Influencers are altering search behavior and the way users discover content online. This trend is becoming increasingly apparent as a new generation of searchers utilizes social platforms like Instagram and TikTok as their primary search engines. Even so, influencers can still influence your organic search performance on traditional search engines like Google.
Case in point, Google has a history of showing social media posts in search results. It started with Twitter (now called X) and Real-Time search in 2009, and has ebbed and flowed since then to include publicly facing content from LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, and other social networks. Some networks are only represented by profiles for individuals and companies, and others, like Instagram, enable feeds of posts to appear directly in search results. The social post can even appear above your website link in the search results. The more real estate you can occupy in the search engine results pages (SERPs), the better for increasing your brand’s visibility.
What Is Influencer Marketing?
An influencer marketing strategy is when a business collaborates with an online influencer to market its products or services. These influencers typically have hundreds, thousands, or even millions of followers on their social platforms. The influencer creates content that resonates with their followers on their social media channels, promoting a brand’s product or service, and this content reaches their followers. Like word-of-mouth advertising, influencer campaigns tend to work well, as they build brand awareness and foster credibility and trust, leading to customer loyalty.
How Influencer Marketing Campaigns & SEO Complement Each Other
Although Google claims that social media is not a direct ranking factor, a strong social media presence can indirectly increase your chance of being discovered in the search results and increase your organic search performance. When companies combine influencer campaigns and search engine optimization (SEO), a powerful synergy boosts visibility in the SERPs, signals brand authority, and can even increase conversions. An influencer marketing strategy can directly and indirectly impact your SEO efforts. Here are seven reasons why investing in an influencer marketing campaign is beneficial to your SEO strategy.
- Product or Service Discovery: Influencers highlight products or services in their content, which is then hungrily digested by their many followers. This can be especially beneficial for new product launches, new brand launches, and even shoring up flagging areas of the business that are high-quality but just need a boost to regain momentum.
- Building Quality Backlinks: One of the signals that Google uses to rank content in the SERPs is quality backlinks. When you partner with an influencer who has a high domain authority on their website, and they link back to your site, it’s a sign to search engines that your site is a little more authoritative and buzzworthy. Influencers can link to your site in social posts, blogs, video descriptions, and product review articles.
- Brand Mentions & Brand Recognition: While not every post will include a link, Google recognizes brand mentions as implied links that carry similar trust signals, showing your brand is an authority in your specific industry. Brand mentions let search engines know that your brand is seen as credible, authoritative, and trustworthy, boosting your E-E-A-T (Google’s concept of experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness). The more that your brand, products, and services are talked about online in places where other people gather, the more your brand awareness can grow. This can increase the amount of search demand for your branded keywords, which in turn signals to Google that your brand is popular and worth displaying in the SERPs.
- Increase in Website Traffic: When an influencer promotes your brand on their platforms, you would hope to see a surge in quality traffic to your site, and, of course, sales or leads. In addition, if those followers search for your brand and then engage with the content on your site, it sends positive signals to Google’s Navboost, a system that turns Chrome user experience data into signals that can inform its algorithms about the quality of a site. That can positively influence future rankings.
- Higher Click-Through Rates (CTR): As mentioned above, influencer campaigns boost brand awareness, leading to more people recognizing your brand in the search results. When they see the familiar name, this encourages them to click through to your site. In addition, when social posts are featured in the SERPs, they provide another click-through path for your brand, which, while not as beneficial as a visitor landing on your site, is much better than that visitor landing on a competitor’s site or on another page that you don’t control.
- Expand Your Content Strategy: When you collaborate with influencers, this allows you to create fresh content for your brand. Oftentimes, this influencer-produced content comes in the form of product reviews, guest posts, and interviews. When optimized for SEO, using keywords naturally, and tailored to the right target audience, these influencer creatives reinforce your content strategy. Elements of the influencer’s creative can be repurposed on a brand’s site or social media platforms as blog posts, as website content, as shorts or images in social media posts, on podcasts, in an email marketing campaign, or any number of other ways. Just avoid reposting exact duplicates of the influencer’s content on your own site because it will reduce the SEO value of both copies. Fresh content is often favored by search engines, so be creative and produce unique content for different purposes from the same core elements.
- The Domino Effect: The power of an influencer campaign that works well is that when well-respected influencers promote your brand, this often causes a domino effect. Other influencers and bloggers are more likely to feature your brand, leading to even more backlinks and brand mentions. Sharing these influencer-created posts extends the reach of this promotional content, creating a virtuous cycle of increasing numbers of branded searches and more traffic.
5 Tips for Getting Search Engines to Index Social Posts
Make sure you choose to work with an influencer who understands how to create captivating content that is indexable in search engines, for added brand visibility. Follow these five tips:
- Create engaging content: The visually compelling photos and videos, and their captions, can be indexed on many platforms and may be eligible to be shown in the SERPs if they’re well optimized. Google has always loved the realness of user-generated content, so it works as well for SEO as it does for influencer marketing strategies and larger content marketing strategies.
- Incorporate keywords: Use relevant keywords in the captions and descriptions. Similar to SEO, keywords used in social posts send a signal to search engines that the content is relevant for specific queries. Search engines can also index the text within these posts, so it’s essential to optimize headings and hashtags. Use long-tail keywords in this strategy to reach the right audience.
- Use relevant hashtags: Incorporate hashtags that relate to your products, services, or even location to help improve discoverability for your brand.
- Ensure your profile is public: Remember that only public business profiles will be indexable. Content featured on private and personal profiles is not indexed in search engines.
- Promote engagement: Encourage shares, likes, and comments on social posts, boosting engagement, which indirectly influences your visibility in the search results. Hosting contests and giveaways on social channels, within the allowable guidelines for each platform, is a great way to promote engagement for your brand.
Real World Example of Social Posts in the SERPs
If you perform a search for the query “clean makeup,” you will see all of the usual SERP links and features you’d expect — people also ask, shopping, Reddit links, and more — but also a section titled “What people are saying.” It’s a featured section with a carousel of social posts from, in this case, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. The example below has been excerpted from the middle of a Google incognito SERP to illustrate the point.
This content is typical of influencer marketing. Many makeup brands will partner with popular beauty influencers to create product review videos on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube. The influencer mentions the brand in the video, highlights the featured product, and potentially links to the website in the video’s description or their bio. The result is visually engaging content that is appealing to their followers and hopefully drives brand awareness, traffic, and sales for the sponsoring brands.
Influencer Marketing + SEO = The Perfect Pairing
Influencer marketing and SEO strategies complement each other by working together to amplify their brand exposure with high-quality backlinks, brand mentions, social engagement, an influx of traffic to your website, and trust signals – all of which have the potential to boost your organic rankings.
Influencers have a way of promoting your content authentically, through storytelling and personal content that consumers trust. When these two strategies are implemented properly, they work together to help your brand build lasting authority that is reflected in the search results.
