7 Steps to Leverage Social Media for Local SEO: Benefits & Tips for Success

Local SEO is a search engine optimization tactic that aims to increase the exposure of your business in Google’s local search results. These SERPs demonstrate the most relevant results for location-bound queries and help users find business locations nearby.

Who needs to bother about local SERPs? In fact, any business that has a physical location. If you have a physical office, store, or another facility, local SEO can help you drive more prospects right to your door. But that’s not all.

Local SEO also benefits businesses that serve a specific geographic area. Even without a physical location, you can benefit from this new marketing technology trend. It will help you indicate that your brand supplies services within a particular area. At the same time, it will let you boost your outreach and accelerate growth.

Apart from focusing on universal local SEO tactics, such as optimization of your Google My Business profile, you can leverage local social media to rank higher. Social media channels can complement your optimization efforts in a number of ways. Read on and we will tell you how they can benefit you and how to start using social signals for SEO success right now!

Advantages of Using Social Media for Local SEO

The role of social signals for SEO is often undervalued. Google’s final say is clear – social signals are not direct ranking factors. Nevertheless, these signals still affect your positions in SERPs. It’s just that these effects are indirect.

Okay, but how? There are plenty of ways to leverage local SEO. You can find handy specialized tools to get started. For example, you can check a comprehensive SEO tools comparison on Top10 to discover the available SEO software and pick the right one for you. 

With the help of the right SEO tool, you will be able to create a data-driven strategy, monitor your performance, and gradually get higher in local SERPs. However, that’s not all.

For local SEO, in particular, social media can bring several benefits:

●     Enhance your online visibility;

●     Improve your reputation;

●     Create more engagement;

●     Generate more traffic for your website.

While social signals don’t affect your rankings in local SERPs, your reputation, engagement, traffic, and visibility do affect them.

What Causes These Benefits?

What drives these benefits, you may wonder? First of all, the global population of social networks is growing rapidly. In 2023, nearly 60% of the globe’s population are active users of social media. Such a huge population makes different networks a perfect channel to reach out to a larger number of prospects.

Users’ behaviors also explain the importance of networks. According to a 2023 Statshot Report, as many as 49.2% of users (16-24 years) find social media their primary channel to research brands. That is, businesses that want to be discovered by more potential customers MUST get active on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and others.

All in all, networks provide businesses with an effective platform to engage with their local audience. This is an opportunity to build trustful and lasting relationships with prospects and customers. If done right, this can help you gain more exposure and rank higher in SERPs.

Related: Instagram SEO: Best tactics to boost your exposure

7 Steps to Leveraging Local SEO

Now that you know about the key benefits, let us tell you about the primary steps that will help you leverage local SEO in social media marketing to rank better in local SERPs.

Step 1: Choosing the Right Social Media Platforms

When you decide to engage in local social media, the first thing you should do is choose the right platforms for your brand. Choosing suitable channels allows you to make your efforts as effective as possible.

The chosen platforms should suit you in terms of your goals and the type of content that you produce. But most importantly, they should align with the type of audience you are trying to reach.

To help you get started, here’s a quick overview of the demographics and other stats of the most popular networks:

Based on this data and other specs of different networks, you need to choose the right channels for your business. Focus on your ideal customer profile and define where you have the highest chances of connecting with your ICP.

Step 2: Optimizing Social Media Profiles for Local SEO

The second big tip for effective SEO social media marketing is profile optimization. Here are a few simple tricks to make the most out of your profiles:

●     Photos – Optimize your profiles with branded images and logos to create brand recognition.

●     NAP – Provide NAP (Name, Address, and Phone number) info to your profiles and keep them consistent and up-to-date across all channels. This is especially crucial for local SEO because Google scans and analyzes all these listings to provide users with relevant information about your business.

●     Bio – Present an engaging and relevant bio that reflects your brand’s identity, vision, and values.

●     Links – Share links to your website in your profiles to drive more traffic and improve rankings.

●     Keywords and hashtags – Include relevant keywords and hashtags in your bios and publications. This will help you boost visibility, improve SEO, and reach your target audience more efficiently.

●     Location tags – Finally, include location tags to your profiles to indicate your business’ location and complement your local SEO.

Step 3: Creating Localized Content

In a nutshell, localized content is a type of content created for a specific country or region. By including localized content in your social media profiles, you can attract your target audience within a specific area and engage with it on a more personal level. As a result, this will help you boost your visibility in a target geographical location.

Some examples of such content are posts about relevant local news and events. Also, a great example of localization for international business is running multiple accounts meant for different countries, as Netflix does. The company has Instagram accounts for the US, UK, Spanish, and other users.

Also Read: Instagram SEO: 10 Pro Tips to Boost Your Reach

Lastly, speaking about content localization, we have to stress the power of relevant local keywords and hashtags. If you are not targeting users internationally and don’t translate your publications into other languages to reach your audience, you can also use region-bound keywords and hashtags to help your target audience find you with ease.

Step 4: Building a Strong Online Community

Building an online community is also a great way to connect with your local prospects and customers and boost your SEO. A strong community can bring your brand a number of tangible benefits:

●     Enhanced brand visibility;

●     Increased engagement;

●     Stronger brand loyalty and retention;

●     More meaningful and personalized connection with your customers and prospects;

●     Decreased customer support costs, etc.

On top of these benefits, a strong online community can give you one more thing. The more loyal and attached to your brand people feel, the more user-generated content and reviews you can receive.

User-generated content and reviews in their turn can help you boost your credibility and authority on the web. Besides, search engines take into account the quality, quantity, and frequency of customer reviews when ranking you for local search. So building a strong community can also help you get higher in SERPs.

Okay, the benefits are clear. But how do you engage with your audience and create a sense of community? There are several strategies to attain this goal:

●     Always encourage a lot of communication among your followers and your brand.

●     Leverage contests, giveaways, and other online activities to encourage participation.

●     Encourage users to share their content and opinions using your hashtag.

●     Sponsor or participate in local events (and talk about this on social media) to let your prospects meet you face-to-face and become more trusted and recognized.

Step 5: Consistent Posting Schedule and Engagement

When it comes to posting your content on social media, consistency is the key. A consistent posting schedule shows your audience that you are committed to crafting high-quality content and providing them with something interesting and entertaining. This will help you win their trust.

Also, consistent publications will help you retain the audience’s interest. Modern users have access to a wealth of content on different networks. Naturally, they quickly get bored with accounts that don’t show much activity and unfollow them.

Nevertheless, too much activity also isn’t good. A 2023 study by GoodFirms revealed that 41.50% of users also unfollow brands that post too much or too often.

That is, if you want to grow your following and gain engagement, you need to develop a consistent posting schedule. It shouldn’t bore users with no activity but it also shouldn’t overwhelm them with an endless flow of content.

Apart from posting consistently, brands should pay special attention to engagement. Reading users’ comments and messages on networks and responding to them promptly is crucial for retaining their trust. When followers don’t see you engaging with them, they know that a brand doesn’t care about them. According to the same study by GoodFirms, 37.14% of them leave forever due to a lack of engagement.

Step 6: Monitoring Analytics and Measuring Results

Having strong engagement metrics and traffic from SEO social media strategies can significantly improve your ranking in SERPs. However, in order to know that you are doing everything right, you need to keep an eye on your metrics and assess the impact of your strategies on local SEO.

Some of the primary key performance indicators (KPIs) to keep an eye on include:

●     Reach;

●     Follower growth;

●     Engagement;

●     Click-through rates;

●     Conversions.

These KPIs can help you assess the effectiveness of your social media tactic and define areas for improvement.

Same way, you should keep an eye on your SEO performance. Your SEO metrics can help you see if you are getting any improvements thanks to your activities in networks. The easiest way to do this is by leveraging an effective SEO tool.

Okay, but how do you adjust your strategy for success using analytics? Of course, the specific steps will differ for each specific situation. However, there are a few general steps that should help:

●     Have clear goals in mind to be able to compare your actual KPIs to your objectives.

●     If you are not attaining the desired results, carefully analyze your profiles and content to define what might be holding you back from success.

●     Analyze your top-performing competitors to see how they are achieving their goals.

●     Adjust your strategy based on your findings and test a new approach.

Step 7: Leveraging Local SEO Tools and Integrations

Now that you know everything about local social media, you must be looking forward to starting to implement your strategy and receive the desired results. Before you get there, there is just one more tip that we’d like to give you,

Getting started with social media and achieving your goals there can be incredibly tough and time-consuming. Luckily, these days, there are handy local SEO tools and integrations for social media management that can get you on the right track.

These tools can help you automate a variety of tasks and streamline your efforts on social media. A great example of such a tool is AiGrow. AIgrow is your reliable social media assistant. The tool offers an all-in-one solution for generating excellent content, driving engagement, growing your following, and more.

FAQs

In the following, we’ll go over some frequently asked questions to better understand this subject:

Q1. How Long Does It Take to See the Impact of Social Media on Local SEO Rankings?

The timeline for seeing the impact of social media on local SEO rankings can vary depending on several factors, including the level of engagement, the competitiveness of your industry, and the consistency of your efforts. 

Generally, businesses may start noticing improvements in online visibility and engagement within a few weeks to a few months. However, for more substantial and lasting results, it’s recommended to maintain a consistent and strategic social media presence over the long term.

Q2. Is There a Specific Social Media Platform That Works Best for Local SEO, or Should Businesses Focus on Multiple Platforms?

The choice of social media platforms depends on various factors, including your target audience, industry, and business goals. Different platforms cater to different demographics and content types. 

For instance, Facebook is effective for relationship building, Twitter for real-time conversations, and Instagram for visual content. To maximize the impact on local SEO, it’s advisable to choose platforms that align with your business objectives and resonate with your local audience. 

A diversified approach, utilizing multiple platforms strategically, often yields the best results.

Bonus Tips: Utilizing Instagram for Local SEO

Being one of the largest and most popular social networks out there, Instagram is an excellent place to get started with your local SEO efforts.

Instagram is centered around visual content, such as images and short videos. Thanks to its visual nature, this platform can help you attract prospects with stunning aesthetics, create a strong emotional bond, and drive more engagement with your brand. 

Besides, its visual nature will let you leverage the visual anchors for your local audience, such as photos and videos from a well-known local place.

Here are a few bonus tips to help you leverage this platform for your local SEO strategy:

Post 

Consistently post content that will engage your audience. Be sure to maintain a healthy blend of marketing publications and posts that bring value or are “just for fun”. To empower your local SEO, don’t hesitate to share publications bound to your area, such as news or events.

Localize 

If you want to rank higher in local SERPs, you want to localize your Instagram content as much as possible. The best way to do this is to use localized tags, such as area-specific keywords and hashtags. 

Also, don’t hesitate to use geotagging. It will help your audience find you and it will also help you enhance your engagement because posts with geotags tend to get more engagement.

Encourage users 

Ask your audience to create user-generated content (such as reviews) for you. This kind of content can help you boost your ranking and enhance your authority on the web.

Participate

Instagram is a large and powerful community. Simply posting your content isn’t enough to become a reputable member of this community and earn trust. 

To do this, you need to establish relationships with other community members, such as popular influencers, other businesses, and even your direct competitors. And you want to participate actively – engage with other’s content, join conversations, etc.

Partner

Collaborate with popular influencers to create more engagement. Such partnerships can help you access a larger audience and earn trust because users trust influencers’ opinions.

Final Thoughts

These days, networks are powerful tools for business growth and success. The number of users in them keeps growing at a rapid pace. This means that businesses also have to adopt these channels to connect with their prospects and achieve their short-term and long-term business objectives.

As you already know, with the help of social media, you can strengthen your local SEO and gain a variety of benefits, such as:

●     Improved online visibility;

●     Better reputation;

●     Higher engagement;

●     More traffic;

●     And many others.

Social media can significantly complement your overall SEO strategy. After reading this article, you know how to leverage SEO social media marketing for your success. Use the tips from this article to grab your audience’s interest and get them engaged!