AboutUs Weblog

Social Media: Small Biz Can Use It To Rank Higher in Google

Posted: 12 Oct 2011 10:00 AM PDT

Last night’s talk by social media expert Ian Lurie at SEMpdx’s monthly meeting confirmed what many have suspected for a long time: Social media likes, retweets, followers, friends and favorites can boost even a small website into top search results.

That’s welcome news for any small business owner who wants to attract more site visitors, and has limited time to work on Web visibility. Until social media sites like Twitter and Facebook became so prominent, it was well understood that one of the most important ranking factors for Google and other search engines was inbound links – that is, links from other (reputable!) websites back to your own site.

Getting those inbound links, though, isn’t easy. Sure, you can buy inbound links from link farms or link-exchange schemes. But these tactics are viewed with disfavor by search engines, and won’t help you.

Getting links the legitimate way – by creating great content people will want to link to, and promoting it – is hard work and may not produce quite enough inbound links. So people who are really serious about inbound linking find ways to ask other sites for links – a long and laborious task. And you really can’t make people link to you.

So it’s good to hear that using Facebook and Twitter in a truly engaging way is a legitimate way to get more attention from search engines. It’s a way for a small business owner to boost Google rankings in a way that’s more firmly in his or her control.

Not only that, social media platforms are a great place to engage with your customers and other fans, and win a good reputation. Remember, for many companies, word of mouth is the best form of marketing, and increasingly, that WOM is happening in the social media.

Use your Facebook page and Twitter account to:

Discuss issues in your industry or your customers’ areas of concern. For example, if you sell eco-friendly picnicware, you might want to tweet links to good articles you’ve discovered about composting, family get-togethers and healthy recipes.
Promote your blog posts – remember, creating great content and sharing it isn’t just a link-building tactic. It’s also a great way to engage your public and offer them worthwhile information. Make sure you promote your own material along with other people’s – you don’t want to be that person who talks only about himself (or herself).
Talk with customers who raise issues around your products, service or company in public. You want to address any social-media comments on your company quickly, in a spirit of being helpful and open. This is possibly one of the most important uses of social media, and one that’s often underutilized or done in the wrong spirit.
You can offer coupons and specials, but just like promoting your own blog posts, do it sparingly. Oddly enough, a corporate social presence that’s solely commercial seems out of place in the social landscape.

Here are a few more great tips from Ian:

Avoid internal slang. Use the same words your customers and audience use.
Don’t use even the simplest abbreviations on your site unless your customers use them first.
If you have a retail store, make sure every receipt has a link to your Facebook page, and invite people to like you and comment there. (You could also have a QR code on the receipt – a nice suggestion from @MerryPopins on Twitter.)
Put “like” Facebook buttons on all your product pages, blog posts, etc. These little buttons can get you a lot more likes, which can in turn help you rank better in Google. Take a look at Kohls.com to see how well they’ve placed their like buttons on product pages – it’s right below prices, which is where everyone’s eyes go.

You can learn a lot about using social media effectively by reading the articles we’ve published in the Social Media section at AboutUs.org.

Last, but certainly not least: Do not – I repeat, do NOT – purchase followers or friends on social networks. They won’t retweet, link or share, so they won’t do you any good. And they will make you look like a spammer – no one’s idea of a legitimate person/company/social being.

Thursday, October 13, 2011

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