A staggering 89 percent of consumers begin their purchase process with a search engine, which leaves no doubt that search engine optimization (SEO) in influencer marketing campaigns plays a huge factor in generating long-term value and results for brands.
To best understand how important good SEO can be for a campaign, consider this: The first page of Google Search Results receives more than 91 percent of all search clicks, with the top three results in the list nabbing 61 percent of all clicks. Not only can strategic SEO help influencer content rise to the top of search results, but it can also boost your own company website’s ranking: Blog posts are sources of authoritative inbound links which factor into your own site’s search ranking success.
In today’s Measurement Monday post, we are taking a close look at how to structure campaigns for SEO success, as well as how to measure that success practically and accurately.
In one of our previous posts, we touched on why influencer-generated evergreen content is so powerful. Blog posts that are “evergreen” offer brands long-term results, as they help content rise to the top of search rankings and provide potential customers with readily available resources as they are searching for information related to the brand or product.
Before launching an influencer marketing campaign, be sure to do some keyword research and craft a strategy that leverages specific keywords in the blogger-generated content. The words and phrases you use should offer a balance of the most commonly searched terms (those that currently rank the highest) and those that have lower competition and are more “ownable” to your brand. These keywords should appear not only in the headings of blog posts but also regularly throughout the body content and in image descriptions.
It’s important to remember that you can use SEO strategy in social media posts by utilizing keywords, especially since Facebook and Twitter posts are treated like any other web page by Google’s rankings. Studies have shown that engagement of social media posts have a direct correlation to higher search rankings, furthering the value of engagement in influencer campaigns. You can apply SEO on Pinterest by focusing on image relevancy and using strategic keywords in pin titles and descriptions. Social signals increase search rankings by signaling search engines you are relevant and by increasing domain authority.
When correctly executed, influencer-generated blog posts can become significant traffic sources for a brand website over time. For example, in one of The Motherhood’s recent campaigns for a healthcare client, blog posts from our team of influencers served as one of the top drivers of traffic to the client’s website and contributed to significant conversion. Many of the influencers’ blog posts have generated hundreds and even thousands of monthly visits to the company’s site.
As you can see in the graph below, the top-performing blog post increased in popularity over time, generating a high level of traffic from Pinterest and organic search and continuing to drive high levels of visits to the company’s site, even 10 months after being posted.
A study by Halverson Group found that the lifespan of a blog post is almost 24 times as long as the standard 30 days reporting metric, indicating that the current measurement metrics are undervaluing blog post performance by failing to measure any results over time. The takeaway? It is important that our measurement methods account for this long-term value.
Metrics that can be monitored to track the SEO success of a blog post include search engine rankings, views after a certain period of time, and social media engagement. It is important that these factors are tracked consistently across blog posts if there are multiple posts resulting from a given campaign.
Three ways to measure the SEO success of a blog post:
- Record the page views at time increments, such as after one week of posting, three months and six months after. Be sure that these numbers are being recorded from a consistent measurement source across all posts.
- Do a search for your keywords and pay attention to how the post ranks on search engines. This includes images that appear in search!
- Monitor engagement on Pinterest (and other social platforms). While this activity may not always immediately convert to page views, it will over time, and it indicates intent and boosts search rankings. Engagement on other platforms should also be measured, as social signals increase the off-page SEO results.
SEO, along with effective measurement of long-term campaign success, are important strategic factors in influencer marketing. Using the three methods mentioned above, the long-term value of search engine optimized influencer marketing can be better reported and included in the measurement of overall campaign success.
Interested in learning more? Read all of our #MeasurementMonday series posts HERE.
Campaigns with The Motherhood’s bloggers have seen program content rise to the top of search rankings. We’d love to work with you in developing easy-to-find, evergreen blog posts that will live on for potential consumers to find when they’re searching for more information online prior to purchase. If you’re interested in working with us, email contact@themotherhood.com.
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