How to Use Facebook and Google Together to Grow Your Business Online

If you’ve been running a business online for any length of time, you’ve probably noticed that the conversation around digital marketing tends to split into two camps. On one side, you have the search engine optimization crowd — people who obsess over keywords, backlinks, and ranking on Google. On the other side, you have the social media marketers, who live inside Facebook’s ad manager, study engagement metrics, and build audiences through content and community. Most businesses treat these as separate strategies with separate budgets and separate teams. That’s a missed opportunity, and this post is going to explain why.

Google and Facebook aren’t competing tools. They’re complementary ones. When you understand how each platform works, what it does better than the other, and how to connect them in a coherent strategy, you unlock a level of visibility and reach that neither platform can give you on its own. Let’s break this down in a way that’s practical and actionable, whether you’re a solo entrepreneur or managing marketing for a growing company.

Understanding What Google and Facebook Actually Do

Before you can use these platforms together intelligently, you need to be honest about what each one is designed for.

Google is a search engine. Its entire purpose is to match people who are looking for something with the most relevant results available. When someone types “best running shoes for flat feet” or “emergency plumber near me” into Google, they already have intent. They want something. Google’s job is to surface the best answer. Your job, if you want Google to send traffic your way, is to be that best answer. That’s what search engine optimization is: structuring your website and your content so that Google recognizes you as authoritative, relevant, and trustworthy for the queries your ideal customers are typing.

Facebook, by contrast, is a social network. People aren’t on Facebook because they’re searching for something. They’re there to see what their friends are doing, watch videos, follow pages they care about, and scroll. That means the intent is different — more passive, more entertainment-driven. But Facebook knows an enormous amount about its users: their age, location, interests, relationship status, job title, purchasing behavior, and more. That makes it an incredibly powerful targeting tool for reaching people who might not know they need what you offer yet.

Put these together and you see the beauty of using both. Google captures demand — people who are already looking. Facebook creates demand — reaching people before they’ve started looking, or reminding people who’ve already shown interest. A business that only invests in one is leaving money on the table.

The Awareness-to-Conversion Journey

One of the most useful frameworks for thinking about online marketing is the customer journey from awareness to conversion. It goes roughly like this: a person first becomes aware that a problem or desire exists, then they start researching solutions, then they evaluate options, and finally they make a decision and convert — meaning they buy, sign up, call, or take whatever action you want them to take.

Different platforms are better suited for different parts of this journey.

Facebook is exceptional at the awareness stage. Because you can target people by interest, behavior, and demographic, you can put your brand in front of exactly the kind of person who would benefit from your product or service, even before they’ve thought to search for it. A well-crafted Facebook post or ad introduces your brand, builds curiosity, and plants a seed.

Google tends to shine in the research and decision stages. By the time someone is typing a specific query into Google, they’re already aware of the problem. They’re actively comparing options and looking for reasons to choose one solution over another. If your website ranks for the terms they’re searching, you’re there at exactly the right moment.

The smart strategy is to use Facebook to widen the top of your funnel and Google to close the bottom of it. You run awareness content and ads on Facebook to introduce your brand to new audiences. Then you invest in SEO and Google Ads to capture those people when they move into the research phase. And you use Facebook retargeting — more on that in a moment — to stay in front of people who’ve visited your site but haven’t converted yet.

How Facebook Can Strengthen Your Google Presence

This might sound counterintuitive, but Facebook can actually help your Google rankings, just not in the direct way many people assume. Let’s clear something up first: Facebook links are nofollow, meaning they don’t pass traditional SEO link equity to your site. Sharing a blog post on Facebook doesn’t give you a backlink the way that, say, getting mentioned in a news article does. But that doesn’t mean Facebook has no influence on your search performance.

Here’s how the relationship actually works.

When you share high-quality content on Facebook and people engage with it — clicking through to your website, spending time reading, sharing it further — you’re generating real traffic from real humans. Google pays attention to how people interact with your site. If visitors arrive and immediately leave, that tells Google your content wasn’t relevant or helpful. If they arrive and stick around, read multiple pages, and come back later, that signals quality. Facebook-driven traffic, when it’s genuinely interested traffic coming from well-targeted content, can improve these behavioral signals.

There’s also the amplification effect to consider. A piece of content that gets traction on Facebook gets seen by more people. Some of those people are bloggers, journalists, or website owners who might link to it, share it in their newsletters, or reference it in their own content. Those organic backlinks are enormously valuable for SEO. Facebook can be the catalyst that gets your content in front of the right people who then help build your site’s authority.

Finally, Facebook is a great way to test content ideas before you invest heavily in SEO. If you write five different posts on related topics and share them on Facebook, the engagement data tells you which angles resonate most with your audience. That insight helps you prioritize which content is worth optimizing for search.

Building a Facebook Presence That Supports Search Goals

Not all Facebook content is created equal, and if you want your Facebook activity to support your broader search strategy, you need to be intentional about what you post and how you link it back to your website.

Start by thinking about your content as an ecosystem. Your website should be the hub — the place where all the in-depth, optimized content lives. Your Facebook page and profile are distribution channels that drive people toward that hub. Every blog post, guide, case study, or resource you publish should be shared on Facebook with enough context to make people want to click through. Don’t just paste the link. Write a few sentences that tease the value inside the post, address a common question or pain point, and give people a reason to engage.

Consistency matters more than most people realize. Facebook’s algorithm favors pages that post regularly and generate consistent engagement. If you disappear for three weeks and then post a burst of content, your reach will suffer. Building a simple content calendar — even just three posts a week — creates momentum that compounds over time.

Video content deserves a special mention here. Facebook has pushed video aggressively for years, and short-form video in particular tends to get outsized reach compared to static image posts or text-only updates. You don’t need a production studio. A smartphone, good lighting, and a clear message are enough to create video content that builds trust and drives traffic. Use video to introduce a topic, then direct viewers to your website for the full story.

Retargeting: The Most Underused Tool in the Facebook-Google Combination

If there is one tactic that ties the Google and Facebook strategies together more powerfully than anything else, it’s retargeting. Here’s how it works.

Someone finds your website through Google — maybe they searched for a product you sell, or they found one of your blog posts. They spend a few minutes on your site, maybe they even add something to their cart, but then they leave without converting. Without retargeting, that person is gone. You spent money or time to get them there, and you got nothing.

With retargeting, you can install Facebook’s pixel — a small piece of tracking code — on your website. When that person visits, the pixel fires and adds them to a custom audience in Facebook’s ad system. You can then serve ads specifically to people who’ve already been on your site. These ads can remind them of what they were looking at, offer a discount, answer a common objection, or simply keep your brand visible while they’re still in the decision-making phase.

The conversion rates on retargeting campaigns are dramatically higher than cold audience campaigns because you’re reaching people who already know who you are. They’ve shown interest. They just needed another nudge. And because you can segment your retargeting audiences — people who visited a specific product page, people who started checkout but didn’t finish, people who visited more than once — you can tailor your messaging with remarkable precision.

This is the loop that makes Google and Facebook such a powerful combination. Google brings in the initial traffic through search. Facebook keeps those visitors engaged and brings them back. Together they reduce the gap between awareness and conversion.

Keyword Research Insights That Improve Your Facebook Content

Here’s another direction the two platforms can inform each other: using Google keyword research to make your Facebook content more relevant.

Keyword research, at its core, is the process of understanding what language your audience uses when they’re looking for what you offer. Tools like Google’s Keyword Planner, Google Search Console, or third-party tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush can tell you not just what people are searching for, but how they phrase it, what questions they ask, and what related topics they explore.

That language is gold for your Facebook content. If you know that your target audience searches “how to get rid of dark spots naturally,” you also know that phrasing resonates with how they think about the problem. Use that language in your Facebook posts. Address the exact question they’re asking. Speak in their vocabulary, not in the clinical or technical vocabulary of your industry.

This alignment between your search content and your social content also creates a more coherent brand experience. When someone sees your Facebook post and then finds your website ranking for the same topic in Google, the repetition builds trust. It signals that you’re a real authority on the subject, not just a one-off hit.

Local Businesses: A Special Opportunity

If you run a local business, the Google and Facebook combination is even more powerful, and the strategy becomes even more focused.

On the Google side, local SEO centers on your Google Business Profile — making sure your listing is complete, accurate, filled with good photos, and consistently gathering reviews. You also want to ensure that your website mentions your city, neighborhood, or service area naturally throughout the content, and that you’re building citations — mentions of your business name, address, and phone number — on relevant local directories.

On the Facebook side, local businesses have the advantage of genuine community connection. Facebook Groups are still one of the best organic reach opportunities on the platform, and local community groups can be a powerful place to build visibility, answer questions, and establish your reputation as a trustworthy local business. You don’t need to advertise to participate — showing up consistently and helpfully in the right communities does the work.

Facebook’s local ad targeting is also precise enough that you can run campaigns targeting people within a few miles of your location, narrowed further by age, interests, or behaviors. Combined with a strong Google Business Profile and solid local SEO, this creates a local presence that makes it very hard for competitors to ignore you.

Measuring What Matters

All of this strategy is only as good as your ability to measure it. Both Google and Facebook provide analytics tools, but the real insight comes from connecting them.

Google Analytics (or GA4 in its current form) lets you track where your website traffic comes from, what those visitors do on your site, and which traffic sources lead to actual conversions. By setting up proper goals and conversion tracking, you can see whether the people coming from Facebook are ultimately becoming customers, subscribers, or leads. You can also see which Google search queries are driving traffic that converts well.

UTM parameters — small tags you add to the end of your URLs — let you track specific Facebook campaigns, posts, or ads all the way through to conversion in Google Analytics. This means you can answer the question that every marketer needs to answer: which activities are actually producing results?

Use this data to make decisions. If a particular type of Facebook content consistently drives traffic that converts at a high rate, do more of it. If certain Google keywords are bringing in a lot of traffic but low conversions, examine whether the content on those landing pages is matching the intent behind those searches. Let the numbers guide your priorities rather than running on gut instinct alone.

Where to Start If You’re Doing This From Scratch

If all of this feels overwhelming, it doesn’t need to be. Start simple.

Identify three to five topics that your ideal customers care about deeply — questions they ask, problems they have, goals they’re working toward. Write a genuine, thorough piece of content on each one and publish it on your website. Optimize each piece with relevant keywords, a clear structure, internal links to other relevant content, and a compelling call to action.

Then share each piece on Facebook. Write a post that gives people a reason to click and read. Respond to comments. Pay attention to what gets engagement and what doesn’t. Install the Facebook pixel on your site so you can start building retargeting audiences even before you’re ready to run ads.

From there, you build. You add more content. You start testing Facebook ads. You improve your Google Business Profile if you’re local. You begin tracking your results properly. You iterate based on what the data shows.

The businesses that win online aren’t usually the ones with the biggest budgets. They’re the ones that are consistent, patient, and willing to learn from their results. Google and Facebook together give you two of the most powerful channels in digital marketing. Using them in concert, rather than in isolation, is one of the smartest strategic decisions you can make.