Social media marketing, without doubts has a huge potential in increasing sales. Social media sites offers increased brand recognition, enhanced opportunities to convert, better SERP rankings, improved brand loyalty and ascertain higher conversion rates. Bearing this in mind, the million-dollar question stands out; how beneficial is Facebook SEO?

A recent study concluded that approximately 51% of Facebook users prefer to shop from brands they follow, as 80% of the various US social networks connect through Facebook with various brands. Benefiting from Facebook SEO requires that social media marketers learn some tips and tricks in their profiles.

Before getting to these tips, let’s look at some of the importance of integrating SEO Facebook profile.

 

Importance of SEO Facebook Profile

 

Some of the importance of doing SEO to your Facebook profile include;

    1.Raises awareness for your online business

Whenever you post a photo, video or blog in your Facebook account, expect to create conversations. Optimized online conversations can go viral, reaching farther and wider. This will certainly help your business reach new clients, ultimately resulting in increased leads.

 

   2. Improves your rankings

Google and Bing attest to the fact that Facebook, and to an extension, Twitter profiles have an effect on SEO results. The more your online business is talked about, the better it gets in search results.

By doing this, any time a customer searches for your brand, your Facebook, and other social media accounts profiles show up in the results. This ultimately results in providing more click-through opportunities by occupying top SERP positions.

 

     3. Great platform to connect with customers

Updating statuses, photos or videos creates a conversation, as mentioned before. Most often, new potential customers can be caught in your conversation, as they wish to try out your products or services.

 

   4. Leads to offline sales

 

With the current state of internet availability, most customers often do their research online before settling on a product to purchase. Doing good SEO for your Facebook account increases the number of conversations about your products. By occupying good local search results, be certain of increased offline sales.

 

  5. Free brand advertisement

Through Facebook and social media pages, you can always give regular updates on your products and services. This can be done through various images, blog posts, videos and other means. Through this, you effectively advertise your brand to your active followers and engaging social media platforms that increase the reach of your brand.

These benefits are perhaps what you would like to see your online venture go through. Just to mention, Facebook is becoming a “second home page” for various online businesses. Facebook has also recently created various opportunities that enable users to get traffic through tried and tested methods – Facebook SEO.

 

SEO Facebook Profile Tips and Tricks

To achieve the said benefits, try the following tweaks in your Facebook profile.

 

1. Choose a Good Facebook Name

Though sounding obvious, choosing your Facebook name, either for a personal account or a Facebook page is the first step of signing up, and of your online marketing strategy. Choosing a significant name is the first correct and the most significant step towards success.

This hugely depends on your company’s name, and how it can help you for SEO. Rahul Dass, the business development executive at Creation Infoways believe that optimizing Facebook pages is as simple as including some simple key phrases that represent your business.

A case in point, if you deal with reviews of the best products on the market, with your site called “TopTenReviews.com” and use a Facebook name such as Top Ten Reviews,” it is easy to understand. Using a lot of keywords may hurt your search and consequently, viral growth.

Having a long name such as “TopTenReviews, Review of Best Products, Comparison and Buying Guide” will certainly lack appeal and memorability. Actually, some may take your page as spammy due to the “desperate” kind of Facebook name. The name you chose should, therefore, be of high quality and satisfy people’s needs.

Note that the first word of your Facebook name of Page title is important for Google. This can bring about followers and fruitful engagement henceforth. When choosing a name, it is important that you avoid generic words and consider the best keywords that can represent your brand or personality best.

Tip: Once you have chosen your Facebook name, it is unnecessary to keep changing it. Think of a long-term choice, as you want your Facebook page to work well with Search Engine Optimization. With this, people will easily reach it by searching certain keywords.

 

2. Select Your Vanity URL That Boosts Facebook SEO

Search marketers and Facebook users certainly understand how selecting a good URL “username” for Facebook pages work out. This represents one of the best opportunities that Facebook offers for marketing. after deciding on the username, your URL will change to something like this www.facebook.com/username. You can choose or access your username on this page.

When doing this, it is worth noting that there are blacklisted generic usernames that you cannot register with. Nonetheless, Facebook offers a wide array of generic usernames that gives you freedom of choice. You can as well mix up your actual names with other keywords.

 

Always be cautious when choosing a username as it should represent your brand’s identity alongside personality. To be able to choose one, note that your page ought to have a minimum of 25 likes. There are a couple of Facebook guidelines that will help you create a custom username. They include:

• Your page or profile can only have one username and you can’t claim someone else’s username.
• Username must have alphanumeric characters i.e. A – Z, 0 – 9 or period (”.”)
• Periods and capitalization do not count as part of the username. For instance, Vincekip55, Vince.kip55 or Vince.kip.55 are considered as the same username.
• Usernames should be at least 5 characters long and shouldn’t have generic terms or extensions such as .com or .net.
• You ought to be the admin of the page to create or change the username for the page.
• Usernames should always adhere to the Facebook statement of rights and responsibilities.
• New pages may not immediately create a username and your page’s username can be removed due to inactivity.

3. Strategic Keyword Placement

The importance of keyword usage on your Facebook page cannot be ignored. There is undeniable proof that optimizing web content and metadata with the most relevant keywords improves your ranking. Similarly, optimizing your social media content with specific keywords can improve the visibility within the social network. Simply put, it will be easier for interested social media users to discover your content.

Below is a good example of this. Someone searches for “Organic and wildcrafted herbs” and the results generated include links to public posts on Facebook with a similar keyword.

Increasing the visibility of your social media through keyword placement may not ascertain the direct impact on search ranking. However, it will attract more relevant and interested users who are likely to click and engage with your content.

Since this content could be relevant to them, they will take some time reading it, spending more time reading it and sequentially decreasing your bounce rate.

Keyword optimized Facebook pages have a similar effect. When creating an official page for your online business, there is an option of adding a description.

Using relevant and strategically placed keywords in this description attracts a relevant audience who can easily find you. The more optimized your page is, the more visible it will be.

 

4. Optimizing Facebook Status Updates for SEO

Some of the common responsibilities of running a Facebook page for your brand include sharing captivating content. Always take advantage of the descriptive fields every time you post a picture, video or create an event.

Use keywords properly as it can make difference in your overall ranking. Note that this text will become SEO title for the specific Facebook post.

Doing keyword research and adding specific words in your photo description and status updates while engaging your followers expands your SEO power. It is important to note that Facebook makes the content that is posted on Facebook Fan Pages indexable by Google and other search engines.

Google places a high value on the first word of the post. The first 18 characters of the post also become the Meta description for search engines. Therefore, ensure that all these are relevant.

5. Include Your Address to Boost Local SEO

The growth rate of local SEO is so significant to be ignored. Undertaking this is of immense importance as national level SEO is increasingly becoming competitive day in day out. Due to this, local business owners will find it absurd to compete on such scales, perhaps preferring local SEO for online marketing.

The best way to win this is by including your address in your Facebook posts. The majority of consumers depend on their tablets or smartphones to complete local searches. To get competitive online visibility, therefore, it is prudent to adopt a right strategy for social channels.

Facebook can help you accomplish this, especially if you have your Facebook page. This is why experts’ advice on the importance of filling out everything on your “info” tab, including address and phone number.

Why is this important? You may ask. Well, according to Adweek, the city, address, country and ZIP code helps in indexing your brand for enhanced local SEO. All these details will boost your trust in the eyes of Facebook and followers as well.

6. Link Your Facebook Business Page

Backlinks have been proved to not only be useful for websites but also Facebook profiles. If more important pages link your Facebook page, the more trust followers will get on your page. If you have a popular website, creating links that direct readers to your Facebook page will be beneficial.

This will not only add credibility to your page but also increase the chances of ranking higher. Accomplishing this is quite easy. Use your website and articles in your blog to link to the page.

7. SEO with Facebook Notes

Posts on Facebook are used to inform or create some engagement with your followers and fans. They are an easier way of informing fans important news concerning your venture as well as updating them during times of crisis. Unaware to many people, Google searches, and indexes these notes from Facebook fan pages.

However, this is only true for business pages and doesn’t apply to personal profiles. Notes give Facebook page admins a good platform to fill keyword rich text that can improve the rankings of the Fan page with Google or Bing.

Always spread the keywords wisely in the title and all over the notes. You can include photos that provide chances of adding keywords in the caption section.

 

8.Post Direct Website Links on Your Facebook Page

The power of social media when it comes to boosting your website’s SEO cannot be ignored. Facebook can help in getting high quality backlinks as well as increase the domain authority. This will not only help you in being on Google’s first page but also benefit from increased traffic.

Borrowing from the notes thing, you can create a Facebook Note with few quotes from your recent blog post that are rich in keywords. Before posting this, ensure that you suggest to your followers to visit your website to read the whole article.

9. Managing Reputation

Managing the reputation of your page is both an art and science. There are several ways of bumping down negative posts and reviews that are ranking highly. With social media sites, their advantage is that you will appear higher in search engine results page if you have a high-ranking profile. Nonetheless, there could be some negative information that you may want to be removed.

This could be some negative business review posted or a criminal database relating to a minor offense that refers to you, but is no longer relevant and needs to be pulled down to secure employment. With social media sites, you can “Like” pages or send personal messages.

You can also describe your business in the “about” section vividly and include any information that will outrank other pages that refer to your company. A good example is the Starbucks Google search result. Try this and you will realize that Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites rank highly. This is the advantage of social media for reputation management.

If it is impossible to remove the undesirable post, you can use your social media pages to outrank those pages with negative reviews. Try a simple search at Pringles to realize how much the social media pages can help you.

 

10. Outrank Negative Reviews by Creating Engagement

Engaging with your clients and making them aware of your presence really matters. For instance, if you want to earn more rankings from your Facebook page, think of the best ways of creating engagement online. This can be easier, especially if you have a huge following or likes.

A large number of likes or comments in your post will alert Facebook and Google that something good sprouts’ from your page. Don’t forget that having quality content is elementary to achieving this. Some of the methods of accomplishing this include:

 

        i. Don’t refrain from showing your personality

Everything in your social media should portray your brand’s personality. Ensure that your fans return to your Facebook page as they like your company’s tone and voice. Express yourself through various posts, cover photos and many more.

 

     ii. Ask questions to understand fan’s preferences

This is perhaps one of the easiest ways of driving engagement on your page. It will always keep your fans talking and discussing your products.

 

   iii. Take advantage of images

As an English idiom, pictures are worth a thousand words. Truly, images tell stories quickly and have a great news feed exposure. Therefore, you should take advantage of this visual identity. Customize the images including your cover photos and profile pictures to suit your brand.

 

   iv. Use call to action buttons

Call to action buttons come in handy by helping marketers drive their followers or audience to respond in the way they want. Seemingly, audience tends to respond better when given the specifics on what to respond to. This will get your followers to comment and like your comment that strengthens intra-Facebook linking.

 

Final Thoughts

Understanding the deep correlation between Facebook and SEO is key to succeeding in this. Whereas building your Facebook page requires creative content and consistent execution, SEO integration also plays a crucial role in boosting the pages’ growth rate.

Viral distribution somehow limits you to your fans and those connected to your fans. However, search engine optimization exposes your page to the entire userbase and unlimited search engines.