In a white paper published by BrightEdge last month, nearly 100% of top 200 companies listed on Fortune 500 are reported to hold the top rank in the SERPs for their brand name. However the study also found that 70% of these top brands didn’t have Facebook Pages in the top 20 search engine results. That means, although these companies have figured out the importance of implementing SEO into their website, they aren’t optimizing their Facebook Page for SEO yet.
Since Facebook page is often used as a business’ second home on the Internet, boosting its rank in search engine results can help business owners maintain control of their brand’s online reputation. This can also increase social engagement with their customers and improve brand visibility.
Furthermore, the paper describes a few optimization steps that can help ensure your Facebook page gets into top 10 – the first page – of the returned results list on major search engines. Below are some of those steps.
1. Make Sure Your Page Name Exactly Matches Your Brand’s Name
Although you may be highly tempted to use a keyword-rich phrase as your Facebook page vanity name, using the actual name of your business will gain you better SEO results. Stuffing your page title with high-value generic keywords will actually harm your page’s viral growth rate inside Facebook. For example, if your page title appears too spammy – like “Mike’s Travel Agency: Hotels, Flights, & More“, fans will be less likely to share it with their friends on their profile and more likely to hide your updates from their news feed.
2. Add Links From Your Website
Adding links from your website to your Facebook page indicates search engines that your page is highly relevant to your brand. You should at least put the link from your website home page, but if possible, it is recommended to add links from other pages as well. When you do so, make sure the anchor text includes your brand or define an alt-text image tag with this text in an image link.
3. Use Your Brand’s Name in The Post Title
Search engines will analyze the content on your Facebook page to determine for which search terms and phrases your page should be displayed in the search results. In order to increase the relevance of your Facebook page on searches for your brand, you should frequently use your brand name in your posts.
4. Earn Links and Likes
Search engines analyze the link graph – quantity and quality of links – of a page in order to determine its authority. When your Facebook page gets “Likes” from users, it will accumulate links from public user profiles that are visible to spiders. Also, don’t forget to build a regular stream of posts so that your page constantly appears in your fans’ news feeds.
