People-Powered SEO: Employee Ambassadors for Brands

Following a people-centered approach internally will mean you tap into a credible source from within, which is your own team. This is a stark contrast to another people-focused marketing strategy, influencer marketing, where you rely on external voices to advocate for your brand. 

While both have their benefits, building a culture that encourages employees to become ambassadors for your brand can be more beneficial for your brand in the long run, as it also contributes to your internal growth.

By taking a people-powered approach to SEO, you get to build visibility and strengthen your brand both internally and externally.

Why Employee Ambassadors Matter for SEO

Employee ambassadors are staff members who actively represent the company online by sharing content, engaging with industry discussions, and amplifying the brand’s messages through their personal platforms.

Search engines increasingly prioritize signals of authenticity, trust, and authority. When multiple individuals within your organization contribute content that meets these qualities, it sends powerful trust cues to both users and algorithms. 

This approach enhances E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness), a concept Google uses to assess content quality.

Beyond Rankings: The Broader Benefits

The advantages of working with employees for  SEO go far beyond better rankings. You’ll see increased content reach without extra ad spend. You’ll also observe higher engagement rates, considering how some personal posts can outperform corporate accounts.

On the recruitment side, you might see a larger inflow to your talent pool as your employees become proof of a strong workplace culture. 

How Employee Ambassadors Influence SEO

If you haven’t considered including your employees in your SEO strategy, you might just be missing an important piece to better marketing. Here’s how you can work with them to influence SEO:

1. Expanding Content Distribution

When employees share company blog posts, videos, or whitepapers on their own LinkedIn profiles, the audience expands beyond your existing followers. Even a small team can significantly multiply content impressions and click-throughs. This increases the chances of backlinks and mentions, which are helpful in strengthening SEO and improving your content marketing strategy.

2. Creating Authentic Backlinks

Search engines value backlinks from reputable sources. When your employees write guest posts, contribute to industry forums, or share insights that get picked up by other blogs, they create organic backlink opportunities.

3. Diversifying Content Formats

Ambassadors can create varied content. They might post behind-the-scenes photos, share lesser-known industry tips, Q&A videos, or personal takes on company news. This diversity can help your brand rank for a wider set of keywords and satisfy various user intents.

4. Boosting Brand Mentions and Social Signals

While social media signals are not a direct ranking factor, they do help with increasing your viability. When employees’ content is increasingly shared and discussed, there can be indirect SEO benefits, such as more traffic, more backlinks, and more branded searches.

Establishing an Effective Employee Ambassador Program

Establishing an effective ambassador program from the ground up is not easy, but it is absolutely doable. Just take note of these steps:

Step 1: Define Clear Goals

Your objectives must be clear. They will also depend on your priorities. For example, if your analysis shows that you lack backlink authority, you might want to focus on earning more backlinks.

You could also consider increasing branded keyword searches or expanding topics into new topic clusters. Setting clear objectives makes the road to creating content more smooth-sailing as employees know and understand what to focus on.

Step 2: Provide Training and Resources

Not everyone will be comfortable from the get-go when it comes to promoting content online. Offer short training sessions on the best practices for engaging on social media or the fundamentals of SEO.

It helps if you can provide ready-made assets, such as graphics, post templates, and suggested hashtags as well, to make participation quick and easy.

Step 3: Encourage Authenticity Over Scripts

Having a goal in mind and creating guidelines to help your team stick to them is important, but you have to avoid over-controlling the message to retain authenticity. 

Remember, the real value in employee advocacy is authenticity. Encourage team members to share their own perspectives, experiences, and stories, which resonate far more than corporate jargon.

Final Thoughts

Though employee ambassadors do not serve as a replacement for traditional SEO strategies, they’re certainly a good addition. By training, empowering, and recognizing your team’s contributions, you create a network of trusted voices that extend your reach and strengthen your digital footprint. 

Perhaps, it can be said that your employees are your greatest asset—not only in driving business results, but also in building the kind of authentic online presence that no algorithm update can take away.