Introduction
With the surge of the internet, social media has become something everyone uses daily. And The role of social media in Local Search matters a lot, especially with the platforms like Instagram. If you open your Instagram and search for something like “Cakes in London” for your city, there will be hundreds of reels and profiles from London cake businesses. These businesses are getting tons of orders from their social media pages because they manage them regularly. So, social media is one of the ways your customer is searching for a business like yours.
So, let’s discuss the details of how social media affects local search results
Importance of Local Search
86% of customers rely on the Internet to find a local business and almost a third (30%) search for a local business once a week – GoGulf
Local search presence can have a big impact on the business because it allows your customers to find your business easily. Without it, they would probably never know about you in years, Because even in the area where you live, you’ve probably sometimes discovered a shop that you never knew existed.
Around 40% of the people use mobile devices to search for local businesses and around 86% of them visit the related store within a week – Google
The Relation of Social Media and Local Search
A. Social Signals and Local SEO
Social media for sure does not affect your site authority, but it can still have an impact on your rankings. Search engines can recognize a lot of things about your social media profiles, like:
- The number of people coming from your social media pages to your website
- The number of people who follow your profiles
- The content that you provide on your social media pages.
- Number of likes and comments that you are getting.
With all these things google’s algorithm gets an idea about the value of the information that you are providing. It starts to recognize your content as more valuable and ultimately it helps in increasing the rankings of your website for local searches.
B. Social Media Platforms for Local Businesses
There are a lot of social media platforms, but there are a few that you need to focus on to gain the maximum results while giving only a few hours a week.
Instagram is a big platform and has a very big active user base. The most important thing to focus on Instagram is the reels, because they have more reach, and great content can go insanely viral there. People also like to follow business accounts on Instagram to know about the latest information, which is like free marketing if you get a big following.
Youtube
YouTube has the best conversion rate with long videos and helps you elaborate more about your services or products. You can also put the reel content on YouTube shorts for extra reach to the videos.
YouTube videos are also ranking in the top results for almost all the searches that you make on Google, so that is also an advantage of being active on YouTube.
LinkedIn has a comparatively smaller active user base than Instagram and YouTube but the business potential that it can derive is probably more than others. LinkedIn profiles also rank very easily, so that would also help you to get more leads.
Other platforms
There are a lot of other platforms that could be helpful for you like, Quora, where you can answer questions that are related to your business industry, and place your link in the content to get more customers. You can also use Twitter to solve some user queries and organic marketing.
Using all these social media platforms will only show you the results you want if you are consistent on the platform and create engaging and informative content that your audience is looking for.
Social Media Reviews and Local Reputation Management
Suppose you are searching for a Chinese restaurant in your area, and you see these three results on your screen:
Above 80% of people would be choosing the option in the middle because it has a lot of reviews and some good images of Chinese food. Now if a hundred people are searching for this in your area in a week, and most of the people are going to this restaurant, Google is signalled that this restaurant is really good and will rank it higher, and as the website is linked to the google profile, it would also be ranked higher.
The first restaurant in this image is not managing its online reputation, because probably they are not asking its happy customers to leave a positive review, but the customers that don’t like the service or food are themselves coming on their profile to leave a negative review, resulting in 2.2/5 stars rating from 6 reviews.
Geo-targeted advertising on Social Media
You can also target a certain type of users in a local area for a specific thing through geo-targeted social media advertising.
On Facebook you can target people who own a pet dog, they are between the age of 35-45, working in a private company, and living in a specific city. Now this advertising would be very beneficial for a pet daycare business in that city.
Local Influencers and Collaborations
You can collaborate with local influencers in your area and get your products or services promoted to their audience.
You can also collaborate with businesses that have a similar target audience like yours but are in a different business. A windows cleaning company can collaborate with a lawn management company.
Conclusion
Social media plays a big role in local search optimization, and it can get you a lot of visibility and customers. The main thing to point out here is that you have to focus on the thing that the audience is focusing on, if people are engaged in social media every day, businesses also have to make a presence there.
Overall, SEO is a collective effort from all sides, we have to focus on everything from where our customers are searching for us.
If you need any help in the SEO of your website, book a free consultation call with Oxyrank, and we are happy to help you out in the SEO of your website.
If you have any questions, you can comment in the comments section below.