Influencers in today’s SEO – Search Engine Watch

One new to SEO might assume that the only role influencers play 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 how a visitor interacts 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.

Targeted peer personas

Within 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 most ideal customers.
2. Based on the buyer contact’s email, use a tool such as Clearbit to generate a list of their social media accounts. Remember that where they maintain social accounts is just as important as their level of usage and subject matter.
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 not, LinkedIn Sales Navigator makes segmentation relatively simple based on its filters and query refinements, allowing you to select highly similar individuals to your targets.
6. Repeat the above process to generate a significant enough dataset to apply pivots in a worksheet to determine buyer persona commonalities.

Once targeted personas are created based on those distinct commonalities, we can use them to impact those user signals positively. Here are a few oversimplified pieces for the sake of brevity.