Keywords

Individuals act in such manner that would maximize their benefits gained from social interactions (James T. Tedeschi, 2009).
Facebook provides an easy to use platform that can be accessed from almost anywhere to fulfill social needs of people. However, it can also be used for companies to advertise their products and keeping in touch with their customers.
Facebook alone has over 955 million active users and over 50% of active users log on to Facebook every day and an average user has approximately 130 friends on Facebook (Melason, 2012).

Thanks to the vast base of users Facebook is having, it becomes a paradise for marketers. It enables marketers to customize their advertisements to fit certain group of individuals. This can be done according to their demographic features or by their interests, and all marketers have to do is to choose which factors they are going to target their advertisements towards.

There are two different ways of advertising of behavioral targeting; Network targeting and On-site Targeting. In network targeting, the data is collected from various different sites and user preferences, where as on-site targeting is based on a specific-site. Facebook used to have on-site targeting, but is nowadays following its users’ moves even outside Facebook. There are two sides to this; Facebook follows users through their cookies as well as their “likes” (Popkin, 2011).

Difference Between Facebook ads and Google ads

Before we look at the various strengths of Google AdWords and Facebook Ads, it’s crucial to understand the primary difference between the two platforms.
Facebook Ads is a prime example of what is known as “paid social,” or the practice of advertising on social networks. With the highest number of MAUs of any social network in the world.
Unlike paid search, paid social helps users to find businesses based on the things they’re interested in and the ways in which they behave online.

Google AdWords is the world’s largest and most popular PPC advertising platform. AdWords is so widely used, it has become synonymous with the term “paid search.”
Paid search focuses on the targeting of keywords and the use of text-based advertisements. Advertisers using AdWords bid on keywords in the hopes that their ads will be displayed alongside search results.

Strengths of Google and Facebook
Today, Facebook Ads is a pioneer in the sphere of paid social, and has become a central part of many business’ digital marketing strategies.
Marketers are often taken by surprise by the potential return on investment that Facebook advertising offers, and how far advertisers can stretch a limited budget on the platform.
This highly competitive pricing makes Facebook a very attractive proposition to small businesses and companies with limited resources. Combined with the remarkable potential returns offered by the platform, Facebook is one of the best online advertising solutions available today (Wordstream, 2016).

Google’s advertising offerings are split across two primary networks – the Search network, and the Display network.
The Search network is the entirety of Google as a search engine, and advertisers can bid on an almost unlimited supply of keywords and phrases to target prospective customers.
The Google Display Network, which offers advertisers more visual ads such as banners, spans approximately 98% of the World Wide Web, making it a great choice for advertisers who want to accomplish marketing goals such as raising brand awareness.
Google makes an excellent addition to a digital marketing strategy, when combined with Google’s increasingly accurate search results, it’s easy to see why AdWords is the most popular and widely used PPC platform in the world (Wordstream, 2016).

Risks of Using Facebook for Advertisement
Before anyone should use Facebook for advertising, there are some risks to consider.
For example, if you’re caught using false information about a product, you might expect some negative feedback. When dealing with social media, this can go viral and spiral out of control. Dishonesty can be a trending topic on a variety of social sites, not just Facebook.
Using an online service is a constant risk for hackers, they are everywhere and in large numbers.
People can get classified information, so be aware of displaying emails, keeping the same password, etc.
The more risks that companies are aware of in social media, the better equipped they will be at handling them. The risks mentioned above only cover a small number of the many potential issues that could be faced (Robinson, 2013).

Conclusion
Using Facebook as a platform for advertisement is a great idea for either new companies or massive producers thanks to the low costs. There is no competition or bidding for keywords when using Facebook like there is for Google. However, there are major risks of using Facebook for ads thanks to the sheer exposure that occurs.
Facebook is the largest social media platform out there with nearly 1 billion users, not to use the advertising opportunity would be foolish in many peoples mind (Kapp, et.al. 2013).

References
Kapp, J, Peters, C & Oliver, D. (2013). Research Recruitment Using Facebook Advertising: Big Potential, Big Challenges. Journal of Cancer Education. 28 (1), p134-137.

Lukka, V & James, P. (2014). Attitudes toward Facebook advertising.Journal of Management and Marketing Research. 14 (2), p1-26.

Melason, D. (2012). Facebook posts first earnings as a public company Retrieved 12.9.2012, [http://www.engadget.com/2012/07/26/facebook-posts-first-earnings-as-a-publiccompany-1-8-billion/]

Popkin, (2011). Facebook to stop following you after log off. Retrieved from [http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/09/27/7991573-facebook-to-stopfollowing-you-after-log-off

Robinson, C. (2016). The Risks Associated with Social Media Marketing.Available: http://blog.tailwindapp.com/risks-of-social-media-marketing/. Last accessed 18th April 2016.

Tedeschi T.J (2009). Conflict, Power & Games – The Experimental Study of Interpersonal Relations: Transaction Publishers]

Wordstream. (2016). Facebook Ads vs. Google AdWords: Which Should You Be Using?. Available: http://www.wordstream.com/facebook-vs-google. Last accessed 18th April 2016

It starts with optimizing your website with keywords and phrases. You may already have a good idea which words people use to find your business but it’s important to keep an open mind and do your research. The results may surprise you. The Google Keyword tool can help you find the most popular words and phrases.
In short, SEO helps you find what you need on the web (Killoran, 2013).

Using SEO to Increase Visibility?

SEO is a technical process, and as such, it impacts major technology choices. A CMS for example, can facilitate or, possibly, undermine your SEO strategy. Some platforms do not allow you to have titles and meta descriptions that vary from one web page to the next, create hundreds of pages of duplicate content, or make a 302, temporary, redirect the default redirect.

An important factor to understand is the nature of the market in which you are competing. This tells you how competitive the environment is in general, and augmented with additional research, which you can use to tell how competitive the SEO environment is.

Another method you can use to get a very quick read on competitiveness is using a keyword tool such as the Google Traffic Estimator to see what your cost per click would be.

A key factor is how many clicks from the home page it takes to reach a page. A page that is only one click from the home page is clearly important. A page that is five clicks away is not nearly as influential. In fact, the search engine spider may never even find such a page. In SEO it is important to keep the site architecture as flat as possible, to minimize clicks from the home page to important content. However, too many links on a page are not good for search engines either. The bottom line is that you need to plan out a site structure that is as flat as you can reasonably make it without compromising the user experience.
Establish a strong foundation, and you will help set yourself up for SEO success (Marketing Donut, 2015).

Keyword Research

Every search phrase that’s typed into an engine is recorded in one way or another, and keyword research tools allow you to retrieve this information. However, those tools cannot show you how valuable or important it might be to rank for and receive traffic from those searches. To understand the value of a keyword, you need to research further, make some hypotheses, test, and iterate, the classic web marketing formula.
Popular search terms usually comprise less than 30% of the overall searches performed on the Web. The remaining 70% lie in what’s commonly called the long tail of search (Enge, et.al. 2012).

It is a good idea to target keywords that indicate imminent action, because searchers are more likely to perform the corresponding action on your site when they search for those terms than they are when they come to your site from different search terms. Your click-through/conversion rates are likely to be higher if you target keywords that indicate the intent behind the search. You can also test this by setting up a PPC campaign and buying clicks on a given keyword and seeing how it converts for you.
Pay attention to your site’s content and compare it to what other sites in the top results are offering. You can also use an analytic program to check which of your pages have the highest abandonment rates. See what you can change on those pages to improve the user experience and increase users’ level of enjoyment when using your site.
Keyword research is a complex and time-consuming task, but the rewards are high. Once you learn where the keyword search volume is, you can begin to think about how that affects the information architecture and the navigation structure of your site (Imperial College London, 2016).

Conclusion
SEO and Keyword Research are vital parts to increase the visibility of your website, they are time consuming but have high rewards for when it is done. It is something that can help any business that need to increase traffic on their sites, from small businesses to large, SEO is very important and should be undertaken by all.

Sources

Enge, E, Spencer, S, Stricchiola, J and Fishkin, R (2012). The Art of SEO. 2nd ed. United States of America: O´Reilly Media inc. p25-160.

Killoran, J. (2013). How to Use Search Engine Optimization Techniques to Increase Website Visibility. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication. 56 (1), p1-4.

Imperial College London. (2016). Increasing the visibility of your website. Available: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/staff/tools-and-reference/web-guide/training-and-events/materials/seo/. Last accessed 29th January 2016.

The Marketing Donut. (2015). Online Marketing. Available: http://www.marketingdonut.co.uk/marketing/online-marketing/seo. Last accessed 29th January 2016.

John's Digital Marketing Blog

John's Digital Marketing Blog

Just another University of Brighton Blog Network site

How to use SEO techniques to Increase Website Visibility