The influencer marketing market is experiencing very strong growth. Indeed, brands are not mistaken since, according to the study Influencer Marketing Hub, the influential marketing market has grown from $1.7 billion in 2016 to $15 billion expected by the end of 2022!
 

It is therefore important to include it in your overall digital marketing strategies. It can be complementary to the activation of other levers. Some are obvious as the SMO (Social Media Optimization) or the SMA (Social Media Advertising) and others are less so as the SEO/SXO but are not to be neglected. By combining influential marketing and SXO, you can improve the SEO popularity of your site, improve your visibility on search engines, improve your brand image and even strengthen the user experience by improving journeys on your digital ecosystem.

Influencers can make a difference by increasing a brand’s influence and positively affecting your SEO and improving the brand experience. Beyond the leads generated through an influencer or the sales created via live shopping for example, you can also strengthen your SXO by working on:

• Sharing on social networks,
• Links to your sites from social networks,
• Content referring to influencers who speak about you,
• Journeys in your digital ecosystem
• Netlinking from articles written by influencers on content sites
• etc.

How can collaborating with influencers improve your SEO?
 

Influence marketing is about reaching a qualified audience through influencers. But how does it actually work?
 

You have to:

• define the objectives of your influence marketing campaigns (increase your awareness, sales, promote your brand image, energize it, etc.);
• define the targets you want to touch and the tone of your campaigns;
• identify the social networks and sites on which you will take action to reach your targets and achieve your objectives
• identify influencers
• implement the mechanisms that make it possible to promote journeys on your digital ecosystem and your natural referencing
   

B2B influence marketing, while still rare and expanding, is no different from B2C influence. Companies are increasingly turning to ultra-niche influencers, experts in their field of influence. By the way, micro influencers are the most important source of growth in the influence marketing market.
 

The benefits of influence are mainly to create engagement, create visibility for the company, and build trust in business relationships. According to DemandGen, a research firm specialized in BtoB, 90% of B2B decision-makers are not sensitive to commercial prospecting. 
Decision-makers are wary of traditional media discourse, so 61% opt for search engines in order to have advice from other professionals, where BtoB influencers can intervene. Indeed, according to a study by Cision, journalists are the most relevant influencers in B2B. Influencer 2.0, the influencers who appear on social networks, come in second position, followed by bloggers.
 

👉👉Twitter (83.6%), LinkedIn (77%) and Instagram (29.7%) are the social networks of choice for B2B influencers. As part of a B2B marketing strategy, the most relevant influencers will be those who have real expertise and will be able to produce engaging content.
Instagram is the favourite social network for B2C influence marketing, YouTube, the video platform of Google, comes in second position followed by Facebook, then TikTok, the social network of ByteDance which continues its meteoric progression to arrive in 4th position.
 

The impact of an influence strategy on the natural referencing of your website:
 

Influencer marketing can be tremendously effective if it is used for specific purposes:
 

👉Improve your SEO: 
In a SEO environment where credibility, commitment and user experience play an increasingly important role, influencer marketing is an interesting tool to activate in order to improve the SEO of your website.
 

SEO is based on 4 fundamental pillars that complement each other and are inseparable, to have a SEO that exceeds the one of your competitors and that allows the website to be on the first Google search results.
 

1. The first pillar : Technical

The technical referencing helps to ensure that the site will be crawlable (explorable by search engine robots) and that its structure is well understood by search engines so that its contents can be well indexed.

On this point, not much to do with influential marketing.

2. The second pillar : Content

The content is what will allow you to position yourself on key expressions in search engines. It will be necessary to understand research intentions, to have rich semantic fields and well optimized content structures. 
 

The importance of content in influencer marketing
Influencers have the experience and expertise to create relevant and unique content. By combining UX Writing and SEO writing techniques with the writing of this content, the performance of a website can be improved.
UX writing and SEO optimization of content allow to make the level of engagement of the users better by making more explicit their paths, by better meeting their needs and their requests and understanding their intention or research.
 

Influencers know what appeals to their community and they know the type of content they need to generate engagement.

Google particularly values interesting and relevant pages. It is important to ensure the quality of the content, both in substance and form, and to update it regularly. 
 

3. The third pillar : Popularity
A fundamental pillar to increase the visibility of your website: Netlinking! It consists of creating quality backlinks to your site from external thematic sites to improve its positioning in Google search results. You can get inbound links from the sites where the influencers post their content, links posted by their followers, and you can also increase the number of queries related to your brand in the search engines. 
 

• Linkbait for quality backlinks

The purpose of the linkbait is to create a large number of external links (backlink) and thus to promote the quality of the natural referencing through the increase of the SEO popularity of the page or site. Linkbait is about telling a story… A story that Internet users want to share and thus viral the links.
High-value editorial content allows the creation of links when they are unique, referent, innovative, informational, funny, etc.
Through a partnership between your brand and an influencer, they can post a link that redirects to your website and it can be picked up and shared by their community. 
 

4. The fourth pillar : UX

The user experience, also called UX for "User eXperience", is a pillar recently taken into account in SEO. Since May 2021, Google’s algorithm has included this notion in its criteria for qualifying sites. 
This update puts users at the heart of the research experience. The objective is to highlight in the search results the sites offering the best web experience (faster loading, accessible to all, easy to use, etc.).

It is obvious that the sites that will benefit from the endorsement of influencers will generate more commitment from Internet users, thus enhancing the UX indicators taken into account by Google.

👉Choose influencers that look like your brand
 

Influencers bring together growing communities and have the ability to significantly boost a site’s audience and influence a brand’s image. But brands don’t have to knock on their doors just to increase their awareness. It’s important to target them well. Indeed, your brand will depend on them and their speech.

The tone and universe of the influencer should match the DNA of your brand, the business objectives of your site and the needs of your users.
 

The thematic concordance between the subjects supported by your brand and by the influencers will be one of the main criteria. The incoming links on your site will bring even more weight to the semantic fields on which you are positioned.

The result: you will strengthen your audience’s commitment and benefit from a recommendation effect that will allow you to improve your site’s performance and generate qualified traffic.
 

👉Build strong connections with your audience: in addition to quantifying goals, influencer marketing allows you to leverage the relationships you build with your customers. When influencers use their creative talents or humour to talk about your brand, your communication gains in originality and impact.
It’s important to note that these influencers are not just marketing tools, but social relationship assets that brands can work with to achieve their strategic marketing goals. 
 

Influencer marketing is therefore becoming an indispensable part of a successful digital marketing strategy, all the more so since it can also serve other levers as important as SEO.