Articles on SEO and Digital Marketing Case Studies — Real Clients. Real Results.

Benefits of an Active (Closed) Facebook Group

People can be quite active in Facebook Groups. A Facebook Group consisting of users all passionate about the topic of the group will be far more engaged here than they would be with a Brand or Company page.

A big part of this success revolves around the fact that we’re creating a “Closed” Group, meaning you have to be invited to the group, and not just anyone can join. And if you’re not a member, you can’t see any group discussion at all. This completely changes the atmosphere and can be incredibly effective for growing your company or brand if you pull it off.

Grow your Brand with a Closed Facebook Group

5 reasons to do this!

  • You’re in control — this is YOUR target audience, and you’re in charge of what goes on
  • Unparalleled consumer feedback — you will NOT get this kind of actionable feedback elsewhere
  • A FREE sales team — you’ll notice that members are pushing your products for you
  • Better than a newsletter — announce your new product here, and they’ll go ape-$*%^
  • Loyal customer x2 — essentially, you’re taking your best customers, that go online often (because they wouldn’t be active FB Group members if they weren’t), and growing their “Brand Loyalty” one step further

BTW, my favorite part of this is that it’s a competitive advantage that the competition can’t see! And even if they do, it’s still pretty difficult to duplicate.

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Recent Google Algorithm Update and Rankings Changes

There’s been a lot of keyword ranking fluctuations in the past couple of weeks.  Lots of speculation on whether Google is making changes surrounding Panda, Penguin, or something having to do with mobile perhaps.  Well, Google has just confirmed this is not Penguin or Panda, but something else.

The thing that makes the most sense is that Google is making changes to their algorithm to better serve mobile search results.  They’ve been sending out messages to sites for weeks now, warnings about sites not being “mobile-friendly”.  So that’s where I wanted to look for any possible correlations between keyword ranking changes and mobile friendly sites.

Google Wants Mobile-Friendly Sites

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MadeLoud.com is an indie music site that started back in 2005.  The site has been a great resource for many unsigned artists to gain exposure over the years.

Unfortunately, it was hit by Google’s Panda Update, drastically reducing its organic search traffic for many months.

Panda was released by Google on February 23rd, 2011 in an effort to reduce the amount of “thin content” sites ranking in the search results.  Since that time, they have released numerous updates.  So, even if you escaped the wrath of Panda when it was first introduced, you can still get nailed by a later iteration.

Panda hit MadeLoud.com twice, once with Panda 3.5 (update #13) on April 19, 2012 and again with Panda Update #21 on November 5th 2012.Google Panda Recovery

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I’m going to preface this by saying this is an article of the basic SEO (search engine optimization) variety.  I don’t really mention advanced SEO tactics, so if you’re above the Beginner SEO level, then you probably won’t learn anything new here… although sometimes articles like this are a nice refresher.

I’d like to talk about the work I did (I guess this is sort of a case study) on one small business site very recently.  With one day’s worth of work, I saw an immediate increase of 82% in Organic Traffic and 50% increase in impressions.  This is a demonstration of the power of On-Page SEO and just how quickly you can see results, especially for a site that had never truly been optimized.

 

Organic Traffic Increase

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