Building Relationships with Influencers Can Improve Your SEO

Influencers are the next wave of celebrity endorsements. They are valuable to companies trying to sell a product or service because they have a similar appeal to their audiences as celebrities traditionally had. However, they are seen as more trustworthy than celebrities, so their endorsements carry more weight than the A-list stars recommending a product. More important to your search engine optimisation strategy is how building relationships with influencers can improve your SEO.

Influencers Can Create Quality Content for You

Influencers each have their own niche, and they publish or produce content for that niche. Their videos priming their audience for your team member’s interview or series of reviews of your products are intriguing, unique content. Many influencers create multiple pieces of content on the same topic, such as demonstrating the product in their home the first day and then coming back a week later with a different scenario. And each of these demonstrations will reference your brand, the product name and company’s website.

Some influencers can become a long-term source of content about your product, such as when they demonstrate your product for one video and then do a series of comparisons between it and your rival’s products. These comparisons are SEO gold since they hit on a topic that potential customers deep in the sales funnel want to be answered and are considered trustworthy because it isn’t created by your company.

A Home for Sponsored Content

If you have a good relationship with an influencer, you may be able to arrange for sponsored content to be placed on their site and to be endorsed by them. This content will receive more social media signals and have better SEO than sponsored content promoted through other channels. Depending on the influencer, you may even be able to save yourself the work of creating the content and compensate them for creating the content themselves.

It Lets You Leverage Their Community

Influencers are defined by their community of followers. When they recommend a product, you are almost guaranteed to see a wave of social media sharing that improves your link profile. The community following an influencer is also much more likely to share a link organically with their friends.

The most important reason to use the influencer is that this sharing builds a strong link profile. The quality of the social media shared linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages. is considered high by search engines, and the links the community shares back to the influencer’s high authority domain improves your site’s perceived trust to the search engines. A wave of link sharing by an influencer will be treated much more positively by a search engine than a high volume of links posted on low domain sites.

They Create Brand Oriented Buzz

While we’ve already discussed how influencers may create multiple pieces of content from a single product provided for demonstration or an interview, their greatest gift for your SEO strategy is the online discussions their promotions will create. Whether it is an influencer’s tweets about an interview with the head of your company about the industry or social media reminders that the live streaming broadcast will come out tomorrow, all of these messages build brand recognition with search engines as well as their followers.

Your Relationship May Lead to Long-Term Content Reach and Engagement

Your company has persuaded an influencer to review several of your products honestly, and now he or she is a fan. This relationship with the influencer means they are much more likely to forward links you send about new products and affiliated services to their user community, and there are also greater odds that it will get their endorsement as well. When influencers share your content, it adds credibility to the content in both the eyes of the audience and search engines.

Conclusion

An influencer’s product demonstration, reviews and interviews are by definition of high-quality content. If you build a long-term relationship with the influencer, they may accept sponsored content or write it themselves, as well as share the content you create with their audience. In either case, the social media sharing that occurs after the content comes out creates a link profile that search engines reward with higher rankings. And influencers priming their audience to tune in for their latest video or mentioning their latest content about your company naturally improves your brand’s recognition by search engines.