If you’re not currently leveraging influencer marketing as part of your SEO strategy, it’s about time you do. Influencer marketing is a powerful weapon to have in your online optimization arsenal and it offers broad-scope benefits throughout your brand’s overall marketing campaign.

Similar to Link Building, which still reigns supreme as the tactic to embrace in any SEO plan, influencer marketing generates strong strategic partnerships in the form of authoritative links. These associations increase your brand awareness, boost user engagement, enhance visibility and bring in more traffic.

Influencer Marketing to Skyrocket SEO

You can turn your SEO campaign into a digital juggernaut through influencer marketing. Imagine being able to churn out millions of social impressions by utilizing one new tool in your marketing toolbox. It’s possible with influencer marketing and the top brands use this approach already. Travel, luxury retail and many other types of industries see their heaviest hitters reaching out to key leaders who have proven they can propel a message to a large market.

Instead of relying solely on traditional marketing to directly connect with a larger group of consumers, today’s successful companies inspire, hire and pay influencers with positive track records for swaying purchasing decisions. These influencers are people who command attention on their blogs and social media channels, and they’re recruited to get the word out for companies selling hotel stays, watches, clothing and the list goes on.

How specifically can you use influencer marketing to reach your target audience and upgrade your SEO plan, perhaps even saving money and time on marketing? First, by recognizing that influencer marketing ties in beautifully with efforts you should already be putting in in terms of link building, creating quality content and being there and being useful.

Using Influencer Marketing to Build Inbound Links

Inbound links from top-tier and even tier-two influencers provide enormous benefits for your link building campaign. Increased visibility from authoritative websites and social media channels is definitely something you want, but keep in mind that the influencer will need to include a disclosure informing their readers that this is a sponsored partnership.

Consider creating quality content that benefits the influencer’s audience and that the influencer will gladly want to link to, as a valued resource and without it looking like a blatant advertorial.

Boost Brand Visibility and Engagement with Influencer Marketing

Traffic and engagement come in at number 5 out of the most critical ranking factors. But, it’s difficult for a company to be seen, heard and understood amidst the chatter and sometimes chaos of the Internet. It’s essential that brands get creative and remain diligent when trying to break through the digital fog and come out as the beacon of an industry.

Even though the online marketplace is a combative one, there are people out there facing the same challenges in your industry and they’re looking to team up, to more successfully engage their target audience. Connect with these influencers. They need new recommendations for their followers and they crave fresh things to talk about. This makes them a marketing asset to you. Collaborate with them and drive traffic to your site, and sell more products and services.

With the online optimization landscape changing rapidly, it’s important to continuously look at all the ways consumers are learning about brands and how they’re making purchase decisions. To find out more reasons why you need to be using influencers to push your brand, check back with us next week. We’ll go deeper into how to choose influencers, why you need a steady stream of content for them and how to design share-worthy campaigns revolving around hashtags.