Having good search rankings is just as important is getting a line of customers into your business. If you aren’t familiar with how social media can impact your search rankings, read on.
What Search Engines Are Looking For
First, you have to understand what search engines are looking for, so you can see how social media is affecting search results. For instance, the authority of your tweets, how many visits from social media your URL receives, how many Facebook Likes and shares your URL gets, and how many tweets and retweets your URL obtains.
Each and every time someone in social media mentions your local business, it helps to boost your search rankings. How large your following is as well as and how much engagement your social posts receive also play a role in this. Here’s an example:
Luigi’s Italian Restaurant got a tweet from a local newspaper about its delicious dishes. That tweet was then favorited 400 times and retweeted 50 times. Both the newspaper’s and Luigi’s Twitter handle get credited with activity for this. Then because Luigi’s had their URL linked to their account on Twitter, their Web site was able to get a higher ranking on search engines.
How this Can Help Local Businesses
Engagement on social media networks can help boost your rankings even for keywords that are otherwise difficult to rank highly for (e.g., broad generic keywords). However, it works best with words that have low competition.
So if the keyword that’s getting social media buzz is broad and generic like “Italian food”, you could end up ranking high for that keyword. Local businesses can take advantage of this because it helps them to boost their business’s search ranks for those broad, yet necessary terms.
Whenever you share content, make sure you include low competition keywords like “Authentic Italian food in (your city)”, or, “Authentic Italian food near me – so when it gets social buzz, it can boost your rankings in search engines. The more content you share from your Web site on social media, the better your site will rank, which means more traffic being generated for your Web site.
Be Sure to Optimize Your SEO
Before you begin your SEO social media campaign, you should check out how you’re doing so far. Make sure you know which keywords are the top ones you should be ranking for, using SEO tools to help you track your ranking and find keywords you can use to optimize your Web site and social media posts.
A Deeper Understanding of Your Social Signals and their Impact
So you probably know the more action you get on social media, the better your search rank becomes. Now, let’s look into how exactly this works for different social media networks:
- Facebook: There are just under 3 billion people using Facebook, making it the ideal platform to use for boosting your search rankings. There are studies that show that Facebook actually has more influence over your search rankings than most of the other platforms. So the more shares and likes your posts receive, the better your rankings will be. The amount of comments you receive also helps — in fact, when you get a lot of likes, shares and comments, it boosts your rankings significantly.
- Twitter: With about 436 million users, Twitter posts boost rankings when tweets have authority, versus amount. The factors that can help you with your search rankings include the authority of your followers, mentions and retweets; how many followers, mentions and retweets you have; and the speed and intensity of your tweets and retweets over time.
There are other social media sites you can use, such as LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, et al. Optimizing your Google Maps listing and your Google Business Profile will also pay off in huge dividends because Google gives you those tools for a reason. For a FREE report on optimizing your Google Business Profile you can grab one here.
Link Building Using Social Media
Link building isn’t a new concept and is just as valuable today as it was 10 years ago. However, it has been made much easier to achieve thanks to social media networks. In the past, people would try link building using black hat tactics, like leaving spammy comments on forums and blogs. Today, you can implement link building into your social media strategy.
For instance, you can include links to valuable content from your blog in the social media posts you submit.
Boost Your Rankings on Google by Using Social Media
There are many benefits that local businesses can receive from social media accounts.
They are (you):
- become an authority,
- gain a bigger following,
- network with influencers, and,
- boost incoming traffic using link building and organic search results.
Social media has an outstanding effect on the way we do business today and if you leverage it the right way, you can steadily grow a customer base for your local business.
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