Trends & Tips

2019 Trends & Tips

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Is Facebook the New Local Search Engine?

Facebook started allowing Business Pages on their social media platform back in 2007, but it didn’t necessarily help with the discoverability of your business at that time. It wasn’t until 2014 that they launched their new and improved version of the Places directory and local business search became a focal point for Facebook as a way to compete with Foursquare and Yelp - which kicked off a new way to search for businesses on the platform. Are you utilizing your Facebook...




3 Types of Promotions That Help Grow Your Business

There are an infinite number of ways to promote your products and services, which can make planning your promotions a bit overwhelming. Thankfully, there’s an easy way to pick the right type of promotion for your business. The key to running a good promotion for your business is to choose exactly what you want your audience to do, and then design your promotion to encourage that behavior. There are three key promotional categories: Acquisition Monetization Activation Learn more...




Why Page Speed Matters for Search Engine Optimization

The web is moving faster than ever – literally, according to Google. Google announced that it would be releasing its official Google Speed Update back in July 2018, and since then they’ve seen some drastic changes. After Google gave site owners notice of the update in January of 2018, Google saw that that the slowest one-third of traffic had performance metrics improve by 15% to 20% in 2018. In contrast, it saw zero improvements in 2017. That’s a pretty vast...




Top 5 Web Design Metrics to Consider

Updated 4/16/19 In the world of web design there are a lot of trends and fads that come and go, but some aspects of web design remain relevant and critical to any project. While staying up-to-date is important for aesthetic reasons, these metrics are the basics for user-experience UX. 1. Compatibility There are a few types of compatibility to take into account when analyzing this web metric. First of all, there is the obvious lesson that Internet Explorer has taught us, not...




10 Amazing FAQ Page Examples and Why You Need One

Frequently asked question FAQ pages not only serve as a way for your audience to quickly find answers to the questions that they many have about your business or industry, but they also serve another important purpose – they can help your search engine optimization efforts. FAQ pages have been gaining traction as a marketing tool again with the growth in voice search, mobile search and personal/home assistants and speakers. That’s because these types of search results usually rely...




Facebook to Add New Relevancy Metrics for Ads – How This Helps Your Campaigns

A few years ago, Facebook introduced the Relevance Score as an attempt to ‘grade’ your ads on how relevant they are to your target audience. Unfortunately, it was not always clear exactly how this scoring system worked and it left many users confused on how to improve their scores, which was a pretty big deal considering these scores seemed to have some impact on the performance of your Facebook ads. Now Facebook is rolling out a new system to show advertisers how their ads are...




5 Ways to Simplify Your Complex Content

The goal is simple: sell more of your products or services. However, sometimes your product or service isn’t exactly the easiest thing to explain. If you have a complicated subject matter to cover, it can be tricky to find the ideal balance of explaining things in the simplest terms and not bore readers right off your website. So how do you make complex content or boring subjects easy to understand and exciting for your target audience? 1. Avoid Jargon/Complex Words Might...




The Differences Between LinkedIn and Facebook for Business

Updated: 3/12/19 One of the first questions you should ask yourself when planning any marketing campaign is, Where does my target audience congregate? The answer to this question will usually help determine which platform you should use for marketing whether that’s a social media platform or not. Unfortunately, there are times when it is not 100% clear which platform is the best to use for marketing. For those times, a basic understanding of the available options can help. In...




How Combining Content Can Help Your Website’s Search Ranking

In a recent Webmaster Hangout, Google’s Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst, John Mueller answered questions about when combining pages makes sense and when it doesn’t make sense, as well as some reasons why you should or shouldn’t do it. The basic breakdown from Mueller was this: Yes, merging weaker pages into a single page may result in a strong and more relevant web page in the eyes of Google. However, there are still certain rules to be followed, such as those pages must be...




Google Plus is Going Away – But What Does That Mean?

It was announced towards the end of 2018 that Google would be shutting down their attempt at a social media network, Google Plus. Google Plus was a place where you could share status updates, photos, links, etc. – similarly to Facebook. Unfortunately for Google, it did not catch on as they’d hoped. Google Plus does not refer to your Gmail account, your Google Drive, YouTube, Google Analytics or any other Google service. It’s just referring to the social network. Everything...




How to Choose the Right Offer for the Different Types of Traffic

A lot of planning goes into running paid advertising — "Where should I run my ads?," "What audience should my business target?," and more. But perhaps the biggest question you’ll need to ask yourself is, What is my offer? Your campaign's objective and the relationship you’ve formed with your audience play a huge part in deciding what type of offer to make. Every campaign you run should have a specific objective, whether it is to: Introduce your business to an...




Facebook Describes How Its Search Results Work

Google has long provided some insights into how their search rankings are determined, but Facebook has been another story. Now with the company taking steps to be more transparent, they’ve released a short explainer video with new details about how their search results work. Within the less than 2-minute long video, they crammed in a lot of information. Here’s what it revealed. How Does Facebook Search Work? Rather than based on various performance and quality efforts like Google...




Google Ads Introduces New Responsive Search Ads

Recently, Google has pushed to increase the use of automation in ads. Some of the initiatives they developed include: dynamic search ads, automated ad suggestions formerly known as Ads Added by Google and Google’s efforts over the past year to get advertisers to give up manual A/B testing and add at least three ads per ad group. Now, they have released a new responsive search ad option. With this, Google is working to push their automated efforts even further by using dynamic...




5 SEO Essentials for 2019

It’s the beginning of another year, which means it’s time to look at your marketing and see what’s working and what needs to change. You should ideally evaluate your website and marketing efforts including SEO at least once a year, so you can stay on top of any changes in your business or in the search engines. Here are five search engine optimization SEO essentials you’ll need according to today’s top SEO professionals. 1. Understand Your Audience ...




How to Double Your Sales This Year

Doubling your sales in a year can seem like a daunting task: especially, in the beginning of the year, if you look at the whole year’s goal. Your brain naturally locks up at the enormous task lying before it. For this reason, we recommend you don’t do that. Instead, we recommend you take two pieces of advice from two great marketers, Jay Abraham and Darren Hardy. Advice from Jay Abraham… He said, there are only 3 ways to grow your business: 1. Find more customers 2. Get your...




Why Your Local Business Needs Social Media Marketing

Social media is huge. Statista reports that the number of Facebook users in the U.S. as of October 2018 had reached a whopping 204 million users. However, many local business owners are still on the fence on joining Facebook and other relevant social media platforms. Some think that these platforms are just for peer-to-peer socializing; and while that does occur the majority of the time, there and some very good reasons to engage with social media as a business. There are many ways that your...




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