A good placement in search results is as important as acquiring customers for your business. If you don't know how social media can affect your search results, read on.<\/p>\n
First, you need to understand what search engines are looking for so you can recognise how social media affects search results. For example, the authority of your tweets, how many +1s your URL gets, how many Facebook likes and shares your URL receives, and how many tweets and retweets your URL gets.<\/p>\n
Every time someone mentions your local business on social media, it helps to improve your search ranking. The size of your following and the engagement your social posts receive also play a role. Here's an example:<\/p>\n
Luigi\u2019s Italian Restaurant in New York City received a tweet from a local newspaper about its delicious dishes. This tweet was favourited 400 times and retweeted 50 times. Both the newspaper\u2019s and Luigi\u2019s Twitter handles were subsequently active. Since Luigi\u2019s URL was linked to the Twitter account, Luigi\u2019s website was able to receive a better ranking in search engines. <\/em><\/p>\n Engagement on social networks can help to improve your rankings, even for keywords that are otherwise difficult to rank highly for (the generic ones). However, this works best for search terms that have little competition. So, if the keyword that is creating a buzz on social media is \u201eItalian food\u201c, you might find yourself ranking at the top for that keyword. Local businesses can take advantage of this, as it helps them improve their business's search results for these general but necessary search terms.<\/p>\n When sharing content, be sure to include low-competition keywords, such as \u201eAuthentic Italian Food in New York,\u201c to help them gain traction on social media and improve your search engine rankings. The more content you share from your website on social media, the better your website will rank, which means more visitor traffic will be generated for your website.<\/p>\n Before you start your social media SEO campaign, you should check how you've performed so far. You can do this with the free tool LocalVox<\/strong> Check. Make sure you know which keywords are most important to rank for. You can LocalCast<\/strong> use ,<\/strong> an SEO tool that helps you track your ranking and find keywords you can use to optimise your website and your social media posts.<\/p>\n So you know: the more active you are on social media, the better your search results will be. Let's now look at exactly how this works on the different social networks:<\/p>\n There are other social media sites such as Pinterest, StumbleUpon, Reddit, FourSquare and Digg that you can use. These are the factors that play a role in getting better placement on these sites:<\/p>\nHow this can help local businesses<\/strong><\/h2>\n
How to optimise your SEO <\/strong><\/h2>\n
A deeper understanding of your social signals and their impact<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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