Facebook and Bing Union Piques Search Engine Marketers Interest

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Facebook and Bing Union Piques Search Engine Marketers Interest

Facebook Graph Search provides a whole new way to think about the search engine. Rather than just searching for a restaurant in your area, as you would on Google, you will be able to refine your search by seeing which places your friends like, and include things like age, gender, sexuality, and common interests into your results. Needless to say, this is a great opportunity to market your business and reach out to potential customers.

Graph Search Business Basics

If Graph Search works as intended, it should be an effective local search engine. Facebook is planning for Graph Search to run local searches when it launches with results based on an algorithm that takes into account information about the business and the history (friends, likes, check-ins) of the person using the search engine. Your business may be listed without having a Facebook Page if people have checked in and liked your business through “places”, but if you are a business owner that likes to stay ahead of the curve, now is the time to make sure that your Facebook Page is ready to take advantage of Graph Search.

Facebook Graph Search SEO

  1. In order to make sure you are visible on Graph Search, you will want to do a number of things that will optimize user results.
  2. Make sure your “about” section is complete with name, category, url, and any other information you can convey about your business.
  3. Go to Admin Panel > Edit Page > Update Info and make sure that your business is classified into a category.
  4. Check on the details of your business and make sure that the address, phone number, and hours are all correct, along with any other information that you provide about your business. Make sure that this is updated regularly and that you check back frequently.
  5. Get more likes. Likes will become more important as Graph Search will use these like Google’s search engine uses linked pages to find out which websites are popular. If your business has 10 likes and a similar place has 400, you can guess which one will appear first in a Graph Search query.
  6. Create content. Make sure there is constant activity on your page, whether it be interacting with customers or drawing people to your site through videos or links. This will let them know that your page is active. The number of people actively coming to your page will certainly affect your search results.
  7. In the open ended text areas, make sure you use the proper keywords to describe your business, imagine you are writing copy to optimize a Google “crawl”, this is just one more way to ensure you are showing up in as many searches as possible.
  8. Tag your photos with the location of your business.
  9. Tag your photos with the Page name, so when somebody searches for photos of your business these will automatically show up in the search.

Make sure to implement all these new techniques as soon as possible, as Graph Search is going to be rolled out over the next couple months. Those businesses that take advantage of Graph Search early may find success compared to those who wait and try to market their business in an already crowded field.