What is Influencer Marketing?
The answer is right in the name. Marketing your products or services through someone who can influence an audience base is Influencer Marketing. These influencers have a certain level of expert knowledge in their field.
Thus, they can persuade their audience to buy/subscribe to the products/services they promote.
Today, social media channels such as Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are the favorite hangout spots for these influencers. But Influencer Marketing has its roots in Celebrity Endorsements. The earliest celebrity influencer was a former slave. Yes, you read it right.
Let’s go for a trip down memory lane. The year is 1890; R T Milling Company of Missouri hires Nancy Green, a former slave and a performer, to promote their recipes by representing a “fictitious” character, Aunt Jemima. She has appeared at food shows, flea markets, local fairs and festivals, and the like for nearly 20 years to promote the company’s product line.
Fast forward to 2025; the social media world is packed with influencers who can significantly impact people’s buying habits in a myriad of ways. Their modern tools are posts, stories, product reviews, testimonials, etc.
How Can Influencer Marketing Impact Your SEO/Rankings?
1. Through Backlinks
The fight to get authoritative links gets tougher day by day. At this juncture, Influencer Marketing comes into the limelight. Now, the catch here is links containing Affiliate Disclosures. The FTA mandates affiliates to disclose their relationship with businesses and brands on their site visitors.
Hence, influencers are legally bound to educate their audience about the products and services they recommend. If you are not going to use Influencer Marketing to its fullest extent, links with affiliate disclosures are unlikely to hurt your SEO. But bear in mind that Google does not want the influence of paid links in SERPs.
Partner with micro-influencers and ask them to curate content (both video and text) about the issues that haunt your sector. Do not push them to promote your products/services directly. Instead, ask them to highlight you via inbound links within their content in a less intrusive manner.
2. Through Brand Visibility
Let’s begin with a piece of data. Every day, no less than 5,47,200 websites are being created globally. Making people recognize you in the online space is nothing short of making a woman apologize (excuse the pun).
The more visible you are in the online world, the higher the number of visitors you get. Bear in mind that engagement and traffic are important ranking factors for search engines.
To get those precious clicks to your website, you need to instill trust in your audience. You do not require an army of influencers and a deep pocket to achieve this.
A handful of good influencers, coupled with a clever marketing strategy, can make your brand’s visibility go through the roof.
3. Through Credibility
Twitter and Annalect did an interesting study on Influencer Marketing’s relevance in today’s scenario. The study revealed that fans and followers trust influencers as much as they trust their friends.
This phenomenon is attributed to the influencers’ struggle. The reason behind the ‘Trust’ is that most of the influencers have built themselves from scratch. Their followers have seen and been with them through all ups and downs.
Reputable influencers who have a loyal following can boost your brand’s image to newer heights.
As your credibility increases, the traffic and engagement go up.
4. Through Crowdsourced Content
Everyone knows in the SEO world how crucial fresh content is for rankings. Crowdsourcing content can result in scores of articles and social mentions with inbound links.
We all know how important inbound links are for Google rankings. In 2008, Starbucks kick-started a crowdsourced content campaign, which skyrocketed its user engagement.
As a beginner, you can crowdsource content from micro-influencers who have a say in your industry. Let’s say yours is a beachwear brand. You could reach out to the budding fashion influencers/bloggers and ask them to make videos/blog posts on your clothing line.
The more original posts you generate through influencers with links to your site, the higher your engagement rate will be.
5. Through Social Traction
As mentioned earlier, with the right Influencers, your social media growth is on steroids. A study says that influencer-created content beats brand-created content, hands down.
Since many influencers operate in the social media space, your growth on social media is pretty much guaranteed if you play your cards right.
Take advantage of contests, unique referral codes, and brand promotions to boost your social media growth.
Make them sport your products and give testimonies. The social signals these testimonies garner will impact your site’s SEO. Search engines will see the shares, likes, and comments as an alternate form of citation.
6. Through User Engagement
The bond between certain influencers and their followers is simply astonishing. You need to understand one thing. The followers of influencers are not just fans; they are loyalists and soldiers.
With just one parody video, Ms. Melissa Ong garnered tens of thousands of followers in a matter of weeks. At the time of penning this article, Ong has 3.8 million followers in TikTok. Today, she has her own song, merchandise, app, etc. Her followers are not just fans but ‘RAIDERS.’
At Ong’s command, her ‘henchmen’ raided the comment section of Phil Swift, who created Flex Tape. This made Phil change his profile picture to Ong’s. Imagine Ong strongly recommending a parody t-shirt to her cult following, and the subsequent user engagement the product page may get.
Useful Influencer Marketing Tools to Increase Your SEO/Rankings
1. Post for Rent
Post for Rent is for those who look for an Influencer Marketing toolkit and a service to manage their campaigns.
Post for Rent says they create award-winning influencer marketing campaigns with guaranteed ROI.
Right from campaign strategy to influencer selection and content creation to campaign reports, they do everything in-house.
If you are not on a shoestring budget, this tool may be your weapon. You can check an influencer’s engagement rate, brand affinity, audience demographics, and a lot using their Influencer Search and Profile Analytics tool. The company also provides customized plans to suit your needs.
2. Upfluence
Upfluence claims to work with giants such as Amazon, Universal Pictures, and Basics. Akin to Dovedale, Upfluence also offers you an all-in-one dashboard wherein you can perform a wide range of tasks.
To start with, you can find the right influencers by filtering the results with more than 20 advanced search criteria. Upfluence also offers you a nifty feature to zero in on the most influential customers by collecting their social data.
If you have other affiliate tools, you can integrate them with Upfluence. They also have an in-house team to devise comprehensive strategies for your business.
For those who want to catch a glimpse of Upfluence, there is a free Chrome extension for you to try.
3. Neoreach
Neoreach is another influencer marketing agency that claims to work with leading entities such as Airbnb, The New York Times, Walmart, and Honda.
The agency boasts that it has so far managed over $250 million worth of influencer marketing campaigns. The result of its collaboration with NVIDIA is to promote new project releases: 48.3 million impressions, 258.4k engagements, and a total reach of 13.4 million.
By the looks of it, Neoreach is not a new kid on the block. It appears that the agency maintains direct relationships with influencers, bloggers, and other content creators.
Neoreach is capable of fully undertaking your influencer marketing campaign. Their services include contracting, negotiating, payment disbursal, budget allocation, etc.
4. Buzzsumo
This tool helps you identify the ideal influencers using various filters. You can view an influencer’s top content, average and total engagement, number of articles/videos/posts published, etc.
If you are eyeing to recruit influential journalists to spread the word, Buzzsumo may be the right fit for you. Buzzsumo’s database has details about more than 5,00,000 journalists.
From those who write for The New York Times to hyperlocal newspapers, you can pretty much make a connection with anyone.
The downside of Buzzsumo’s influencer marketing tool is its limitations. The tool allows you to find influencers only on three platforms — Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
If you are interested in Instagram and TikTok influencer marketing, Buzzsumo is definitely not your bedfellow.
5. Melt Water
Another Influencer Marketing Agency you can trust. The agency was recently acquired by Meltwater, the “world’s first” online media monitoring company. The duo has “won” clients, including Nestlé, Walmart, Audi, H&M, Ogilvy, and BMW.
Here is what Ogilvy says about Melt Water. “We found Melt Water to be the most comprehensive platform in the market. We now use it in 11 offices, allowing us to deliver best-in-class influencer marketing programs for our clients.”
For those who want the taste of Melt Water, there are a handful of free tools, namely Facebook Page Analysis, Twitter Analysis, Top Influencers by Location, and Find Twitter Influencers.
If Gen Z is your audience, consider Melt Water, as it has a TikTok Influencer Marketing Tool as well. Within Melt Water’s dashboard, you can manage all relevant tasks such as finding influencers, approving content, signing contracts, sending payments, etc.
6. Captiv8
Positioning itself as an end-to-end influencer marketing tool, Captiv8 says it is the only influencer marketing platform with first-party creator authentication. They say the information is exclusive to them.
Their AI tool will predict the impressions, views, engagements, and more your campaign may garner through their program.
Captiv8 stands out in the crowd with its Brand Safety and Fraud Detection policy. Captiv8 filters out accounts with adult content, hate speech, racism, profanity, and the like.
If your concern is brand credibility and image more than just sales and impressions, Captiv8 is an agency worth considering for your Influencer Marketing needs.
The platform offers a free demo for you to catch a glimpse of how things work at Captiv8.
Influencer Marketing and SEO FAQs
1. Does Influencer Marketing Really Improve SEO?
Absolutely. Influencer Marketing helps your SEO through impressions, engagement rate, traffic, and social signals. The strategy enables you to generate authoritative links from a diverse range of personalities.
Another benefit is the steady supply of fresh content. The right influencers are Content Machines. They can encourage their followers to share their thoughts about your company. Imagine tens of thousands of people talking about you and the subsequent snowball effect.
2. How Do I Recruit Trustworthy Influencers?
Your concern is genuine. There are cases wherein followers were “cheated” by influencers.
The classic case is the Fyre Festival. Even Netflix made a movie — Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened — out of the disaster.
The festival organizer, Billy McFarland, is now behind bars for fraud. Fyre was promoted by a bevy of Instagram influencers, who faced severe backlash from their followers.
Coming back to the question, you have to have the background of the influencers checked before entering into a contract. You can also choose an influencer marketing tool to vet the influencers.
3. Is Influencer Marketing a Cost-Effective Marketing Strategy?
Corporate giants indeed use Influencer Marketing more than ever. PepsiCo, Amazon, Universal Pictures, Verizon, Asus, Microsoft, Coca-Cola; you name it, they all use Influencer Marketing. But that does not mean that they dominate the space. There is enough room for small players to soar high.
In fact, micro-influencers offer great value to emerging businesses for a fraction of the cost charged by big players. The values they offer you are a high engagement rate and affordability.
4. How Do I Get Backlinks from Influencers Without Getting Flagged?
First things first — Do not design your Influencer Marketing campaign as a sales-driven one. Instead, try to create some buzz around your brand. Since FTA mandates people to disclose if they are a part of an affiliate program, you need a workaround to make things work. Don’t worry!
The method you will need is 100% Legit, and even Fortune 500 companies are doing it. Instead of chasing backlinks, ask influencers to generate content on the burning issues of your industry. While doing so, ask them to market you softly. Trust us, this works!
