Influencer Marketing/Outreach

Off-page SEO is vital in the race to the top of the SERPs for a website. Eighty five percent of search results can be traced back to effective off-page SEO techniques. (Reed College of Media, 2021) There are many ways to gain credibility, popularity, and authority from places outside of your own website, but there is on effective way that has gained steam in the last few years. Not only does it help with SEO, but it can also help with social media efforts. That is influencer marketing.

Before defining what influencer marketing is, it would be wise to explain what exactly an influencer is. Per Dada, an influencer is defined within it's name, "An influencer, is someone who has the power to influence the perception of others or gets them to do something different." (Dada, 2017) In the marketing world, and influencer is someone that influences another person– normally someone that follows their life or likes them– to buy your product. In the case of SEO, an influencer helps to boost your online authority and popularity through means discussed later. 

Influencer marketing or influencer outreach could be the act of reaching out to influencer and asking them to provide their feedback on  community driven content or an article t that you've published. It could be the influencer sharing your content or website via link or social media post with their circle of followers. (Saleem, 2019). It could be them linking your website on their social media accounts or on a blog of theirs.

Influencers Help to Build Strong Links

There are other impacts of influencer marketing, one being that they help to build a strong and diverse slate of links. A marketers links on their website have a massive impact on their search engine ranking. Links are probably one of the top three factors in Google's mind when it determines site authority. (Reed College of Media, 2021) So a marketer needs to take advantage of any effort that improves their link profile. In addition, the quality of links matter as well, so websites need to have links from high quality and high authority websites in order to scale search engine rankings.

Working with influencers helps to generate better organic backlinks for a website. Influencers could have a website of their own or could have access to various high-authority websites, so when that influencer creates content and links to yours then it creates one of those high-quality backlinks that was mentioned earlier. (Leibowitz, 2021) If an influencer shares the link then that increases the chances of another person charing the link. This multiplies overall visibility and increases the chances for your content to be picked up by other higher-authority domains.

Influencers Have Access to and Engaged Following

The more that your audience is engaged in what you're doing, the better your search engine ranking will be. Influencers can help to increase engagement and traffic to your website. In a study by AdWeek, it was found that users trust influencers almost as they trust their friends. (Swant, 2016) 

Sharing content through a source trusted by potential customers could result in serious engagement with your website. Influencers, especially smaller influencers with a more engaging following, have significant reach of their own and can improve a website's visibility if they share its content or engage with it. (Leibowitz, 2021) Influencers with their tactics can drive site traffic upwards and in turn increase your website's ranking in the search engines. 

An influencer has the ability to be the beginning of a chain reaction where they share a link to your site to their trusted followers. Their engaging and trusted followers then do the same with theirs, and your website's reach expands exponentially.  

Abundant and High-Quality Content

Through on-page and technical SEO websites aim to improve their keywords, content quality and other things. Google looks at these when deciding whether or not your website should be highly ranked. In addition, Google looks into the amount and quality of social shares that link back to your website. (Leibowitz, 2021) Influencer marketing connects a marketer with influencers who's main purpose is to consistently produce intriguing and shareable content. When you partner with an influencer, you are getting help with content for your site and even sponsored content on your behalf on their pages. It is the marketer's responsibility to choose wisely when selecting which influencers to reach out to. The influencers that they contact should be seasoned and have a track record of creating high quality content. This way, spiders don't penalize your website.

There are some cases where influencers can prompt their followers to create their own content related to your company via a branded hashtag or mentioning your name in their content. This is a great source of user-generated content (UGC) that your website could thrive off of. This abundant source of content on your behalf mixed with the high quality content from the influencer themselves looks good in the eyes of search engine crawlers.

Cost

Compared to hiring a company to optimize your off-page SEO for you, influencer outreach is relatively easy and cheap. Influencer outreach does not involve delving into copy and finding broken links or comparing the authority of one link to another to see if it's worth keeping, all the marketer needs to do is reach out to actual people that are proficient influencers and they do the rest. All that is needed is communication and a good point of contact for this to work efficiently. 

Potential Cons

There are some potential cons when working with influencers. These are things that could be avoided with thorough research into who you want to invest in. Many influencers aren't as widely known as normal celebrities. Micro and nano-influencers have anywhere from 1,000 to 50,000 followers. This means that what they say is less viewed than someone with 500,ooo eyes watching them. While that can help in terms of engagement, it can be harmful if the influencer that you partner with does something that damages the reputation of your company This might not affect your SEO immediately, but over time your website or company could be in the top of the search rankings for the wrong reasons.



In addition, influencer marketing is still a relatively new marketing strategy and mistakes will be made. Sometimes these mistakes can affect your company negatively. Barker lists some potential mistakes that could arise when partnering with influencers (Barker, 2021):

- Not disclosing that a post is sponsored
- Posting content irrelevant to the marketer's target audience 
- Ignoring FTC guidelines
- Using bots and computer generated followers to boost vanity metrics

Hence, influencer outreach is highly effective when it comes to off-page SEO. Influencers can help with links, the quantity and quality of your content as well as expanding reach, engagement and traffic to your website. While all of these are attractive, it is important for marketers to make careful decisions if they decide to include influencers in their marketing mix.


References

Barker, S. (2021, March 8). Pros and cons of Influencer Marketing. from https://shanebarker.com/blog/pros-and-cons-of-influencer-marketing/

Dada, G. (2017). What is Influencer Marketing and How Can Marketers Use It Effectively? from https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescommunicationscouncil/2017/11/14/what-is-influencer-marketing-and-how-can-marketers-use-it-effectively/?sh=3450411323d1

Leibowitz, B. (2021). 3 Ways Influencer Marketing Impacts Your SEO. from https://www.convinceandconvert.com/influencer-marketing/influencer-marketing-impacts-seo/

Reed College of Media. (2021). Week 6 Lesson: SEO/Off-Page Optimization. from https://ecampus.wvu.edu/webapps/blackboard/execute/displayLearningUnit?course_id=_159257_1&content_id=_8031417_1&framesetWrapped=true

Saleem, M. (2019, October 6). 11 Smart Off-page SEO Techniques You Need to Use Right Now. from https://optinmonster.com/off-page-seo/

Swant, M. (2016, May 10). Twitter Says Users Now Trust Influencers Nearly as Much as Their Friends. from https://www.adweek.com/performance-marketing/twitter-says-users-now-trust-influencers-nearly-much-their-friends-171367/

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