How to Find Your Business’ Local Competitors
Analytics / Digital Marketing / Local Search / PPC / SEO

How to Find Your Business’ Local Competitors

When it comes to local SEO efforts, one of the best things you can do is identify your local competition. The reason that knowing your competition is so important is that it is nearly impossible to beat your competition if you don’t know who they are. When you work with Rank Fuse, we help you find your competitors and implement a strategy that will help you outrank them on Google. 4 Steps for Identifying Local Competitors At Rank Fuse, we use a few simple steps to best determine local competition for our clients. Here are these steps: #1. Determine Keywords The first thing we do is look at keywords. When you can best determine what keywords you want to rank for, you can use these keywords to see who else is ranking highly or trying to rank highly for those terms. While…

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September 10, 2019
How Default Google Ads Settings Could Be Hurting Your Campaigns
PPC / Web Development

How Default Google Ads Settings Could Be Hurting Your Campaigns

When you create a Google Ads account, there are a number of default settings already loaded into your campaigns. While this may seem extremely helpful if you are new to Google Ads, formerly Google Adwords, you could be costing yourself significant money in the long-term. At Rank Fuse, we caution our clients from accepting default settings in PPC campaigns, and we have some advice for the settings that you should change. Google Ads Default Settings You Should Change and Why When you create a campaign in Google Ads, you will see default settings that Google automatically applies to the campaign. Here are a few of the default settings you should change and why you should change them: Campaign Type Creating a Google Ads campaign requires a campaign type. This campaign type will default to “Search Network with Display Select.” However, this setting…

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June 13, 2019
Store Visits – The New Beta Tool in Google Analytics
Analytics / PPC / Web Development

Store Visits – The New Beta Tool in Google Analytics

Consumer behavior has changed dramatically over the past decade.  More and more consumers go online to research the best restaurants, find product reviews, and so on. E-commerce sales continue on an upward trend, especially with Amazon’s continuous growth. Despite this growth, however, in-store sales still make up 90% percent of all retail sales. Many consumers are researching products or services online before going into physical retail locations to make the purchase. This is true across industries, including restaurants, auto and transportation, jewelers, and more. “Near me” searches have tripled in the past two years, placing importance on targeting Google Ads campaigns. Unfortunately, it was near impossible to track if these ads were effective in getting consumers into brick-and-mortar locations. Google My Business data has come along way to help set benchmarks with driving direction data, but it's still not an exact science.…

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May 8, 2019
Google Ad Grants Program Makes Serious Changes for 2018
PPC

Google Ad Grants Program Makes Serious Changes for 2018

Google’s Ad Grants Program is undergoing some big changes in 2018 that may have a significant impact on non-profit organizations. While many organizations may find these new rules hard to cope with, Google implemented the changes to prioritize quality for all Google Ad Grants users. With more than 35,000 non-profits using the program, there are bound to be concerns about all these changes. Rank Fuse Digital Marketing is here to help you better understand all the changes this program will undergo starting in 2018. Changes to Google Ad Grants Program Bidding One of the biggest changes to the Ad Grants Program is there will no longer be a cap on the cost-per-clicks. Instead of having a $2 CPC cap, Google will now allow non-profit organizations to be more competitive when bidding on keywords. In the past, it was difficult for many grantees…

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January 17, 2018
Bing Ads is Making Big Changes
PPC

Bing Ads is Making Big Changes

On June 30, 2017, Bing stopped serving ads to its content network. This may have left you wondering where your Bing ads will now show up. Well, now you may have even more questions at the end of November when Bing continues its data cleanup process. On November 30, 2017, Bing is cleaning up data that was previously related to the now-defunct content network. This means that starting November 30, ad groups that were previously set to distribute across both the search and content networks will only be shown on the search network. If your ad group was set to run only across the content network, it will be deleted. Note that these ads haven’t been running since June 30, 2017. You won’t be able to create or update match-type content or set content bids in Bing Ads. All keywords with the…

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October 24, 2017
How to Use Holidays as a Marketing Tool for Your Business
Content / Digital Marketing / PPC / Social Media / Web Design

How to Use Holidays as a Marketing Tool for Your Business

We all know that the holiday season is just around the corner, and for many businesses, the holiday season is the busiest time of year. While you may understand that sales will increase during the holidays, you may need a little help maximizing your sales during this time of year. If someone were to ask you if using holidays as a marketing tool was necessary, you’d probably answer with, “yes!” That’s because you understand how spending habits change throughout the year. If you are going to making a larger percentage of your profits during the holiday season, doesn’t it make sense to increase your marketing efforts around this time in the hopes of increasing profits even more? The real trick isn’t using the holidays as a unique opportunity to market your company, it’s doing so the proper way. There are many great…

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September 15, 2017
Ads Invading Local Pack Search Results
Local Search / PPC / SEO

Ads Invading Local Pack Search Results

As you know by now, Google is all about information; however, the latest development in the land of Google caused a bit of a stir. Google has confirmed they will be placing ads in the Local Pack. This means that now, one of the three local results is going to be an ad. This means local SEO pros are going to have to increase their efforts further to ensure their clients are showing up in the top two local results, rather than the top three. The Former State of the Google Local Pack Prior to this change, the local pack highlighted the top three business search results, based on relevance and physical proximity to the searcher. This element of Google was beneficial to many companies looking for growth via the internet. There are countless businesses that have received new customers simply because…

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July 16, 2016
What Are Expanded Text Ads and How Can They Help You?
PPC

What Are Expanded Text Ads and How Can They Help You?

The days of using the newspaper to advertise your business have come and gone. The way businesses advertise themselves changed in 2000 when Google launched an innovative service, called Adwords. Google’s Adwords has made it so that all types and sizes of companies can get noticed on the internet. Google Adwords works on the idea of pay-per-click, or PPC. PPC ads are those sponsored advertisements that you see at the top of a Google search bar. A company’s advertisement appears based on the keywords a user searched. This way, businesses gain traffic to their site without having someone search for them directly. In Google’s big spring announcement this year, they reported that they would be making a change to Adwords. Now, Google is offering expanded text ads. So what exactly does that mean? Expanded ads defined Expanded text ad space is two…

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June 20, 2016