The One Thing Most Facebook Pages Get Wrong

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One of the very first things you must do in order to set up a Facebook Page is know how to name it.

Although it's easy to assume that the best way to do this is to just call it by your company name, unfortunately your SEO won't agree with you. Basically, in non-tech speak, if you name your Facebook Page the 'wrong' way, you could be losing up to 90% of traffic of people that may otherwise be coming to you, to get products or services.

If you have a business, and you're wanting to start up a Facebook Page for it, you need to look at it from the same perspective you did when you were starting a website (hopefully you have one!). The problem with the online world is that even if you offer the best product or service out there, the rest of the world wanting your products or services won't know you exist if you don't know the inner tricks of making your business presence known online. Just because you set up a website, doesn't mean much these days – you need to reinforce its search-ability online, and in order to do this, you must put yourself in the shoes of your target market. You started up a business, hopefully, to help people with something in particular, so you need to be seen online to be providing that particular product or service, using the keywords and search terms your target market is looking for.

Perhaps you're called George's Café, and if you put up a website and Facebook Page called 'George's Café', that's fantastic, but people who don't know OF you won't know to search for 'George's Café', will they? So, you need to put yourself in their shoes, and ask 'Why would people be looking for me?'. Perhaps people may be searching online for 'best coffee in Auckland' – you obviously want to show up for people searching for something like this, so the keywords you put into your SEO in your website must reflect these keywords people will be looking for.

There is a fantastic tool you can use, which can help you decide what these keywords should be – if you go to https://adwords.google.com/o/KeywordTool you will find that this tool lets you enter your website, and Google will HELP you with supplying you keywords of search terms people are likely to be searching, depending on your industry.

Now stepping away from websites, a Facebook Page works through a similar concept. 'George's Café' can be a great Facebook Page name, but it's not going to help those who are using the Facebook Search option to look for Auckland places to have a coffee at. So, using the Google Keywords Tool, or just by brainstorming some ideas, you may consider having your Facebook Page called 'George's Café: Coffee and Cakes in Auckland'. I can swear you will be getting more traction for those looking for you under these search terms than you otherwise would.

OK, but perhaps I haven't sold you enough and you may not want to have a huge by-line after your business name in the actual Facebook Page name, which makes sense, so then we go to Plan B. Plan B is simply to put it into the About or Description Section Facebook provides you with. Make sure you put in as many important keywords as you can into these sections, as it will help you with SEO – even if you have named your Facebook Page with the long title, these sections are also just as crucial to get right – the beauty of these sections is that even if someone is searching for 'best coffee in Auckland' on Google, and you have included all or some of these keywords in your About or Description Section of the Page, your Facebook Page is more likely to come up in the results than a Page that hasn't read this article (hehe).

The great thing about Facebook is that as a website, it already ranks very high on searches going through search engines such as Google because of the massive amounts of traffic it receives (another SEO 'trick'), and it is actually helping you get found, if you take just that extra step, and add some of those precious keywords in.

As an example, we were working with a hotel that didn't have the term 'Hotel' in their actual name – they were international, and many people knew who they were anyway. However, even with the massive amounts of traffic, we were able to gain them a 90% increase in traffic from 5000 views per day (you do the math) to their Facebook Page alone, just by adding the search term 'Auckland Hotel' into their Facebook Page name, and not touching anything else.

Best of luck – I'm only an e-mail away if you need any help (evamaria@socialemedia.co.nz) and I look forward to finding you and your business better online, soon!