In SEO, there’s always an extreme craving to know what tactics have an impact on organic rankings. Whether it’s backlink’s impact or social media’s impact on rankings, everyone wants to know, “how does it help increase my organic search visibility?” The debates are endless when it comes to social media’s impact on SEO. In this article, we’ll focus on social media’s impact from a local SEO perspective and how it can fit into your local SEO strategy.
First off, does social media impact local SEO?
The short answer: no. At least, not directly. From our research, we haven’t been able to find anything that proves social media has a direct impact on your search engine rankings. This is probably because Google isn’t spending much (if any) of its time crawling the roughly 61,000 social media posts that are made per second.
If we do some napkin math and multiply that number by the number of seconds in a day (which is 86,400 if you didn’t know), that’s over 5 billion posts per day! Although we don’t know how many pages Google crawls in a day, this Quora answer estimating Google’s crawls per second gives us a starting point. Even if Google crawled at the rate of 45,000 pages per second it’s still a bit shy of the 61,000 posts made per second. Plus, Google still has to crawl the however-many-millions of webpages created per day.
All this to say, social media likely has no direct impact on local SEO. However, this doesn’t mean we should rule it out entirely when building your local SEO strategy. So, let’s explore!
Where does social media fit within your local SEO strategy?
Now, where does social media fit within your local SEO strategy? Well, in this next section, we’ll discuss some of the indirect benefits that social media provides for SEO and how you can leverage it for your brick-and-mortar SEO strategy.
Social media as a tool for content amplification
First and foremost, social media is a tool for amplifying your content and communicating with your audience instantly. At the push of a button, you share virtually any message you want with your audience. Additionally, it’s allowed businesses the chance at virality and to reach people beyond their core audience. This is where the real value of social media trickles into local SEO.
You never really know who’s keeping an eye on your brand so, if you happen to have some local bloggers following you then social media just paved the way for those bloggers to write about you. Similarly, if you have a viral post that lands in the lap of a journalist and that journalist writes about it or mentions it throughout the web then that’s where social media impacts your local SEO strategy.
At the end of the day, social media is a tool for communication. So, the more you are placing yourself in front of others, the better chance you have of getting mentioned throughout the web.
About pages and bios
About pages and social biographies are an underrated component of social media strategy and can be an important piece of local SEO strategy. First off, it’s the best place to show your brand’s personality, share your story, and give followers an understanding of your brand’s mission. Although it’s not entirely clear how Google uses ‘About’ pages to understand your business, we believe it’s safe to assume that if Google is indexing social profiles then they are probably reading some of these pages.
So, if you operate under that assumption, then it’s probably good to begin optimizing these ‘About’ pages as you would any other page on your website. It’ll be critical that you add valuable keywords to these pages to help Google associate those keywords with your brand name. By doing this, you can potentially influence the rankings Google decides to give you.
Boosting brand presence
Additionally, social media is all about boosting your brand presence online. The reason this is important is that the more your brand is in front of people, the more memorable it becomes. Thus, the more likely people are to share your posts on social media with friends and the more likely someone is to write about your brand online. Social media simply increases the chances or likelihood of this happening.
At the end of the day, social media is your soapbox. Whatever you publish on social allows for it to get talked in person or on the web. If it’s on the web, then these signals are digested by Google and (hopefully) translated into favorable rankings for your brand.
Social landing pages
Social landing pages, or more popularly known as “link in bio” pages, are another underrated social media tactic with potential local SEO benefits. If you’ve never heard of these pages, they are essentially mobile-friendly web pages with the sole purpose of directing social media users to other pages, apps, and content that you are looking to promote. These social media landing pages can be good for two reasons:
- They help direct users to external content related to your social posts.
- They create valuable links to your owned content.
These are important for local SEO because they make it easy for users to access your content on your site from social media which will help boost traffic. Additionally, the linking features allow you to create contextual links to help Google to understand your content. Though they may be ‘nofollow’ links, Google is still using the images and anchor text of those links to understand your content.
Social profile optimization tips
Before you leave, we wanted to give you some social media optimization tips. These are all the items within the social-sphere that we believe have the most potential to impact local SEO:
- Keyword-rich business information: Be sure your About pages and Biography fields all take into account your core keywords. It may seem like an unnecessary step since we just finished explaining that social media has no direct impact on SEO, but no one really knows how Google uses this information. So, you may as well put your best foot forward even if they aren’t looking.
- Reviews: Reviews will be super important especially when it comes to Facebook. The reviews you get on Facebook are actually displayed in search results so don’t neglect this feature on Facebook. Make sure you get your Google and Yelp reviews too but please don’t forget about Facebook!
- Linkinbio or Social Landing Pages: Make it easy for users to access the content you reference in your social posts. Plus, although these are “nofollow” links, they’ll help Google contextualize the content you link out to and potentially influence rankings.
- Consistent activity: Finally, just be consistent. As we mentioned above, the more you’re in front of your audience, the more likely you are to be talked about throughout the web. So, just be consistent!
Get to it!
Although social media may not have a direct impact on your local search rankings, it’s still worth remaining active on social and following SEO best practices when possible. Every effort you make on social media is simply increasing your chances of gaining more positive results in organic search.
Now, go ahead and get your hands dirty and make your social media strategy influence your local SEO strategy! And once you do, let us know what results you get! If you need help, no worries — we’ve got you covered. Reach out today.
