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Can gifting products to influencers improve your chances of appearing higher in search engine results? It is possible when influencers places a link to your brand's website or keywords of your choice in their promotional messages. Their followers, who could be your potential customers, are encouraged to learn more about your brand or products — eventually boosting your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy.
Brands such as Glossier, Jack in the Box, Tarte Cosmetics, House of CB, etc., are already using product gifting as a part of their SEO strategy to increase brand visibility, drive traffic and increase brand recognition.
SEO is an essential marketing tool that helps marketers improve the visibility and discoverability of their brand's website. It has become more strategic with constant changes in the Google algorithm, rising competition, and duplicate content. Here, influencer marketing can open new doors for you by bringing in more backlinks, exposure, social signals, and authentic content, improving your SEO score on Google.
Influencer seeding is when brands send free products to creators or invite them to try their services and ask them to create content based on their experience. It can include reviews, social media posts, blogs, YouTube videos, or any piece of content that shows the audience how the influencer had a positive experience with the brand's products and services.
Whether celebrities or micro-influencers, brands can collaborate with content creators to create mass awareness and generate maximum engagement.
Learn in-depth: Product Seeding (Influencer Gifting) – A Quick Guide
But how does influencer seeding impact SEO? SEO or search engine optimization is the marketing technique brands use to rank higher on Google and increase their visibility to the audience.
Marketers follow the on-page SEO methods to rank the pages but often forget to focus on off-page optimization, equally important to kick off the rankings. Influencer seeding helps improve your on-page and off-page SEO through backlinks, content creation, social signals, and more. Influencer seeding helps strengthen the authority, relevance, and quality of your brand's website and boost your value in the eyes of Google.
Preparing fresh content for your audience is a challenge for even seasoned marketers. However, influencers are experts at it, so much so that they have made a living out of content creation. They know how to create compelling quality content that their followers will like and engage with.
While quality content is essential to capture audiences' attention, it is equally important to rank higher on Google. Search engines look for brands with authentic content on their page that can solve the audience's problems and provide value. Google prefers such pages and ranks them higher on the search engine results page (SERP).
Gifting free products and services to influencers makes up for tons of captivating, shareable content that can attract the audience and get the attention of search engines. Blogs, videos, social media posts, reviews, or more influencer content enable Google to collect unique and reliable content about a brand and rank it higher on the search page for users.
Besides the content, influencer seeding also helps you attain user-generated content (UGC), which can boost your Google ranking. Often influencers encourage their followers to create content using branded hashtags for videos or hold TikTok challenges. The followers use hashtags to share their content on social media, generating mass awareness for your brand and providing rich reusable content.
Influencer seeding can help increase brand awareness by reaching a larger and more targeted audience. Influencers have a dedicated following, which can be an ideal target audience for a brand's products or services. By partnering with an influencer, a brand can reach a wider audience and generate more buzz about its products or services.
Increased brand awareness can positively impact SEO by increasing the number of people who search for the brand or its products online. The more people search for a brand or its products, the higher it will rank in the search results. Additionally, as more people become aware of the brand, they are more likely to click on the website link, which can further improve its ranking in the search results.
For example, celebrity influencers expose your brand to millions of newer audiences who might be willing to buy your product. The followers become aware of your brand and what you're offering, making your brand more recognizable and memorable.
House of CB, a women's luxury fashion brand, is an expert at attaining mass awareness and engagement for its products by distributing clothes to influencers. The British brand works with mega influencers and celebrities, including Vanessa Hudgens, Molly-Mae Hague, and even the Kardashians. It gifts its products to influencers before launching them to the general public. Influencers then post images of their newly received outfits and tag the brands in the post, generating massive buzz about the fashion company.
In 2019, the company gifted a designer top to Molly-Mae Hague, a lifestyle and fashion influencer on Instagram with over 7 million followers. She styled the outfit and shared an image on her Instagram page, tagging the company. The post generated more than 15k likes and thousands of comments from her followers.
Massive awareness drives website traffic — one of the primary reasons why people carry out SEO in the first place. With SEO techniques, marketers try to get as many visitors on their page as possible to show Google their website has valuable content. Massive traffic means Google ranks you higher on the search results, helping the users to find you easily.
Social media users, especially Gen Zers, tend to explore the brand or product they find interesting on social channels. Using the social commerce features launched by social media platforms, the users immediately click on the product or website link mentioned in the influencer's post to purchase your product online.
Besides website links, influencers include discount codes and affiliate links in their content, encouraging followers to buy the brand's products at a discount. Such codes and links drive the audience to the product or landing page, bringing countless visitors to your website and positively impacting your authority.
Skratch Labs, an energy food and beverages brand based in the USA, targets health and wellness influencers to drive website traffic. Their influencer seeding campaigns include a mix of celebrity and micro-influencers, driving mass awareness and authentic engagement.
The brand gifts products to professional athletes and sports celebrities, asking them to post photos, videos, blogs, giveaways, and more on their social media channels.
On the other hand, the micro and nano influencers post content about how they use Skratch Labs products in their daily fitness routine and link to the company's social media page or website. The content mix drives traffic to the brand's product, blog, and social media pages, improving its SEO by building authority in the fitness niche.
Skratch Labs is also famous for hosting exciting giveaways with multiple niche influencers, including fitness, pet, family, mom bloggers, and more.
Related: Leveraging Pet Influencers To Reach New Customers
One of the essential components of SEO is link building. Search engines use links to determine the relevance and authority of a website. The more links a website has from high-quality sources, the higher it will rank in the search results. Influencer seeding can help you earn backlinks from influencer websites and social media profiles. When this comes from a well-known creator, these backlinks are top-quality, enhancing your SEO score.
Quality backlinks build a strong link profile—the link makeup that connects back to the website or page. Google looks at link profiles for ranking pages.
Influencers enable you to build a powerful link profile by adding a link to your website in published content, creating a direct backlink to your website. The higher the number of quality links, the higher your ranking on search engines, as Google will see your website as a relevant domain in the space.
These links can increase the number of inbound links to a website and improve its authority in the eyes of search engines. Additionally, suppose the influencer has a significant following; in that case, the links they share can drive a considerable amount of traffic to the brand's website, further improving its ranking in the search results.
Social signals, such as likes, shares, and comments, can significantly impact a website's ranking in search results. Search engines use social signals to perceive your website's social presence, popularity, and relevance. By partnering with influencers, brands can improve their social signals and enhance their SEO efforts.
When influencers share a brand's message, they often encourage their followers to like, share, and comment on the content or individual brand posts. The more engagement a brand's posts receive, the more likely it is to rank higher in the search results.
Koa's product gifting campaign is the perfect example of using influencers to improve social signals. The USA-based organic beverages company used a gifting-only campaign to boost social engagement. They gifted a month's supply of healthy organic juices to seven relevant micro-influencers asking them to share content on their social media pages. The campaign was a huge success, bagging more than 10,000 likes for the brand's account, which is a huge engagement from just seven influencers. These influencers were also brand advocates who were already talking about the product on their pages, which made the campaign even more effective.
SEO is a keywords game. Keyword optimization is an important aspect of SEO and involves using keywords that people search for in a website's content. By placing the most relevant keywords in the most suitable places without stuffing, you can optimize on-page SEO to rank higher on Google.
The branded keywords on social media, guest blogs, videos, etc., help the brand get more recognition and raise the SEO score.
With influencer seeding, you can ask the creators to mention your branded keywords in the content, blog posts, video descriptions, or hashtags for better optimization. Influencers can also add links to these keywords to double their SEO rankings.
1. Blogs - help create direct links to your websites and improve keyword optimization.
2. Videos – help capture attention, create quality backlinks and enable keyword optimization.
3. Influencer-hosted Podcasts – build mass awareness, create trust, and drive traffic to the website.
4. Social media posts – improve social signals through engagement, generate awareness, and drive traffic.
5. Influencer Events – generates buzz on blogs and social media, provides quality content, drives website traffic, and strengthens the link profile.
Influencer seeding is not only about gifting products to influencers and then waiting for the content. It is a step-by-step process to get the desired outcome.
Step 1: Set an achievable end goal for your campaign, which can be leads, sales, engagement, or more.
Step 2: Identify the creators who can help you attain the desired goal and fit your content requirements. The best practice is hiring top-performing creators with high engagement rates and relevant content.
Step 3: Reach out to the creators and send them gifts along with a brief of the type of content you wish them to create. Allow them the creative space to develop exciting ways to promote your product or service. You can also share the discount codes and affiliate links with them to track their performance later.
Step 4: Once the creators create the content, start tracking the results through the links and codes to ensure the content is working.
Step 5: Analyze your SEO on the web analytics tools to see how influencer seeding impacts your SEO efforts.
Step 6: Pay your influencers. It is an important step that brands forget. Product gifting means you don't have to pay the influencers. But paying your influencers is a good practice if you wish to build better creator relations and lasting positive reviews for your product. You can use the influencer affiliate hybrid model to pay them for the sales or conversions they drive.
The step-by-step process may sound exhaustive if you execute it manually. However, with an automated tool running end-to-end campaigns can become easier. affable.ai is an influencer management tool that enables fast influencer search, smooth campaign management, and detailed performance measurement. You can do everything from influencer selection to product gifting and performance measurement on a single platform.
Book a free trial to connect with our experts now and begin planning your next campaign!
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