How Your Facebook Can Help Local SEO

Facebook Local could end up being a very important marketing opportunity for your dental practice. Over the past year, thousands of dental practices have created Facebook Fan Pages , which are simple templates to create a page about your dental practice that can be promoted via Facebook’s social network.

FB already has the social network and now they are throwing local search on top of that. A much better way to go in my opinion 🙂

Facebook’s business pages are taking off I believe they have solved a big part of local search by creating a highly reliable credible referral network for local businesses. The main point is that people on Facebook are most likely who they say they are so these referrals are highly likely to be genuine. So what does this mean for your dental practice??

FB referrals = more patients!

The more networked your business’ page is (via patients, friends, labs, etc.) the more likely you are to show up in Facebook and be found by a potential patient. These pages are also getting indexed in Google, Yahoo and Bing.com and certainly help drive search engine traffic to Facebook, BUT….
most dental practices are getting no local search engine optimization from these pages.

For example, a page for an Chicago dentist may be helping promote his practice, but there is a “no follow” tag on the link to the practice’s website, meaning no page rank is being passed on to the Search Engines!!!

Of course what’s the point of telling you about this unless I had a way to help you …

How to Get Local Search Engine Optimization From Your Facebook Page

1. Set up a blog on your website (if you are a client of mine, use the one we’ve created for you)

2. Go to your Facebook page and click on “Edit Page”, then “More Applications” and browse for a RSS reader application like “Simply RSS”. Add the application to your page using your blog’s feed url – Make sure your feed urls are on your domain, or if they are going through an RSS manager make sure that the RSS manager 301 redirects to your domain. Now your blog posts will show up on your Facebook page . As long as the links are pointing to your domain you should be able to pass page ranking from this page to your site.

3. Post regularly with locally targeted keywords in the headlines so that you can get the Local SEO benefit from keyword rich text.

4. Network your Facebook page like crazy! The more profile pages that link to your page the more likely your page is to get crawled by the local search engines and the stronger the page rank that will get passed on to your site. throw dental videos on top of that…and now you’re cookin!

What does all this mean? Well if you have a solid Locally Optimized Facebook and Social Media strategy, done properly, it can get you more patients, more referals and more profit! It’s a no brainer.