How Social Media Can Impact Your Local Search Engine Rankings – A Look at Google & Bing
As we know, social media is growing and becoming a prominent
aspect of local business marketing campaigns, but there’s still some question
around how exactly social media impacts local search engine ranking results.
Turns out, Google, in addition to Bing, have confirmed that they do indeed
consider social media when it comes to organic local search engine results. And
though inquisitive business minds are still trying to understand the exact
formula these companies use for local search engine rankings in regards to social
media, it has been determined that the following criteria can impact local
search engine rankings.
Relevance of Postings.
It doesn’t really pay to post on social media sites for the sake of posting.
For one, you want to post newsworthy material to encourage others to share your
links to grow your follower and fan base, but in addition, search engines that
consider social media as part of their local search engine ranking criteria do
look at the relevance of the material, or links, posted.
Reposting and Posting
on More than One Social Media Site. If a business Tweets a link, for
example, and then has the same link posted on FaceBook, it’s considered to hold
more relevance and credibility for a business, which impacts search engine
rankings as reported by Bing. Google also considers the reposting of links on
Twitter and FaceBook for search engine ranking results.
Private vs. Public
Pages. There’s evidence that privacy can hinder local search engine
results, meaning that a public FaceBook page is going to boost your ranking
more than having a private page. That being said, it’s understandable that
Twitter seems to have more of an impact on local search engine results than
FaceBook considering that it’s more public by design.
Author Quality in
addition to Followers and Followees. Google reported that it does look at
the author quality of tweets to some degree when determining business search
engine ranking, as does Bing. In addition, Bing gets more specific by reviewing
both who a business follows in addition to who follows the business. Google
treats authority for FaceBook authors the same as it does for Twitter, as well.
We encourage our clients to use social media as part of
their local search engine marketing plan; in fact, it’s imperative and should
be an integral part of any business marketing plan for sure. But it’s important to use social media as
efficiently and effectively as possible. By understanding how search engines
such as Bing and Google look at social media for search engine ranking, it puts
you in a position to utilize the power of social media to create optimal local
search engine ranking results for your company.
