If your business has a Facebook page, have you considered performing search engine optimization on it? There are over 80 million business pages active on Facebook, and it can be a challenge being found, and attracting user interest. It’s an important step to take to make sure that your Facebook page comes up when people search for it, both within Facebook and on the search engines. If you’re not sure how to optimize your Facebook page, here are 10 tips.
Choose the right name for your Facebook page
Keywords throughout your content are a basic requirement of successful SEO. This means that there should be keywords on the name of your page, as well. It’s important to not stuff your name with keywords, however. It could both look unprofessional, and not work well with the Facebook search algorithm. If you run a running shoe store, for instance, calling your page Andy’s Running and Athletic Shoe Store would work well — it puts all the right keywords in the name.
Use keywords throughout your page
Find the most important longtail keywords for your business. When you use these keywords, you are likely to attract small numbers of searchers, but ones who are ready to convert. For instance, a longtail keyword phrase like running shoes for fallen arches is likely to be used by someone who is looking for a specific product and is likely to want to buy before long. If you try to use a short-tail keyword phrase such as running shoes, however, you would show up for far too many searches, and get buried under a ton of other results. Several keyword tools exist that help you find the right longtail keywords to use.
When you find a keyword that you’d like to use, put it into the Facebook search box to see what kind of results show up. If it throws up results from your biggest competitors, you should look some more, and find keyword phrases that come with less competition.
Get backlinks
Backlinks have an important role to play when you optimize your Facebook page. When you have well-respected authority pages linking to your content, it’s a sign that your content is good. One way of getting backlinks to your Facebook page is to get in touch with influencers in your industry who are willing to allow you to guest post on their pages. Whatever content you post, you can include a link back to your own Facebook page. It can also make sense to put links to your Facebook page on your blog posts. This way, when someone links to your blog post, they will also end up promoting your Facebook page.
Get a vanity URL
When you launch your company’s Facebook page, what you get is a dynamic, automatically created URL. If you can get a URL that contains your company’s name, however, it can result in an SEO boost. It can also make your Facebook page easier to find and share. You can get your vanity URL by going to the username page on Facebook, and specifying the URL that you would like.
Write a better About section
When people visit your business Facebook page for the first time, they will usually head straight to the About section to read up on what your business does, and what kind of reputation it has. On Twitter, you only have 155 characters to work with. You need to use keywords and make sure that you write something memorable.
Make sure that you have up-to-date contact information
Often, businesses neglect to make sure that their Facebook pages have all the latest contact information and information about the company’s business hours. It doesn’t matter if you are a business that operates exclusively online. You can still get a boost on the search engines by including an address and phone number.
Put in custom tabs
You aren’t limited to the generic sounding Events, About and Videos tabs on Facebook. You can create your own. These tabs can be useful as a way to categorize your content by posts, reviews, podcasts, images and so on. The better organized your content is, the easier it becomes to navigate.
Create great content
Nothing you do on Facebook will work well until you begin producing and sharing great content. Your content needs to be helpful and interesting to your visitors, and inspire them to engage, make comments, share and like. It’s important to remember that Google looks at the first 18 characters of your posts, and makes use of them to create meta-descriptions. They should contain important keywords.
Inspire your followers to do something
You usually create a Facebook business page with the intention of having customers and visitors take action buying your products or downloading your content. You need to provide visitors with clear calls to action on your Facebook page so that they know what exactly they are expected to do.
In general, calls to action work best when they talk about the benefits that visitors get, rather than the features that your products have. Directly address your visitors’ pain points and worries, and tell them how you plan to solve these problems for them.
Use Messenger Bots to engage your audience
Facebook’s Messenger bots allow your visitors to interact with your business even when you have no personnel to talk to them. You don’t need to put a human employee in charge of answering questions. As long as you design your bot well and supply it with enough scripted answers to questions, it should perform well. The better your customers feel about your service, the more likely they will be to search for your company, and send you up in the search engine rankings.
Conceptually, SEO for your Facebook business page is simple enough. All you need to do is to create content that attracts visitors, improve service with Messenger bots, pay attention to keywords and build backlinks. Some of these requirements may take time for your business to achieve. When you do achieve them, however, you will find that it greatly helps your Facebook SEO.
If you have any questions, our team would be more than happy to help. Call us today at (484) 893-4055.
