With 2.9 billion active monthly users, Facebook is one of the most popular social media platforms on the planet. Billions of active users equal billions of potential customers, but as the user base grows, so does competition. Creating a Facebook business page is no longer good enough to reach these users. A brand has to adopt a Facebook SEO strategy to increase organic traffic to its business page, just as it optimizes a website page to drive traffic and reach conversion goals.
What is Facebook SEO?
Facebook SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of optimizing your Facebook page to be found when users are searching for a specific keyword. Although Facebook isn’t technically a search engine, it has search capabilities and people have adapted to interacting with the platform as a search engine to answer queries and find information. SEO and social media work together on the same basic principles that traditional search engines operate on. In website SEO, you optimize on-page and off-page factors to hopefully get your content to the top of search results.
For social media, it's the same idea, but you’re optimizing your social media page to be at the top of search results on the platform (and possibly Google). All platforms have their own algorithms, and just like Google, they can be difficult to figure out. Below, we touch on ten Facebook page optimization suggestions to get your content found.
10 Facebook Page SEO Tips
Driving organic traffic to your Facebook page can be difficult but there are a few proven on-page and off-page tactics you can start implementing today to help improve traffic. The following top ten Facebook page optimization suggestions will get you started in the right direction.
1. Conduct Keyword Research
SEO for Facebook starts like any good SEO strategy, with keyword research. Although keyword research is mostly considered for search engines, the same people who use Google are also using social media. These users do not change their search behavior from Google to the way they search on Facebook. This is why it’s important to optimize your page with keywords. Think about your brand and products and the way people use them — how would they search for these things? You can use free SEO tools, or tap into Google’s Keyword Planner if you run ads, to see the volume of traffic for these keywords. It’s also a great way to find new search terms that you might not have considered.
2. Optimize your Facebook Profile
Once you’ve identified your keywords, it’s time to put them into action. Ideally, you want to use these keywords as close as possible to the beginning of the content you’re creating, exactly as they appear in your research.
Example: Facebook SEO vs. Facebook page SEO. One of these terms has significantly more search volume than the other, and you want to give your page every advantage. Even worse, you could use a term that doesn’t have any search volume if you’re not careful.
Use keywords in your business name only if it sounds natural and it makes sense.
Remember to always think of your customer first and if it doesn’t sound like something a person would say out loud in normal conversation, It probably should be left out.
Other places you can use your keywords for the Facebook algorithm to better understand your content are:
- Your profile picture and cover photo
- Your ‘About’ section
- In the captions of your videos, photos and posts
- Photo and video tags
- Your page URL
3. Optimizing Your Custom URL
This SEO Facebook tip is often overlooked, but when you create a business page, Facebook automatically generates a default URL. This URL can be changed and customized. In order to do this you must claim your ‘vanity’ URL. This enables you to update the URL to match your business name, which at this point, hopefully, has a good keyword in it. Having a clear, descriptive optimized URL is a significant ranking factor in organic search.
4. Conduct Keyword Research for Reels, Ads and Other Important Content
Optimizing your Facebook business page with focus key terms is the first step in getting your page found, but don’t stop there. Brands should look for opportunities to optimize their shared content, especially lo-fi content like Facebook Reels and paid advertisements for search. All brand-supported content shared on Facebook should be optimized to give it the best chance of being found by your target audience.
First, you’ll need to Identify the theme of your post. For example, if you’re a makeup brand in the beauty industry posting about new lipsticks (lipsticks being the theme), some keywords to build a post around could be ‘peach lipstick shades’ or ‘lipstick shades for brown skin’. These both get searched over 700 times a month.
5. Conduct Competitive Research
Now that you’ve mastered the art of keyword research and optimization for your own Facebook business page, it’s time to check in on the competition. Benchmarking yourself against the performance of competitors is crucial to understanding how your brand is actually performing in the social landscape. It can also help you inform brand strategy and gain valuable insights.
When starting a competitive analysis, brands need to first identify their competitors. This should be easy since your main product or brand competitors will be the same on socials. Now the investigation begins. Look at how they set up their pages, and what terms are they using to describe their products, themselves, and their content. Put these terms into your SEO tools to see the search volume and you’ll get a better understanding of their strategy. You might even gain great ideas for your own Facebook posts, videos or Reels. You want to show up where your competitors are, so use the keywords they do that are relevant to your brand.
If you want to take it a step further, Dash Hudson’s Competitive Insights and Benchmarking feature can help you monitor the performance of your content against competitors to get a deeper understanding of how you’re actually stacking up. Take an interactive product tour to see for yourself.
6. Post at the Right Time
Finding the best time to post on Facebook can be as difficult as finding the best time to post on TikTok or Instagram. The short answer is, there is no exact right time to post, but there are optimal times. It’s important to post when your audience is active so that you get as many views on your content as possible.
Marketing budgets can be tight at times, and paid ads might not be in the budget to ensure your brand is showing up when and where you want to. Finding the best time for your brand to post will require some testing. It helps if you already have an idea of time, but if you don’t, that’s okay. Test similar topic posts at the same time of day each day of the week, record your post engagement metrics, and keep testing. Test different times, and different post types (Reels, videos, static posts) until you have enough data to see a trend.
You can also use a scheduler tool to help with posting at certain times and days to make life a little easier. Posting your content at the right time can help drive organic traffic to your Facebook page and build brand awareness.
7. Share SEO-Focused Content
With over 1.5 billion searches on Facebook each day, smart brands know the value of optimized content. Optimizing your content can increase your chances of being found via Facebook search, and as a result, increase your chances of growing your audience reach and share of voice.
Creating optimized content that engages users (in other words, content you know they’re looking for) not only benefits your Facebook marketing goals but adds value for your audience. They are looking for something, and you are providing the answer or content. Great brands not only create content for their own purpose but think about what will benefit their audience the most.
Your brand should share content on Facebook that’s been optimized with SEO best practices in mind as Facebook has an algorithm. The Facebook algorithm operates much like traditional search engines, like Google, that crawl, index and categorize content. Algorithms essentially look at data and try to understand what it means so that when a user searches for something, it can display content that best matches their queries.
8. Localize your Facebook Profile
This won’t be a strategy for every brand, as there is a difference between global vs. local Facebook pages. But, it is helpful to localize your Facebook business profile if you have a location-specific target audience. Localization includes specifying language, using keywords familiar to the region, and even hours of operation for brick-and-mortar businesses. If you’re not a brand or business with a physical location, you can still localize your profile. Think about adding the country and or continent you operate in and where your headquarters are to encourage local search indexing by Google.
Lots of businesses, especially large organizations with multiple locations, take on this strategy to target a location-specific audience. For example, Margaritaville Hotels and Resorts has many locations where you can search for that lost shaker of salt. Each hotel has a Facebook page with the location in the business name and page details. This allows the Facebook algorithm to easily and quickly identify the differences between them and which location best matches a user's location-based query.
9. Start Conversations & Create Communities
Look for opportunities to share UGC. UGC is an organic, fun way to connect with the audience that already loves your brand while having the added benefit of potentially reaching new users. Think about joining Facebook groups that are relevant to your brand or business and when natural opportunities to share content arise, go for it.
Avoid any type of sales pitch, instead opt to join the conversation in a fun and interesting way. Converse with commenters to encourage engagement. Keep your keywords handy, and when you see them pop up in groups, make sure to comment. You want your brand name associated and connected to those terms.
10. Develop a Backlink Strategy
A backlink strategy is one of the core pillars for SEO success. The more credible links from high domain authority sites to your content the better. A link is like a vote of confidence, a referral from a trusted source, it demonstrates the value of your content. These votes of confidence over time, contribute to your own site's EEAT (expertise, experience, authority, trust) and as a result, help your content rank higher. Share and link your social media accounts from your website, from your blog and anywhere it seems natural to do so. This authority-building strategy can boost your Facebook SEO ranking by increasing the number of quality “votes” to your social media page.
How to SEO Facebook Ads
SEO and Facebook ads are very similar. They both drive traffic with keywords, the only difference between Facebook ads vs. SEO is you have to pay for one and not the other. But they can work together for your brand. Use the keywords identified in your Facebook SEO strategy in your ad copy and bid on them. Your focus keywords used for SEO will most likely result in high impressions for your Facebook ads, as they will be closely tied to your brand's product offerings and identity.
Before creating your Facebook ads, there are some best practices for optimizing ad content that you should consider. This could include:
- Setting Goals: What is your bidding strategy? This can change based on your industry and your conversion goals. Conversion goals should influence the type of bidding strategy you use.
Pro-tip: Every business should calculate their cost per conversion goal, even non-ecommerce businesses, in order to get an accurate ROI number.
- Conduct Keyword Research: Every ad should have a keyword focus and have enough search volume to make it worth it. Make sure you understand the intent of your keywords, a quick search will indicate if it's the right keyword for your business.
- Look at Competitors: This brings us to competitors, when investigating the keyword intent with a live search, do your competitors show up? What else do they show up for? Use these insights to fuel your own optimized SEO Facebook ads.
- Relevant Hashtags: Choose Facebook SEO optimized keywords for your hashtags in posts. If lots of people search for something, chances are, it’s also used as a hashtag.
- Adding CTA buttons: Every piece of content should have a purpose. CTAs (Calls to action) are important in order for customers to understand what to do next when viewing your content. Catchy CTAs that are keyword focused and are interesting to your audience will help drive traffic to your Facebook page, your website, your Facebook shop, and whatever destination fits your strategy.
How Dash Hudson Takes your Facebook Strategy to the Next Level
Dash Hudson can take your organic Facebook strategy to new heights during every important phase of your strategy. At the planning stage, Dash Hudson lets you schedule, review, and approve content with the Scheduler feature (from mobile or desktop), pull in metrics with Visual Insights, and use the Vision tool to determine which visual content from your library will engage your audience.
Does your brand have social commerce goals? Dash Hudson lets you easily upload your product catalog to create a seamless shopping experience for users on your Facebook profiles.
FAQs
Can a company Facebook page help my website SEO?
A Facebook page can help your website's SEO. Although it doesn’t have a direct impact on website rankings, it can help other SEO factors like brand recognition, and build trustworthiness. Social media pages are another trusted source for Google and potential customers to verify brand, business, or company information.
Creating posts and having a presence with a Facebook business page can also help drive awareness, which can result in organic traffic in the future.
Do Facebook likes help SEO?
Facebook likes could help your Facebook SEO as the algorithm looks at metrics like ‘Likes’ as a signal that people enjoy this content, and therefore push it to the top of users' feeds. But, Facebook likes in general, will not have a huge impact on your overall SEO.
Do Facebook links help SEO?
Links from your Facebook page to your website are technically considered a backlink, although they are social links, they can still add value. Links to and from social platforms like Facebook help build trust. This network of links shows your business or brand is active on multiple websites and social channels. This can aid in building brand awareness from different customer demographics as not everyone is on multiple social channels. So, like many tactics, it has an impact but does not directly impact your SEO.
Do Facebook reviews help SEO?
Yes and no. Again, Facebook reviews do not directly impact your SEO, but they can help boost your credibility, your trustworthiness and help increase organic reach on Facebook.
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