The ultimate of any SEO strategy is conversion. Whether you want to increase sales, readership, or have more members in your online forum, it hardly ever happens effectively without paying attention to SEO. Much as SEO training online should be your starting point, you should be prepared to cultivate the knowledge and experience required to succeed in a space where competition for the top spot in search engine results is as fierce as can ever be.
Let’s round up the importance of SEO in a few simple but meaningful sentences.
- SEO will give a brand a 30% lift by improving perception.
- Taking into consideration most if not all SEO ranking factors is likely to boost a website to the top or high rank in SERPs
- A business may never make it to the minds of potential customers if it does not exist on search traffic. To make it on search traffic and create the visibility it so desires, it’s website needs to be optimized for SEO.
- Using the right keywords and an effective SEO strategy can land your site to the top results. Going by statistics, these sites get the lion’s share, up to 75% of the clicks, which is certainly good for business.
- The customer is king. Even in online business, user experience is a critical conversion factor. 79% of users who are not happy with a website may never purchase from it.
- For some, it is not just enough to rank high in search results. There is even better value in becoming an authority site and a recognized brand for that matter. It means that in the minds of users, the website is of high quality, relevant, credible, and offering what they search for. This is one of the long term benefits of consistently optimizing a site for SEO.
- Ultimately, the bottom line of SEO is growth. The higher the traffic, the more leads a business will have. Eventually, this results in higher sales, more loyal customers, and a better competitive edge.
- Beyond higher sales and growth in business is a better understanding of and a good relationship with customers.
Where SEO Meets Influencer Marketing
When SEO is about driving organic traffic to a website for the reasons mentioned above, influencer marketing is the boost that an SEO strategy needs to be a step ahead of the game.
The overall purpose of influencer marketing is to boost a website’s user engagement and loyalty, ultimately improving its SEO.
Who Is an Influencer and What Is Influencer Marketing?
Influencers are authorities.
These are individuals, groups of people, or organizations which command a huge following online and on social media in specific niches based on their expertise, authority, or knowledge. As such, they have the power to sway the decision, loyalty, attitude, or thinking of their followers in a certain direction.
Influencer marketing, on the other hand, is a digital marketing strategy that targets an influencer’s following and their networks by partnering with the influencer to get their recommendation, backlinks, or content.
Should Influencer Marketing Be Part of Your SEO Strategy?
Would you spend $1 to make $6.5 in return?
If your answer is yes, then influencer marketing is a strategy worth considering.
And guess what?
Of those who have either considered or tried this rather new marketing trend, 60% are thinking of increasing their influencer marketing budget over the next year.
Here Are 5 Ways Influencer Marketing Can Benefit Your SEO Strategy
- A better link profile
Influencers typically have a platform, a website, blog, or social media page where they engage with their following. As we all know, a good SEO strategy requires a good link building strategy to be effective.
Influencer marketing is a gateway to getting authoritative backlinks on your site, which in turn gives a website an edge for better search engine ranking, more traffic ultimately allowing you to become an authority in your niche.
- Visibility and brand awareness
The whole idea behind SEO is to create awareness and have a visible brand. Influencer marketing opens up a brand to an influencer’s followers and their networks. The advantage of this audience is that it has already had a positive engagement; therefore, a brand that delivers positive content and maintains relevance automatically appeals to it.
- The traffic
Traffic and engagement fall in the fifth position among the most important ranking factors according to a study by Moz. Influencers already have a huge following and a loyal one at that. Directing this traffic and engagement to your website is one of the biggest advantages and a faster way of growing a website.
- Trust and credibility
People follow influencers for a reason.
Influencers have, over time, built enough trust and credibility to have people stick and engage with them. Not just that, since recommendations and word-of-mouth happen to be the most powerful forms of advertising, followers tend to introduce even more followers to the following.
Influencer marketing allows a brand to tap into the trust already built by influencers. This could be through opinions, recommendations, content, or other channels from influencers. Even before actual conversion, the crowd will already have an existing relationship with the brand based on the trust earned from the influencer.
- Engaging content
Relevant content is among the many factors that Google uses to rank websites. While one may succeed in creating engaging content, it may not be easy getting your target audience to buy into it to the point of sharing it with their peers is not in the least easy.
There are different ways you can use influencer marketing to generate intriguing content. For instance, you can have them link you to people who can create great shareable content, have them create sponsored content, get them to encourage their ardent followers to generate content in a bid to create engagement or have them recommend your content to their audience.
Whichever way, relevant content increases engagement and ultimately traffic to your site.
- Sales channel
As mentioned above, $1 in influencer marketing yields a return on investment of $6.5. Beyond the traffic, engagement, visibility, and credibility, there is a golden opportunity for a sales conversion.
The purchasing power of 70% of millennials will have been influenced by their peers. There is a strong relationship between influencers and their followers, along with their peers. Partnering with an influencer to market products would then be an excellent sales strategy in the short-term and long-term.
Bottomline,
SEO and influencer marketing are not easy skills to master. There is SEO that is characterized by an ever-changing landscape that takes more than learning and experience to perfect and influencer marketing which is more or less like it.
While influencer marketing is more of building relationships and making these relationships work for you, there is more to it than meets the eye. Whether you have a website, you intend to do business online, or you are into digital marketing, attaining the required knowledge in SEO and digital marketing is necessary to take you a step forward.
Taking an SEO course should help you learn the ropes of data analysis, content creation and marketing, technical SEO, and other skills around SEO. The advantage of online training courses is that they are self-paced, and they contained downloadable resources that you can always refer to in your own time. Well, you will need much more practice after and perhaps take a more advanced course as you specialize, but you will have made your first step towards a successful career in digital marketing.