Social Media for SEO: Small and Local Businesses

seo and smm for small-businessAs a local business it can be tough to stand out from the crowd, and as a result you need to be creative and clever with the marketing tactics you’ll be using. SEO (search engine optimization) is a process that is absolutely dominating the internet these days, and it’s pretty reasonable to see why it’s happening. Search engine giants like Google and Bing have taken it upon themselves to throw the internet on their backs (theoretically of course!), and as a result most webpages take it upon themselves to appeal to these search engines. This process of appealing to them is what SEO is, and it’s critical that local businesses know how useful it is.

When you’re making use of social media platforms like Twitter you’re actually attributing to your online presence in more way than one. Not only will you be interacting with customers and people who can relate to your business, but you’ll also be building high-quality links (of the inbound sort) to strengthen your rankings regarding search engines. The better your ranking, the more customers and business you’re going to be seeing. It’s a competitive industry when you’re working with a small demographic, so being on top is always ideal.

Not only do they give you an opportunity to create quality links to your site, but you can also create an abundance of them in a small period of time. Promoting your company’s website will allow consumers to do the same, and we all know that business is a numbers game when it comes right down to it. Twitter isn’t the only social media platform that would apply here, as Facebook and Google+ would be just as relevant as the latter. You might think that Google+ holds a bit more merit than the others (simply because it’s a Google product itself), but it’s all about putting your eggs into multiple baskets. It does help to have an online presence related to your company with Google+, and most people will let you know that it can be more important than the other social media giants out there.

Not only will you be able to provide people with what your service is all about, but you can even set-up a profile that has your address and other neat little tidbits through Google+. For SEO purposes it’s always nice to go above and beyond the normal Google+ profile, so fill yours out thoroughly and you should see some results. How fast your content will appear on these search engines is important as well, but it might not be as crucial to you since you’re more than likely a smaller business (that doesn’t mean that there’s no competition). These search engines “crawl” across webpages in order to index them, and the popularity of a particular page can help this process go by faster. Promoting yourself on social media should not only give you a popularity boost, but it would also alert the crawlers that there’s new content available from your company.