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Leveraging the Power of SEO Influencers

17 Nov 2016 Leah Tagliarino
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in SEO

In the world of digital marketing, we are hearing the word "influencer" a lot these days. In fact, there was even a recent 60 minutes episode that featured a segment about Influencer Marketing. Watch here in case you missed it!

If this concept is new to you and your team, here is how Wikipedia defines Influencer Marketing:

Definition of an Influencer:

“Influencer marketing (also influence marketing) is a form of marketing in which focus is placed on specific key individuals (or types of individual) rather than the target market as a whole.” - Wikipedia

While the definition is pretty straightforward, the benefits can be incredibly impactful. Your customers are easily persuaded by the opinions of those who they trust and admire. Therefore, they are highly likely to go out and buy something that is endorsed by one of their favorite celebrities, athletes, or bloggers.

Most of the time, influencer marketing refers to social media influencers--enter Kim Kardashian.

Influencer SEO

However, those of us in the SEO world have access to a special kind of influencer marketing. For SEO, influencer marketing comes in the form of acquiring relevant brand or product mentions on top websites, publications, and blogs in your industry. And the major goal of these mentions is acquiring backlinks--links on other domains that point back to your website.

The quantity, relevance, and variety of backlinks continues to be one of the main factors taken into consideration by Google’s algorithm, PageRank. It is essential to get these backlinks from other high quality and important websites around the web. Therefore, you must get people to write about and mention your products or business on their websites, and include a link back to your site.

This is where the influencers come in.

There are huge networks of publishers and bloggers who are looking for these types of placements. And while their sites and blogs may not always come with the highest domain authorities or most trustworthy backlink profiles, these are still huge opportunities for referral traffic, relevant backlinks, increase and diversification of your backlink profile, and general brand awareness.

SEO Influencers as Content Distributors

SEO Influencers are experts in one of the most important factors in a successful SEO and content marketing strategy--content distribution. Getting your content and brand out there is just as important as writing great content and making great products. And these influencers know exactly where your target audience goes to find information. Therefore, investing in influencers can take a huge part of the work off of your team’s plate and help to amplify your content, website, and products.

How do I find SEO influencers?

  1. Do a manual search

Do a Google search! The type of influencer targets you are looking for are writers and bloggers who are already writing about the topics that are relevant to your brand.

Search some of the terms that are important to your business, and see who comes up. Disregarding the major players and databases, are there any interesting blogs? Articles from top publishers in the space? Dig a little deeper and these writers may be a great place to start building out your SEO influencer database.

  1. Scout the competition

A great place to get started in any form of digital marketing is to take a look at your close competitors and see what they are doing. While not every strategy or tactic is relevant for every brand, a lot can be learned through some serious competitive analysis.

The same rule applies to influencer SEO. Take a look at where your close competitors backlinks are coming from--are you seeing them get links from some niche bloggers? Many times, specific industries have a key network of writers and publishers focused on them, so if you are seeing a few of your competitors get links from the same writers and publications, these may be very influential networks in your industry.

  1. Invest in a tool

There are also many SEO tools out there that can help you find influencers. However, this option will come at a price. But many tools offer robust data beyond influencers, and can be worth every penny.

Product Review Best Practices, Straight From Google Webmaster Tools

When you do reach out and get a link from an SEO Influencer or guest blogger, be sure to follow these best practices from Google Webmaster Tools! To start, it is important that your influencer placement--in this case a product review--is relevant and compelling. We don’t want to get a link just for the sake of it. The placement needs to be unique and meaningful to readers.

It is also important that the writer discloses the relationship they may have with your brand. After all, Influencer SEO is a form of advertising, so it’s important that readers know that it is not organic content.

And lastly, if it is relevant, Google may require you to use use a ‘nofollow’ tag. While this will decrease the direct SEO benefits of gaining backlinks because nofollow tags do not pass link equity, this doesn’t make acquiring these placements any less meaningful from a brand awareness and content distribution standpoint.

Bottom line, getting your business out there—whether your website, content, or a specific product--is an essential component of any successful digital marketing campaign, and tapping into the SEO Influencer network is a great way to boost your amplification.  While there are many SEO benefits to using this method--increased and diversified backlinks, brand mentions, social engagement--leveraging influencers will have a positive impact on all aspects of your marketing campaign.

So now that you know the plan for your SEO influencer strategy, why not work with a professional? The SEO team at Flying Point Digital is well-versed in finding and getting results from top SEO influencers in a variety of industries.

Get in touch with our  team today!

SEO

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