Not Advertising on Facebook? Well, it’s Time to Start

Facebook is the head honcho of social media. Sure, Snapchat and Twitter are trying to run their social media game, but Facebook dominates with 1.79 billion monthly active users. In addition to the sheer volume of users, almost 30% of those users are in the coveted 25 to 34-year-old age group. In this day and age, being connected to your target audience is essential. If your target audience is on Facebook, then you should be too.

How Facebook Ads Work

While running a page for your business is free, you may find it difficult to generate organic traffic. You should be able to garner likes and profile views from your website and blog, however, promoting your posts and creating Facebook ads can bring more attention to your message.

While running a page for your business is free, you may find it difficult to generate organic traffic. You should be able to garner likes and profile views from your website and blog, however, promoting your posts and creating Facebook ads can bring more attention to your message.

Assuming you’re on Facebook, you’ve likely seen the ads on your timeline when scrolling or the promoted posts. Often, you may find yourself thinking, hey, that’s perfect for me! That’s the goal of Facebook ads—to show you companies and products you will want to see or purchase. You are part of that ad campaign’s target audience.

Other times, you may get shown a poorly targeted ad. Generally, this is because of poor targeting. Whoever created the campaign cast too wide a net or failed to portray their company or product well.

Facebook sells ad space with two thoughts in mind: the desires of the advertisers and the desires of its users. Not only does it want advertisers to be able to positively engage with their audience, but it wants users to be happy with the ads they are seeing. Their goal is to make it a win-win proposition for both parties.

So will, everyone in your target audience see your ad? Not exactly. Facebook chooses which ads they show based on three factors: bid, quality, and relevance. There’s a healthy amount of competition in the Facebook ad space. To continue to be relevant, Facebook needs to connect the right people with the right businesses. To do so, it holds what it calls an auction. The winner of the auction, and the ad that will be shown to a particular user, is the campaign that is the most relevant, that displays good quality, and that has a good enough bid. For a beginner, finding that balance may be difficult. Hiring a digital marketing agency that specialists in PPC Facebook advertising can help your company succeed with social media marketing.

Benefits of Facebook Ads

As previously mentioned, Facebook allows you to target your ads. That means you can focus on those individuals most likely to want your services or products. Having a good idea of your target audience allows you to craft your message and your medium. Using Facebook ads, you can then use demographics, engagement data, and contact information to further determine who will see your ad. Because of Facebook’s size, it’s ability to target ads is pretty spot on.

In addition to targeting, Facebook provides analytic tools to allow you see how well your ad is performing and tweak aspects as necessary to increase your desired key performance indicators (KPIs). For PPC, this typically means clicks and conversions.

Facebook also allows you to set an advertising budget so you can better budget your marketing costs. Once you’ve hit your budget for the day, Facebook will no longer show your ad that day. If you’re consistently hitting your budget, scaling up can be as simple as increasing your budget.

Getting Started with Facebook Ads and TyMedia

Creating an ad can be a hit or miss endeavor. By enlisting the digital marketing services of TyMedia, you can ensure that our expertise will be channeled into your Facebook ad campaign. With years of experience creating PPC and social media campaigns, TyMedia can run a campaign for your company that is sure to reach your target audience. Don’t know who that is? We can find that out for you. Don’t delay. Reach out to us and make sure your message is seen.

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The Ultimate Small Business SEO Checklist

So we thought we'd put together a quick checklist of things you can do yourself with a little bit of research to help you get higher in the search engines (well Google really) and get more traffic / enquires / customers....hope you enjoy it!

• Create and fill out Google accounts (Google +, Google My Business, YouTube etc) along with the main social media sites such as Twitter & Facebook and include a link back to your website - try and include as much information here as possible. 
• Make a list of keywords that you would ideally want to rank for. Top tip > you can use Google Keyword Planner by opening up an AdWords account for keyword ideas.

Using Keyword Planner To Find Relevant Keywords

Enter Main keyword and review suggestions

• Now if you are in a compeitive industry it is highly advisable that you check out how 'competitive' the term you want to target is by using my preferred tool which is called 'Market Samurai'. (Paid software with a $1 trial) Once logged in you set up a new keyword, click check SEO competition and wait for the results. As a general rule of thumb, the more green boxes showing the lower the competition. If you are targeting localised keywords (keyword+city / keyword+town) then I wouldn't worry about it too much unless you are in a particularly competitive niche such as a plumber in London. If you get stuck with Market Samurai there are loads of walk through videos on the site to help you.

market samurai seo COMPETITION results - mostly green = easier to rank

• Once you have filtered your keywords down to the ones you want to target you then need to create one piece of content for each of these main keywords. Ideally this needs to be around 750-1000 words of quality content. If you are struggling with this aspect we can help / do it for you. 

• Next step is to add pages / categories to your website that you are going to use to target each specific keyword - For example, if you are targeting the keyword 'Dog Trainer North London' you would create a page with this title with the url being a slight variation so something like yourwebsite.com/dog-trainer-london and do the same again with the Meta description being careful not to over optimise.

• Once your pages have been created, drop in the articles that are relevant to each of those pages and try to include images and / or video and be sure to include a strong call to action (Call Us Today / Get In Touch etc)

• It is also advisable to make your target keyword pages directly accessible from your home page and ensure you have a sitemap installed in order for the search engines to crawl you site effectively. 

• Congratulations!  - Your website is now ready to begin foundation link building. Don't rush this and do not under any circumstances go out and get thousands of links from dodgy link vendors! Safe methods are posting in online directories, publishing a press release for syndication on news sites (we can help with this), create and distribute an info-graphic to online info-graphic directory sites, ask suppliers / friends, customers to link back to you and if you have the time reach out to bloggers and ask for a link back to your content pages. 

• Warning - be careful with you anchor text when building links..it is really tempting to build a load of links with your target keywords as the anchor text. For example, if you are wanting to rank for 'Dog Trainer North London' the first thing you would likely think is to build loads of links with this as the clickable link back to your website - DO NOT DO THIS! Save these anchors for high authority links which will come later on. All the suggestions in the previous section should have links like http://www.youwebsite.com | www.yourwebsite.com | Your Company Name | Click Here | Visit Site as opposed to using your main keywords. 

• Carrying out the above steps will ensure your website had a good foundation to begin building out higher quality links in the future which ultimately will be a key factor in pushing you up the search results. Another tip is to use a tool called AHREFS to find your competitors links to 'steal' (I mean duplicate). This is a paid took though so not ideal for all..

• Finally, you'll no doubt want to keep a tab on where your website is ranking for your target keywords. I recommend SerpLab to track your keywords. They offer a limited free version with the upgrades costing just $5 a time and I have found the results to be very accurate. You can even add things like Bing / Google Maps / Mobile which is very useful. 

Hope you have enjoyed reading this post - we are here to help so if you want to email us click here...

call us on 03333 443487 to discuss your project  

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The Pros And Cons Of WordPress

If you’re considering launching a website using WordPress or making the switch to WordPress, you’re probably pretty curious about the benefits. To make the choice easier for you, we’ve created a quick list of the pros and cons of WordPress, but first, let’s cover what WordPress actually is.

What is WordPress?

WordPress is currently the most popular, free content management system (CMS). It’s an open-source solution that is great for portfolios, blogs, e-commerce sites—almost anything you can think of.

There are two ways to utilise WordPress. You can create a WordPress site to host on your own domain or you can utilise WordPress hosting and have them host your site on a WordPress.com sub-domain for free or (for a fee) on your own custom domain.

WordPress Pros

Versatile. Browsing the web, you’d be hard-pressed to determine exactly which sites are WordPress sites and which aren’t. Why? Because there are numerous free to use and paid themes and plugins to help you customise your site. Your theme can highlight your images or focus on text. It can have a static front page or lead right into your blog.

Popular. Thanks to WordPress’s popularity, there are plenty of forums that offer support. It’s so widely used that it’s believed that 23% of all websites online currently use WordPress. Plus, this popularity means there are new themes and plugins being developed daily.

Easy to Use. Depending on what you’re trying to accomplish, WordPress is one of the easiest CMSs to use. It can be customised with different themes and plugins, or for the more experienced, with CSS and HTML. As with any software, it can take time to get used to the system, but for basic tasks like blogging, it’s very simple to use.

Inexpensive. Depending on which hosting plan you use and which theme you pick, a WordPress site is generally much less expensive than a custom website. Plus, it will be easier to update than a custom site as well. WordPress offers different levels of hosting and you can also put a WordPress site on your own host.

No Coding Required. That’s right—you can create your own website without knowing how to code. Basic templates are great for launching a simple site. As you’ll see under cons, a custom site will require some coding.

Mobile Responsive. In this day and age, your website must be optimised for numerous types of screens. With most web searches occurring on smartphones, a mobile responsive site is a necessity. Most WordPress themes offer this capability.

E-Commerce Capabilities. If you’re looking to sell products on your website, WordPress is capable of housing e-commerce solutions. For larger retail sites like Amazon, however, it’s probably not the best solution.

This is just a quick list of some of the benefits of WordPress. There are a wealth of other benefits and if you want to find out more then click here to get in touch with us.

WordPress Cons

While a great solution for many website needs, WordPress isn’t for everyone. Here are some of the cons we’ve dug up.

Needs Updates. WordPress is not a “set it and forget it” solution. It does require updates, as do its themes and plugins. You can have WordPress automate some of the updates for you, however, you will need to authorise others. This can be a “con” in terms of the time it takes to authorise the updates, but generally, they help to make your website more secure.

Custom Layouts Require More Knowledge. If you’re trying to create an original site on a WordPress framework, you’ll need HTML and CSS knowledge. Similarly, some changes to themes will require a working knowledge of CSS. Partnering with a web design firm can help overcome this.

SEO Plugins Aren’t Enough. Yoast and other SEO plugins are great. They can help you start optimising your posts to be more search engine friendly, however, they aren’t enough to help you move up in rankings and they don’t generally help you market to your target audience. In order to truly optimise your website, you’ll want to focus on more than just headings and keywords. If you want to find out more about getting your website more exposure on Google then check out the SEO service that TyMedia offers..

Making the Decision

For many people, the pros outweigh the cons, making WordPress a great solution for their CMS needs. If you still aren’t sure, or would rather have an expert help you craft your online presence get in touch to discuss your project in more detail. 

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