Hopefully these 6 simple steps will help guide you in the right direction in staying relevant within the graphical search:
1) Localize
Is your businesses or service listed locally within each area that you provide the service for? Many searches (particularly in social media) are based on a local aspect. If you have multiple locations for your franchise or service ensure that you have a Facebook page for each geographical area. This allows for people to easily find what they are looking for both online and offline. As you can see from the search for "Coffee shops in Waterloo, ON" below: the results number of shops within the city, a map outline, exact address.
2) Encourage Interaction
This not only helps stay connected with your Facebook community, but displays how many people have liked the page, what rating it was given. It helps build brand ambassadors through providing high quality services and interaction (both offline and online). This is significant in gaining credibility since recommendations from friends, acquaintances, families and colleagues are likely to make your business stand out from the competition.
Consequently - people are engaged with the page, and voluntarily encourage checking in, sharing of and commenting regularly. Activity within your online community creates continuous content, communication and in turn results in more visits. Win-win situation!
3) Be Detail Oriented
As you can see, from the Death Valley's Little Brother company outline there is much more to know about a business than the city it is located in:
4) Create Epic Content, Consistently
This one is pretty obvious considering the term of the "Graph" Search (everything is better in graphics anyways) - make sure you provide relevant content with optimized keywords, it will get picked up. It will help all the creativity and effort pay off - plus it will become easily searchable on social media, where in turn it can be shared with others, commented on, and who knows - it might just end up going viral! Here is a view of a "lebron james memes" search:
The results include: (1) actual content (memes), (2) relevant Facebook pages and (3) external websites optimized for those keywords. Ensuring your content and optimization are on point will help it appear on the results pages of graphical searches.
5) Make Connecting via Facebook Easy
Likes from connections on Facebook = higher ranking, comments from connections on Facebook = higher rankings, sharing with others = interactivity. Simple as that - the easier you make it for your community to share content, the easier it will be for your results.
Google SEO ranking improvements are moving towards the generation of original content as are Facebook graph search results, if your brand is not in the publishing game - it needs to be. Digital branding is content oriented, and content drives interaction. Providing the tools to effortlessly share the unique content will further aid in ranking.
6) Keep Track of Changes
Graphic search is still in the early stages, it is bound to get tweak and changed in the future. Staying relevant on any updates can help you stay ahead of the learning curve and anticipate any changes that may need to be made in order to maintain top rankings.
With these latest developments, it is important now more than ever for your brand to have a social media presence that will drive SEO performance, community engagement and visibility. These are some of the tips that will help, but are no means the only things to keep in mind. Do you have any suggestions for graphic search optimization?
