Influencers in today’s SEO – Search Engine Watch

One new to SEO might assume that influencers’ only role in ranking is bloggers providing reviews and links via guest blogging. However, suppose we were to segment the search into simplistic buckets of links, content, and the cumulative user signals associated with visitors’ interactions with links and content. In that case, the future role of influencers would skew far more toward the user signals bucket. Historically, influencers have been viewed as a paid social channel add-on for B2C and D2C companies, only more recently taken seriously for their ability to influence B2B purchases.

Their use cases are far more versatile than the initial assumptions and preconceived notions about value, with expected compensation ranges to match that versatility based on audience sizes and channel selection. As an SEO, it is easy to understand how influencers that maintain blogs in your niche would be helpful when undergoing a PR-driven outreach campaign for link purposes. To understand how influencers can affect the outcome of a site’s rankings external to the links generated, it’s essential to understand a few key concepts.

In targeted peer personation content marketing, a marketer would seek to develop personas to structure content with the appropriate hooks and value propositions properly. For ease in understanding how to create a sample buyer persona, consider the following process:

1. If you’re not operating on a brand new site, look into your previous 100 customers – if you have enough data, you can be more granular and select your ideal customers.
2. Based on the buyer contact’s email, use aRemembers Clearbit to generate a list of their social media accounts. Remember that where they maintain matter accounts is just as important as their level of usage and subject matters.
3. Who do these customers aspire to be? Are they constantly seeking out solutions? Whom do they follow to get these solutions? A quick hack is to sort their followers by audience size, as authoritative influencers have a more significant following than most of their industry peers.
4. Digging further, who influences those subject matter experts? Which sources do they consume?
5. Who are your ideal customer’s peers? On the one hand, you’ll likely have some of that data immediately when analyzing the audience data. If you do noitsnkedIn, Sales Navigator makes segmentation relatively simple based on their filters and query refinements, allowing you to select highly similar individuals to your tto apply pivots cess to generate a significant enough dataset to use pivots on in a worksheet to determine buyer persona commonalities.

Once targeted peto impacts those user signals positively, not commonalities, we can use them to impact them positively. Here are a few oversimplified pieces for the sake of brevity.

Navigational queries

Through multiple experiments, we know that spikes in navigational queries can have a spillover effect on rankings for non-navigational questions. As Google is introducing Multitask Unified Model (MUM) to make sense of complex queries, the more positive results we as SEOs can provide on showing that these navigational queries also have informational and transactional signals associated with them, the better the intent and therefore search the ordering will be on the coveted transactional terms.

How does this work with targeted peer personas? It can be as easy as hiring influencers that exist frequently enough in the sum of audience data to your targets to share helpful information related to your product or service, explicitly writing out the brand name. Each time we’ve run campaigns of this type, the navigational queries spike. This alone is very useful, but there’s more power to these peer influencers.

Repeat dwell

Having a user specifically searches for your brand and click the result is a great first step. What could be better? Repeatedly visiting and spending time on-site. We’re simplifying here, but structuring a campaign with peers that follows the Attention, Interest, Desire, Action (AIDA) allows you to introduce the brand name for navigational queries and then pepper the targeted audience via those peers’ influencers with exciting facts and use cases. In this campaign phase, the direct links from social posts could be used, as we can all probably agree that our Chrome and Android data is being used to refine future searches continually. The goal of this phase is to drive repeat usage of the site. Some commercial activity may occur, which is a bonus but not a KPI.

Query satisfaction

The final phase of the AIDA model moves from desire to action, and our goal is to turn our navigational queries into transactional rankings. Translated to how MUM might perceive this, a user that seeks out a result navigationally, returns to the result from another channel, and then comes back with a transactional query modifier is likely satisfied with the query result. Thus, that website should be shown more frequently.

How does that work with the influencers?

The third style of posts from the peer influencers to your buyer personas can again return to mentioning your brand name and including a specific value proposition to generate that action. It could be a coupon code, if call-to-action for a deal, a giveaway, or any combination of the sort. By now focusing on a specific transactional modifier with your brand name, a percentage of those blended queries will occur, resulting in action being taken, which is the definition of query satisfaction. You’ll have successfully used influencers to influence how Google perceives the site for future transactional queries.