By Shane Coursen
with assistance from Google Gemini
If the SEO value of your business website is important to you, start doing this today!
Posting information solely to your Facebook page is generally not the best strategy. Here’s a breakdown of what you should do, and why.
I’m not just picking on Facebook here. The same core advice applies when posting your content to other social media platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, X (Twitter), Pinterest, or TikTok, although the specific execution will vary by platform.
Why Your Website Should Be Primary for SEO
- You Own the Content and Data: This point can’t be stressed enough. Your website is yours. You own it and all the media therein. You control the content, design, and most importantly, the data. Facebook controls its platform, and your content on Facebook’s platform is subject to their algorithms and their policies, which can change.
- Direct SEO Impact: When you post on your website, you allow search engines like Google to crawl and index that content first. This helps your website rank for relevant keywords, drives organic traffic, and builds your domain authority over time. Every new, valuable piece of content adds to your website’s SEO strength.
- Backlinks and Authority: Websites are more likely to link back to a dedicated page on your website vs. a Facebook post. (Backlinks can be a crucial ranking factor for SEO.)
- Analytics and Insights: There are more robust analytics tools for your website (like Google Analytics) that can give you deeper insights into user behavior, traffic sources, and conversion rates. Deep knowledge allows you to optimize content. Facebook’s insights are limited.
- Long-Term Value: A blog post or news article on your website can continue to attract traffic for months or even years after it’s published. A Facebook post usually has a short shelf life due to the nature of their algorithm.
- Full Control Over User Experience: On your website, you can control the entire user journey, directing them to other relevant content, products, or services, also located on your website. On Facebook, they are still within the Facebook ecosystem.
What is the role of Facebook?
Facebook is still incredibly valuable, but its primary role in an SEO-focused strategy is often:
- Content Distribution and Amplification: Share links to your website content on Facebook to reach your audience and drive traffic back to your site. This is a great way to leverage your existing Facebook followers.
- Engagement and Community Building: Facebook is excellent for direct interaction with your audience, answering questions, running polls, and fostering a community around your brand.
- Paid Advertising: Facebook’s advertising platform is powerful for targeting specific demographics and driving traffic and conversions.
- Brand Awareness: Being present on Facebook helps with brand visibility and recognition.
What You Should Do (The Best Practice)
- Post to Your Website First: Create the original, detailed content (blog post, news article, announcement) on your business website. This ensures you get the primary SEO benefit.
- Share a Link to Your Website Content on Facebook: Once the content is live on your website, create a compelling Facebook post that includes:
- A catchy headline or brief summary.
- An engaging image or video.
- A clear call to action.
- A direct link back to the full content on your website.
- Engage on Facebook: Respond to comments, answer questions, and foster discussion around the shared content on Facebook. This helps amplify the reach of your post and drives more clicks to your website.
Always prioritize posting new, valuable content to your website first for maximum SEO benefit. Use your Facebook page as a powerful tool to distribute, amplify, and engage with that content, driving traffic back to your owned web property.
Why do all of this?
If you *don’t* follow the strategy of posting content to your website first and then sharing it on social media, especially when SEO is important, you’re essentially doing what?
To Your Website:
- Starving it of valuable content: Your website needs fresh, relevant content to signal to search engines that it’s active, authoritative, and worth ranking. If all your “news” or “updates” go to Facebook, your website becomes stagnant.
- Missing out on organic search traffic: This is the biggest loss. When you post only to Facebook, Google and other search engines can’t directly crawl and index that content for their search results. People searching for your products, services, or information related to your business won’t find your Facebook post in a Google search; they’ll find your competitors’ websites.
- Losing potential backlinks: High-quality content on your website naturally attracts backlinks from other sites, which is a major SEO ranking factor. A Facebook post is far less likely to earn valuable backlinks.
- Weakening your domain authority: Domain authority is a measure of your website’s overall strength and trustworthiness in the eyes of search engines. Consistently adding good content to your website helps build this, leading to better rankings across your entire site. Without it, your domain authority stagnates or declines.
- Limiting keyword opportunities: Each piece of content on your website allows you to target specific keywords and phrases that your audience is searching for. If the content isn’t on your site, you’re missing out on these critical keyword ranking opportunities.
- Making analytics difficult: While Facebook provides some insights, you have far more control and detail with website analytics (like Google Analytics). You can track how users interact with your content, where they come from, and what actions they take on your site, which is crucial for optimizing your marketing efforts.
To Your Traffic:
- Missing out on high-intent traffic: People who use search engines are often actively looking for solutions, products, or information. This is “high-intent” traffic, which is more likely to convert into leads or sales. Social media traffic, while valuable for brand awareness, is often more about discovery and entertainment.
- Relying on “rented” traffic: Traffic from social media is essentially “rented” traffic. You rely on Facebook’s algorithm to show your content to your followers. If their algorithm changes, your traffic can drop instantly. Organic search traffic, while requiring ongoing effort, is generally more sustainable and less prone to sudden drops from external platform changes.
- Reduced long-term traffic growth: Your website’s organic traffic tends to grow over time as you consistently add valuable content and improve your SEO. Relying solely on social media means you’re missing out on this compounding growth effect.
- Lower conversion rates: While social media can drive traffic, users coming from organic search often have a clearer idea of what they’re looking for and are further along in the buyer’s journey, leading to higher conversion rates on your website.
To Your Effort:
- Working harder for less return: You’re putting effort into creating content, but that effort is primarily benefiting Facebook’s platform, not your own long-term assets. Facebook’s algorithm dictates who sees your content and for how long. The “shelf life” of a Facebook post is very short compared to a blog post on your website that can continue to generate traffic for months or years.
- Building someone else’s empire: You’re contributing to Facebook’s content ecosystem, making their platform more engaging and sticky, but you’re not building the same long-term value for *your* business’s owned property.
- Becoming overly dependent on a third-party platform: If Facebook changes its algorithm, reduces your organic reach, or even shuts down, all your content and the audience you’ve built there could be significantly impacted. Your website, on the other hand, is under your control.
- Fragmenting your online presence: Instead of consolidating valuable information on your central hub (your website), you’re scattering it across different platforms, making it harder for customers to find comprehensive information about your business.
In essence, by not leveraging your website as the primary source of content and only posting to Facebook, you are undermining your website’s ability to be found organically, reducing its long-term value as a business asset, and making your marketing efforts less efficient and more vulnerable to external platform changes.