6 Best Social Media Strategies for Local SEO

Boost Local SEO with Facebook Events

I used Facebook Events to push traffic to a Tampa-based dental clinic we were optimizing. We created simple event pages, geo-tagged posts, and three boosted video promotions shot with an iPhone. We spent $180 in ad credit over 9 days. Google quickly picked up the event mentions, especially since they linked back to the location page we had optimized. We saw a 26% increase in Google My Business (GMB) traffic the following week, and seven appointment form fills directly referenced the event.

The key is a combination of frequency, location mention, and engagement. You need to train the algorithm to associate local queries with your page’s recency. This means that having 5 comments on a post with your city name in it does more for your map pack ranking than 50 likes from out-of-town users. Local SEO heavily relies on local behavior signals, and social media is where you can quickly simulate that local gravity… if you know where to focus your efforts.

TikTok Drives Local Business Visibility

As a Gen-Xer, I hate to say it, but TikTok has actually been great for driving visibility and traffic to local businesses. The key is to create short and engaging videos that showcase the brand while also incorporating local elements. We might have our clients create videos where they’re standing in front of a well-known local building, talking about a local landmark, speaking in a local dialect, or anything really that helps them relate to a specific local audience. It could be as simple as hashtagging a local city and then asking locals to tag back. By doing this, our clients have also increased their search visibility on Google Maps, so people are finding them a lot more easily.

YouTube Videos Enhance Local Search Rankings

As the founder of Real Marketing Solutions with a decade in mortgage lending, I’ve found YouTube to be incredibly underutilized for local SEO compared to Instagram or Facebook. We transform our clients’ top-performing blog posts into location-specific YouTube videos with keyword-rich titles and descriptions.

Here’s what actually works: We had a mortgage broker client in Portland whose blog about “First-Time Home Buyer Tips” was generating decent traffic. We created a YouTube video titled “First-Time Home Buyer Tips for Portland Oregon Market” and embedded it back into the original blog post. This created multiple SEO touchpoints that Google favors.

The results were impressive – that single video strategy helped them rank for “mortgage broker in Portland” and drove 40% more local traffic to their website within 3 months. YouTube functions as the second largest search engine, so when people search locally, your videos appear in both YouTube and Google results.

The key is ensuring your video titles include your city/state and embedding those videos back into your website content. Most businesses overlook this connection between video SEO and local search visibility.

Cross-Post on Facebook and Google Business

One of the most effective ways we’ve used social media to boost local SEO is by leveraging Facebook Local Posts in combination with Google Business Profile updates.

Here’s the strategy that worked best:

We created short, value-driven Facebook posts that were geo-tagged, mentioned the city or service area, and answered common local questions like:

“What’s the best time to update your Google Business Profile if you’re a restaurant in Fort Collins?”

Then we took that same content, lightly adapted it, and posted it as a weekly update on Google Business Profile using our Google Business Profile Boost system.

Why it works:

1. Facebook builds awareness and community engagement among locals (especially in niche groups and city pages).

2. Google rewards fresh, keyword-rich content posted directly on your GBP.

3. Posting in both places reinforces your presence across search and social channels, improving visibility in the Map Pack.

This cross-posting strategy increased our clients’ direction requests and phone calls by up to 35%—all without spending a dollar on ads.

Pro tip: Use a call-to-action in your Facebook post that leads users to your Google Business Profile link (not your homepage), which strengthens the signal that you’re a trusted local entity.

Instagram Reels Improve Local Roofing SEO

One of my roofing clients started posting Instagram reels showing their daily work in a lighthearted way. They filmed short clips of roof inspections, repairs, and installations, adding a bit of humor by including behind-the-scenes moments. This approach made the content shareable and kept viewers watching longer.

They focused on local relevance by tagging neighborhoods and using hashtags with nearby town names and terms. By doing this consistently, their reels appeared in searches when people looked for roofing services in those areas. Locals began engaging, commenting on specific neighborhoods, and asking questions right in the comments.

As engagement grew, Google noticed the increased social signals tied to those local terms. Traffic from Instagram to their website rose, and search rankings for “Springfield roofers” and similar phrases improved. Fun, authentic content like this helped them stand out and build trust among nearby homeowners looking for reliable roofers.

Pinterest Boards Boost Kitchen SEO Rankings

For a kitchen client of mine, we relied on Pinterest rather than the usual Facebook <> Instagram loop.

We created boards centered around specific room shapes such as galley, L-shaped, open-plan, etc., and pinned every completed project with a brief caption that included the town name and “custom kitchen fitters”.

Each pin linked back to a corresponding case study page on the site. Because Pinterest boards are crawled and ranked like mini galleries, the image pack started appearing for searches such as “galley kitchen ideas”.

That exposure directed qualified clicks to the site, and we observed the local landing pages climb in rankings for their postcode keywords within six weeks. The added benefit was user-generated saves. Every time someone pinned a design, it created another backlink to the original URL, reinforcing location signals without any outreach emails.