Having good rankings on Google, Bing and other search engines 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 +1s 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:
Dr. Ben's Family Dentistry in New York City 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 Dr. Ben's Twitter handle get activity for this. Then because Dr. Ben'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. However, it works best with those that have low competition. So if the keyword that is getting social media buzz is "family dentistry", you could end up ranking high for that keyword. Local businesses can take advantage of this because it helps them to boost their business' search rankings for those general, yet necessary keywords.
Whenever you share content, make sure that you include low competition keywords like "Friendly, painless family dentistry in New York", 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.
How To Optimize Your SEO
Before you begin your SEO social media campaign, you should check out how you're doing thus far. You can check this by going to LocalVox, which is a free tool. Make sure you know which keywords are the top ones you should be ranking for. You can use LocalCast, which is an SEO tool 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 know that the more action you get on social media, the better your search ranks become. Now, let's look into how exactly this works for the different social media networks:
There are other social media sites you can use, like Pinterest, StumbleUpon, Reddit, FourSquare and Digg. These are the factors that play a role in getting ranked higher using these sites:
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 Google Rankings by Using Social Media
There are many benefits that local businesses can receive from social media accounts. They are able to become an authority, gain a bigger following, network with influencers and boost incoming traffic using link building and organic search results. Social media has a grand effect on the way we do business today and if you leverage it the right way, you can steadily grow the customer base for your local business.
