOLs to boost your brand awareness

Regardless of the sector in which you operate, your customers are most likely using social networks on a daily basis. It is therefore important to strengthen your social presence on your target networks in order to get yourself (really) noticed by all your prospects. The use of paid media is not as profitable as it used to be, as Neal Schaffer, author of “The Age of Influence”, already stated in 2020 in a podcast for GRIN. But working with KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders) is a more efficient way to establish your social presence and to make yourself known in a more profitable way: “I think that companies that don’t work with influencers will spend more and more money on paid social, because it becomes less and less efficient over time”, said the author already at that time.

Thanks to the community they have built up over the years, content creators can help you get your name in front of a wide range of potential customers who might never have visited your website otherwise. By creating authentic and original content that mentions your brand or products on their own social networks, they will help you get discovered by extending your reach in a sustainable way. If you get a major KOL to retweet or share your content, you will have reached a whole new group of people. KOLs are more important than ever in the discovery of your content.

Influencer Marketing to help you build credibility

In addition to reaching a wider audience, opinion leaders give your site more credibility. It solidifies your position in the market and makes you look like a reliable source to your potential future customers.

If you can identify who the best KOLs are for your brand and convince them to share your content on their social accounts, you will have taken a big step towards improving your SEO capabilities.

However, finding, identifying and engaging with influencers is not always easy and can take some time. According to a study by Influencer Marketing Hub, finding influencers is the biggest challenge for those who organise their campaigns in-house. Focus on building long-term relationships that are a win-win situation for both your brand and the influencers themselves. To help you identify which KOLs are most relevant to your brand, you can use technology solutions such as Kolsquare that will allow you to gain insights into their communities (gender, cities, countries,…) and the engagement they generate and thus save valuable time.

With a strategic and well-targeted Influence Marketing campaign, you can drive a lot of traffic to your website through the affiliate links you set up with your activated content creators. Google, like other search engines, will take note of this traffic and update your page rankings accordingly.

Improve your E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness) with KOLs

Although Google’s algorithm is continually evolving, the E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness) principle remains one of the most important ranking factors to this day. We explain.

If you publish high-quality content that meets the search intent of Internet users, demonstrate that you are an authority in your field and that users consider you trustworthy, then your site will reap the rewards by gaining a prominent place in the search engine results pages.

Google’s goal here is to ensure that users receive the best possible answer to all their questions. That’s why websites that demonstrate expertise, authority and reliability consistently outperform their competitors.

But it is not only your personal “E-A-T” that contributes to search engine optimisation. SEO is also influenced by your site’s link structure, including social signals and links pointing to your site from external, high authority domains.

If you are already using social media as part of your digital marketing strategy, you probably know that brand mentions, likes, retweets, shares and links play an important role in improving your site’s ranking.

Obtaining quality backlinks by using opinion leaders

As we have seen, getting a position in the first pages of a search engine’s results depends on both your website’s SEO and off-site SEO. Off-site referencing refers to all the external links that redirect to your website. Using content creators can help you improve your E-A-T through high quality backlinks and online mentions of key KOLs that you have identified.

Using content creators can definitely help you get quality backlinks and social signals that contribute to your site’s SEO in the long run. Its SEO can be greatly improved by the ability of influencers to create unique and engaging content but also to extend the reach of your audience and create links to your pages and your various products.

Many KOLs also have blogs and are very often experts in their respective fields (lifestyle, food, beauty, fashion, etc.). As part of your Influencer Marketing campaigns, don’t hesitate to ask the identified KOLs to present your brand in a blog post and to link it to your own website.

Furthermore, if the bloggers you decide to collaborate with as part of your Influence project are reputable promoters in your sector, their links may encourage other high authority domains to link to you as well. Thus a virtuous circle will naturally take place and allow you to boost your SEO on a larger scale. The better your SEO is, the more inbound traffic you will get and the less you will have to pay to acquire new customers.

Of course, first of all, your content must be relevant and reliable. Then, as we have discussed in this article, it is essential to choose the influencers you wish to work with. They must have a high level of authority and competence, a good reputation in their sector and be trusted by their target audience. Only when these criteria are fully met can you begin to implement an Influencer Marketing campaign aimed at enhancing your SEO.