If you have gone to the effort to create a website and have started marketing it via social media channels, you obviously now want it to be found when people search for your company name in Google; but how can you influence these results??
Here are 4 steps which will assist you in being found…
Before you can be found, you need your Facebook settings to allow you to be found! Head over to your facebook account and lets check your settings…
1. Make sure you have a logical Facebook Page Address
You would have done this during the set up of your page, but did you create a logical Page Address that reflect your business name or what you do? You can check and edit the Page Address by clicking ‘Update Page Info‘ under the cover photo. Your page’s address must be unique and ideally be consistent across all your social media platforms. At Redfox Media; redfoxmedia was taken, so we are now redfoxmedia1 across Twitter and Facebook:
2. Check if you can be found!
A really common reason for not appearing in search results are the country and/or age restrictions you may have inadvertently set. Again, in your ‘Update Page Info‘ you’ll need to click the second tab “Settings”. Look after halfway down the list and check what you have selected in ‘Country restrictions‘ and ‘Age restrictions‘. If it says anything other than “Page is visible to everyone” and “Page is shown to everyone” you’ll need to update them. Click edit and leave ‘Country restrictions‘ empty, and set ‘Age restrictions‘ to ‘Anyone (13+)‘.
Alright, the Facebook settings are now done! So how do you become visible in Google results?
3. Are you promoting your Facebook page?
Unfortunately just having a Facebook page isn’t enough for Google to pick it up, so one of the easiest ways to start attracting Google’s attention is through links.
- Does your website link to your Facebook page?
- Do you write blog posts? Can you link to you Facebook page in those posts?
- Can you promote your blog posts on Facebook?
- Can you comment on popular blogs adding your Facebook page?
A couple of warnings here:
- You want to make sure you are also promoting your website and don’t lose focus on the core of what you are doing because of your Facebook page!
- Linking from other social media sites (e.g. YouTube) won’t add to your links as they are normally ‘nofollow’ links. This means that the website will stop Google’s bots from following the link to your page, therefore it won’t find it to index it.
4. What is on your Facebook ‘About’ page?
Have you added any content to your Facebook page “About”? Do you even know where it is? Head back to Facebook and under the cover image. You can get to your about page by clicking the ‘About‘ link under your timeline image.
All The text on this page is looked at by search engines to determine who you are, and what you do. Not only that, it’s a great place to tell your fans this information too.
To edit this info, click the ‘Update Page Info‘ button again and look at the Short and Long Descriptions. Whatever you write in the Short Description will be reflected on your company page, so we would suggest you include your website URL here. It is character limited, so test it a couple of times to see how it looks.
The Long Description is a great place to give detail on exactly what your company does and why. As search engines review this text, you also want to add in your top keywords. It is good if this text is relatively consistent with your wider company message so that people have a congruent experience across all your platforms.
At the end of the day; you will need to be patient! Google can take some time to index a page, but keep focusing on ways to increase your engagement with your target both on social media and on your website and it should continue to improve!
