Whether you own a local business or have a multi-national industry that wishes to be present in hundreds of towns, local search results can be a great way to gain exposure and ensure viability for your brand’s online presence is maintained. In the past, local search results were poorly optimized and often generated listings for users that were not explicitly relevant to their queries. In these times of seemingly hyper search engine optimization, though, Google and other search engines have incorporated a variety of metrics into search algorithms in order to fetch the most relevant and professional listings in any SERP. Social media (via social signals) is one way in which you can make a big impression via local search. Below, we will discuss some ways that social media can be used to boost your local search engine presence.

Create Local Social Profiles and Link Them

Depending on your strategy, you may have multiple websites for your business that each caters to a specific local audience or multiple pages on one website that serve the same purpose. Whichever the case may be, you will want to link each instance to a local social profile on sites such as Facebook in order to associate those local credentials with search engines. While your pages may be properly calibrated to appear in local results, the social signals that are pinging the servers of Google and other entities no doubt reinforce this trend and boost your long-term exposure. This will not only improve your visibility, but will also make it harder for competitors to outrank you in SERPs.

Calibrate Your Posts

Many social networks allow their users to embed geo-tagging into each post, which will be used by sites such as Facebook to aggregate local content to individuals who have liked your page or are subscribed in some way to your profile. Whether you have one large social media page or many local pages already set up, you can add specific local tagging to any post so that search engines and users alike will recognize that the content is locally-based – even when it may not actually be posted from that locale.

Target Local Users by Age, Gender and Other Metrics

If you have created multiple local Facebook or social media pages that will target various audiences, you can still break this process down even further and create custom content for various demographics who are subscribed to your updates. Social customer relationship management tools are abundantly available and can help most page admins juggle multiple social media accounts at once while also pinging the servers of Facebook with specific updates and posts for targeted audiences.

Local advertising and SERP exposure can be difficult at first without paid advertising or intense search engine optimization. Many brands – particularly those who rely upon leads from local audiences – can boost their local search engine exposure greatly through linking their websites and pages to local social media profiles, calibrating their status updates and posts to reflect these locations and targeting specific posts to various constituencies. If your local search potential seems muted as of late, then give these aforementioned tips a shot to improve your performance over time.