Go to the profile of Keyon Thomas
Keyon Thomas
Marketing, Gaming, and Faith are the things that drive me!

9 Tips for Utilizing Web Personas in SEO and Social Media Marketing

Another place users can find your product outside of normal search engine are your Web personas. These are your customer-facing interaction points that exist on the web (besides your website). These include your company Facebook Page, Yelp/Eat24 listing, Foursquare page, Google Local entry, or any other similar site.

These pages are not only gateways to ranking your own site with Local SEO, but in some cases are more important for ranking. This is because web persona listings traditionally rank higher than a website simply because of their domain authority. In many cases, web personas are places where users can leave feedback, which means that a lot of new visitors come to the personas first to hear what others have to say about your business and to see the conversations you start.

So how do you utilize web personas? Well, you should:

  1. Claim ALL of your listings. Google, Bing, Yelp, and other sites can list your company without you even knowing it. These sites also provide a mechanism that allows you to claim a listing in order to start managing it. It’s imperative that you claim your listing or else you might be in for a world of hurt when it comes to Local SEO.
  2. Reserve your social names. This is just as important as the first step. Make sure you create social media pages on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, or whatever other network you feel is relevant to your business. Make sure that when you make these social pages that you are utilizing the same brand across all of them, relevant to your business. You would hate to be AwesomeThaiFood on Facebook and @213ThaiFood on Twitter.
  3. Complete/confirm the data on your personas. Search engines use this information to determine your relevance to your Local SEO keywords. Make sure to both confirm that the data is correct (in the case of sites that already have your company listed) and complete all the data fields.
  4. Use high quality images that will draw in customers. All web personas allow you to upload images and edit the ones they may have already grabbed for you. Make sure to upload high quality images starting with your logo. Next, make sure your listing uses relevant images to your business, whether it be a photo of your clothing store with one of your team members interacting with customers, food dishes from your restaurant, or clients participating in one of your yoga classes. This is going to help your customers create a human connection with an inhuman medium.
  5. Monitor, embrace, and acknowledge feedback. This is huge. Customers that land on personas like Yelp or Google Local make their decisions largely based on the feedback that has been left by your customers. Make sure that you monitor feedback and you acknowledge it with a real response — especially if it is negative, and embrace the feedback by trying to change the experience this customer had. This will go a long way to not only letting new visitors see what stellar customer service you provide, but also will allow you to improve your business.
  6. Post to these sites regularly and keep your customers engaged.This can be things like creating coupons that are specific to each web persona or hosting regular “flash” deals that your audience can embrace. This will help customers stay connected and help draw in new ones, and is important since engagement is weighed into your rankings.
  7. Get your in-store customers to rank or “like” you online. You have to encourage your customers to go online. The higher they rate you the better your ranking will be and the more feedback you’ll receive, resulting in driving you more customers. Happy customers are your largest advocates, make sure to direct them to your web personas.
  8. Link to your website. Above all else, you need to make sure your social personas link to your website. This will help elevate the rankings of your website.
  9. If you have multiple locations, you will need to maintain listings for each location. This is imperative. If you combine your listings then you will hurt your local specific rankings.