Facebook is undoubtedly the largest social media platform in the world. As of June 2017, it reached over 2 billion active monthly users. If you are still trying to figure out whether Facebook is a good fit for your business marketing needs, you are wasting your time. The time that you need to invest in developing a Facebook marketing strategy.
With so many monthly users, you can guarantee that your target audience, or at least a good majority of them, are already on Facebook.
If this information alone is not enough to persuade you to create a business page and begin marketing on Facebook, stop reading this. Open a new tab in your web browser and do some research for yourself on Facebook marketing success stories. There are many, many individuals and businesses using Facebook every day to expand their reach. Also, there are tons of resources for free about how to get started using Facebook marketing for a business. Take a look at some of these pages and then come back to this article.
The focus of this article will be on SEO and how to use it with for Facebook.
What is SEO
Once you have everything set up on Facebook, you need to use SEO practices to increase your reach. In order to do that, you need an understanding of exactly what SEO is. If this is a new term for you, SEO is short for search engine optimization. Essentially, SEO is a method of increasing your website traffic by using keywords in order to improve organic search engine results.
Why SEO is Important
Google ranks websites and pages in search results based on a complex algorithm which is continuously updated. The tricky thing is Google does not explicitly say how the algorithm works, making SEO even more complicated for beginners. However, SEO experts know with a high degree of certainty that certain things help boost search rankings. In my opinion, the three main things to focus on concerning SEO are content, backlinks, and your website’s mobile compatibility. By properly utilizing and understanding these three functions of SEO, you will have a greater chance of increasing your search results and overall visibility.
Content
Content seems to be one of the most agreed upon factors in SEO ranking results. Google will look at your website and see if you are providing valuable, quality content to your visitors and viewers. Some say that the length of content and relevance or quality are all essential in the ranking process. With that in mind, you need to provide some sort of valuable information on your website so Google will rank you higher. The most common ways to share content is in the form of blog posts or whitepapers. Make sure you are doing this already.
Backlinks
Backlinks are how many times other websites provide links back to your website. So for example, if you are a marketing firm and you produce valuable content in the form of a blog, other websites may use your content in their own blogs and provide hyperlinks that direct readers back to your website. Google looks at the quality of the websites that are using backlinks and also the relevance to your website in order to provide a ranking. So if the backlink is found on another very popular marketing website, it will have a greater impact on your increase in search rankings.
Mobile Compatibility
In 2016, Google announced their mobile first indexing. This means that Google now looks at how compatible your website is on mobile platforms in order to rank your search results. Since most people currently own smartphones, more and more searches are conducted via a mobile device instead of a desktop or laptop. Now that search results are directly affected by mobile compatibility, make sure your website is designed to work well with smartphones.
Using SEO with Facebook
Now that you have a working knowledge of SEO and its importance, how can you use it to optimize your Facebook page? It is important to note that using SEO for Facebook will increase your search results within Facebook initially, not your entire website. That’s okay though and I’ll discuss this in more detail shortly.
Start off by creating a profile name with some keywords. For example, if you have a plumbing business, use some keyword search tools to figure out what people are searching for about plumbing. Get creative and incorporate these keywords into your Facebook profile title.
Use additional keywords throughout your profile as well to increase search results. Create a URL for your profile that will direct searches to your page. Sprinkle keywords into your About section and profile description. You can also use keywords when you post on your timeline. For example, when you share content (articles, videos, links, photos, etc.) on your page, make sure you provide keywords in the descriptions.
The goal of using SEO on Facebook is to expand your reach and attract your target audience to your website. If the information you provide is seen as useful, valuable, or interesting, your target audience will share your content. When they share your content, you increase in overall search results within Facebook. When your target audience shares your content with their friends, it increases your audience even more and gets more people to engage with you. This causes your social media presence to grow further which ultimately increases the click through rate to your website. Facebook then can directly increase traffic to your website, boosting your overall search ranking results in Google.
SEO is an Ongoing Process
While setting up your profile and inserting keywords and phrases is important initially, the SEO process needs to be continuous. Today’s world is full of uncertainty and the one constant you can rely on is change. While that is a silly and overused cliche, your business will certainly need to grow and evolve over time to match the needs of your consumers. You may add extra services or products in the next year in order to adapt to the changing market. As your business grows and the services you offer expand, incorporating new and additional keywords is vital.
Also, you should always experiment with keywords and combine them to see what has the best results overall. Play around with different phrases and use Google’s related search at the bottom of their results page to find out what other words users are typing in to their browser.
Need Additional Help?
Let’s face it, using SEO correctly and efficiently can be difficult on your own. I barely scratched the surface on this topic and there is not even an exact science to it. Your time is valuable and you may not want to divert internal resources to figuring all of this information out. If you would like additional help using SEO for your business, contact us today. They offer a tremendous amount of support and they are a fantastic resource for information. IMT will help get you started and walk you through the process, ensuring you achieve the results you want.