When you are looking to drive local business to you via your website, it is essential that you consider investing some of your time into social media as part of your marketing strategy.
Social media channels are free to set-up and for the most part, you can promote your business and have the ability to make it go viral without spending too much money on sponsored advertising.
Through my own experience, I have worked with businesses of various sizes and it is most common in smaller businesses and new companies in particular, that social media is somewhat dismissed as an importance to your online advertising, as there is ‘too much time involved’ to do things outside your usual daily routine. If you were told that spending a few hours extra a week on putting together some content that could earn you new business, with next to nothing cost, you would jump at it right?
Things like the Yellow Pages, Thomson directories etc are very rarely used these days to what they were in the past, mostly due to the transformation in mobile technology, where everything is pretty much done online through searching. You now have the ability to look for a company, see reviews on their services, grab their contact details and share your experience through social media.
Imagine for example, you went to a local florist, you loved the customer service, you were delighted with your purchase and you were happy about the turnaround time. You could share this via a social media channel such as Facebook and you namedrop the company you bought from as a recommendation to your friends. Once posted, this would land on the timeline of everyone within your friends community on Facebook who regularly interact with you posts through comments and likes. Once the post starts to get ‘likes’ and ‘comments’ it will then also start to show up more frequent on the persons who is interacting personal page, which would then be shared with further people in their friends list and so on as the cycle goes.
When potential customers go to a search engine like Google for example to look for a product or a business in general that they may have heard of, search results appear in order of how they are displayed based on a few things. Social media is one key source. How people interact to social media posts involving your companies name (social interaction), online reviews via social media or an external review website, fresh new content on your website (this could be a blog or news section) and links to your website through social media posts can help boost traffic towards your website. The more traffic to your website through these channels can have a major impact on how you rank on search engines and how people can find you.
Search engines will be looking for recent content including all of the points above. If kept up-to-date, this works well with how they see your website. Make sure that any new post through social media, has a link included, which takes the user towards your website. The more social media accounts you have set-up, this will play an advantage on search results for anyone looking for your name.
Social Media is also important for your website because it shows these search engines that you care about being up-to-date and about interacting with people. It also shows that you want to know your customers’ feedback and reviews.
So that you are recognised for the type of work that you do, within the bio of each of your social media accounts, make sure you include keywords that describe exactly what you do and where you are based.
For any enquiries about a new website for your business or how to help with your social media accounts, then please get in touch.