How Using Social Media Boosts Your Apartment Community’s SEO
Most apartment marketers think of SEO and social media as two distinct marketing channels, with separate strategies assigned to each. And that’s true, you do need to employ a unique approach for your community to each platform. But there are also some great overlapping benefits that you get when you mix the two. Here are seven ways that maintaining an active social media presence for your apartment community can help its performance in search engines.
Page Indexation
Google now once again receives the firehose stream of data from Twitter, which is near real-time access to Twitter’s data. This means that when you Tweet links to pages on your community’s website, Google will discover, crawl, and rank those pages much more quickly.
Popularity Signals
While links have been the traditional factor for how Google determines the popularity and authority of a URL, SEO’s have ruined this signal by spamming it so much over the years. Google is now looking at how a page has been shared across social media to complement how it weighs the external links pointing at that URL. This means that in additional your traditional SEO link building efforts to your apartment community site, creating shareable content and distributing that on social media will help your pages rank in search engines even better.
Search Engine Real Estate
Most of your profiles on the major social networks will rank very highly for your apartment community’s name due to the high Domain Authority of those websites. This is great for controlling what websites appear when prospects research your community and pushing down any potentially negative pages.
Profile Links
While the majority of the major social networks place the “no-follow” tag on their profile website links, these are still valuable links for your apartment community website to have. They have a ton of authority and by having an active profile on a social network, you’re showing Google that your community has an active digital presence, which can help with its website ranking.
Location Authority
Some social networks like Facebook, Foursquare, Yelp, and Google+ are closely tied to profile location. As an apartment community, this is incredibly important for your SEO efforts, as search engines use these clear location signals provided by popular social networks to help better understand the location of your building and determine its ranking in maps and geo-specific search results.
Bing Social Integration
While Bing has significantly less of the search engine market share that Google does, they do integrate social media in a much deeper way. Over the past couple years, Bing has woven in Facebook content into its results in an attempt to personalize your results based on the connections with your logged-in Facebook profile. Most recently, Bing has begun favoring Twitter content within its search results, inserting Tweets and twitter accounts based on a search query’s relevance to Twitter. So if your apartment community is actively engaging with prospects, residents, locals, and neighboring businesses on social media, the chances of your content surfacing in their Bing searches increases even more.
Social Media as a Search Engine
Searching within a social network isn’t anywhere as popular as on a dedicated web search engine, however this has continued to rise in recent months and I expect it to get even bigger as Facebook Graph Search, Twitter Search, Instagram Search & Explore, Pinterest Search, and Google+ Search continue to improve, innovate, and better serve their users. By setting up a complete and optimized profile, sharing relevant and descriptive content, including links to your website, and engaging with other users, you’re setting up your apartment community’s social profile to be found more often in searches performed within each social network.