by Mark Bloom | Dec 13, 2021 | Agency Advice
How Does On-Page SEO Help My Website?
Ask any nine search engine optimization (SEO) experts what’s the best tip for improving your website’s visibility online, and you may get nine different responses. From adding valuable backlinks to using appropriate long-tail keywords, all the answers you get — all those techniques — help your site get noticed. As a business owner, you can spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars every month on substantial SEO efforts.
But there’s one factor that most SEO experts agree on: once a visitor lands on your company website or landing page, it’s up to the design and the content to win them over. Once SEO has done its job and delivered traffic to your website, it’s up to your website — and your website alone — to convert that traffic into new customers. That makes your website content extremely important to your business’s success.
What Can I Do to Make My Site More Effective?
To make your business website work harder for you, optimize your website content. Also known as “on-page SEO,” this technique is completely under your control, so there’s absolutely no reason for you not to pursue this strategy. When it works, your SEO campaigns work better and you’ll likely not only attract more traffic, but you’ll also convert more of that traffic.
Improving your on-page SEO requires several tweaks to your website content. Follow these nine tips:
- Improve your on-page formatting. Use bolded and italicized text for emphasis. Ray Access uses a strategy of bolding one phrase or sentence in every paragraph on the page to help a visitor scan the page and understand the gist of the page.
- Create on-page lists. When you add either bullet lists or numbered lists, as appropriate, you not only make information easier to grasp, but you also add whitespace to the page, which alleviates eye strain. No reader wants to see a large block of text: it discourages reading. Instead, for positive on-page SEO, make every page inviting and accessible.
- Include subheadings. Break up your website pages with distinct sections, introduced by bolded subheadings. If you make each subhead a question — such as: What’s the Best Website Creation Tool? or Are Subheads Necessary? — you may even compete for Google’s Featured Snippet: which is a huge boost to your site’s SEO.
- Proofread your website content before publishing. This tip goes for your blog posts too. In fact, never publish anything to your site before you let an editor or experienced writer review it. Avoid misspellings of names, places and products. Even though many visitors scan rather than read word-for-word, missing words or bad grammar leaves a bad impression.
- Add internal links within your site. Add links from one page to another within your website. This on-page SEO technique improves the rating of each page on your site. It also connects the whole site.
- Add external links to your site. It may sound counterintuitive to link to another website from your company’s site, but as long as you don’t link to a competitor, the tactic can actually strengthen your site. Add links to external authoritative sites, which builds trust. Additionally, search engines count external links as a positive, especially if you link to an expert site, such as your industry professional association or another recognized neutral site, such as a university.
- Use effective, attractive design. Any design that looks dated dates your company. Visitors may not buy from a company whose website looks like it hasn’t been updated since 1998, especially if you’re supposed to be a modern, up-to-date company. How your site looks matters to your on-page SEO.
- Include original graphics and photographs. All graphics increase the design of your business website, but using original artwork and photography add interest. Have you ever recognized a stock photo on a website? It doesn’t stop you from continuing to read (or scan), but the stock photo may stick in your mind. How else, you may ask yourself, have they cut corners? Original artwork builds trust.
- Improve your page-loading speed. If your site takes more than three seconds to load, you have a potential problem. That delay gives would-be visitors time to click away and perhaps end up on your competitor’s website. To optimize on-page SEO, limit the size of your images. Link to videos instead of embedding them into your site. Test how fast your pages load and adjust accordingly.
You can complete all these simple on-page SEO steps by yourself, but contact Ray Access if you need help with your website content or blog. The best content communicates clearly, provides valuable information and engages your audience. That’s the kind of content Ray Access provides.
Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.
by Mark Bloom | Jul 26, 2021 | Agency Advice
What Can Good Writers Do for My Business?
Having a writer on your team who knows how to navigate the business environment can be a huge asset to your company. In fact, a good writer can save your business in more than one way. No matter how good your products or services are, you need a writer to:
- Promote your goods and services
- Connect with your target audience
- Make search engines take notice of your website
- Help potential customers find your business online
- Protect your company’s online reputation
So then the question becomes how to find good writers. You can find writers in every city, town and hamlet. You can find writers by the score online with a simple search engine search. But how to find good writers remains a problem for businesses that want to hire or contract them.
Want to Learn How to Find Good Writers?
While finding writers is no problem, vetting them is. But there are answers to this dilemma. When you’re ready to learn how to find good writers for your business, listen to your friends at Ray Access and employ tips that include:
- Review the writer’s portfolio, including not just quality, but specialties and breadth of work
- Interview the writer to ask pointed questions about process, favorite accomplishments and research techniques
- Ask for references and follow up on them
- Find out if the writer uses a style guide or can write in different styles, depending on need
- Ask about the length of time required to complete an average project
To find a writer who matches your business needs, you have to do your due diligence. Even after a writer satisfactorily answers the questions above, and you move forward to hire or contract, you must stay vigilant to ensure that the content the writer produces continues to meet your standards. Don’t let your writers get lazy or sloppy.
How Else Can I Ensure a Business Writer Meets My Needs?
It’s one thing to know how to find good writers; it’s another to actually find out if they’re right for you and your business. Ray Access as a business is always on the lookout for good writers to add to the team. Once a writer agrees to our terms, he or she is given a test assignment, usually a short blog for a client.
This is a paid assignment because the principals of Ray Access believe that no writer should work for free, and the point of this exercise is to actually produce something useful. If the writer shows enough promise, other assignments will follow. Otherwise, the writer’s paid for the work and told to find work elsewhere.
How Do I Keep Writers Delivering Quality Work?
A test assignment is part of the process for onboarding a new writer, but even after the writer is accepted into the position, the principals and editors expect to coach the new writer through at least several assignments. Coaching takes several forms, including sending:
- The article back with notes for a rewrite
- Constructive criticism of completed work
- The edited version of the article back to the writer to compare
- Occasional general tips to stop commonly seen issues
If writers continue to make improvements, Ray Access continues to work with them. Plagiarism is grounds for immediate dismissal, but if the quality slips badly or no progress is observed, the writer is warned and then dismissed.
Deadlines are extremely important to the editors at Ray Access, as they are to you. Missing deadlines without prior notice is as a dismissible offense. It’s a balancing act, but the ultimate goal is to have a team of writers delivering good quality work. If you’re not sure how to find good writers, contact Ray Access.
Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.
by Guest Blogger | Jul 19, 2021 | Agency Advice
And Why Email Marketing Best Practices Matter
Four out of five marketers and organizations say they’d rather give up social media than email marketing, which shows how powerful it is. Email marketing lets you stay at the forefront of your customers’ minds while communicating directly with them. If you’re still not convinced about the benefits of email marketing, learn more from our friends at emailpreviewservices.com.
Perhaps you’re ready to harness the power of email marketing best practices, but you’re not sure where to start. If that sounds like you, don’t worry. You’ve got company. This article outlines eight things to know about email marketing best practices.
1. Know Your Audience
Before creating a solid email marketing strategy, get to know your target audience. The key to securing leads is understanding your ideal customer’s buying habits, pain points and product wish lists. Popular brands use email marketing best practices to nurture healthy relationships and to add value to their conversation with their customers.
Find out about your audience by posting surveys on social media, which allows your audience to reply anonymously. Offer an incentive such as free shipping or a 10 percent discount on their next purchase. Surveys provide an overall idea of what your customers want so you can curate and send valuable content into your list’s email inboxes. Make sure you’re not only sending promotions, as it could deter customers.
2. Build an Email List
One of the top email marketing best practices is o constantly building your email list. There are many ways to do this, but providing an incentive is almost always effective. For example, you can:
- Introduce gamification to your site. This is a game-style element that encourages customers to sign up. This could be a quiz, test or even a spin-to-win widget. The key is to offer a prize to the winner, whether a freebie or discount, but only once they’ve entered their email and verified it.
- Get promotional pop-ups to appear while the customer is browsing your site. Make sure that the pop-up’s content is relevant to your visitors. For example, if they’re browsing shoes, then activate a pop-up that offers “30 percent off footwear for our email subscribers” to tempt them.
Regardless of how many signup opportunities are on your site, always send out welcome emails. This reassures the recipient that the signup works while letting you make a winning first impression. For instance, send an informative email or update them about what’s new with your brand.
3. A/B Testing Is Your Friend
A/B testing is the lifeblood of email marketing best practices. It allows you to track how each element is performing. Only test one at a time and on a large group of customers so you have extensive data to work with. For instance, you could test frequency, subject lines, and time of the day. But only test for one thing at a time.
When you use A/B testing, you must do it regularly. Get in the habit of tracking your email engagements. That way, you can make any necessary adjustments in a timely manner.
4. Write a Compelling Subject Line
First impressions are crucial in digital marketing, whether it’s your website’s usability or social media prowess. With emails, your subject line is the first contact customers have with your email, so make it count.
As a general rule, keep the subject line concise. You can make it witty or funny, if that works for your brand. Personalize it so it catches the recipient’s attention. You can also use questions as the subject line or write a controversial statement to pique interest.
5. Personalize Your Emails
On average, office employees receive around 121 emails every day. That means your brand must cut through the noise. A cost-effective way to do this is by personalizing emails. Address each recipient by name. Use customers’ behaviors to justify the email. For instance, thank them for downloading your latest e-book or send a “we miss you” message if they haven’t used your services in a while.
If a customer has recently made a purchase, suggest relevant products that work well with the new item. If the customer bought a hat, for example, then suggest sunglasses from your latest collection or matching shorts. There are many ways to personalize your emails.
6. Consider Your Timing
As with most areas in life, timing is paramount. Email marketing best practices say not to bombard customers with daily emails. That’s a turnoff for many. Instead, figure out when the click rate is at its highest.
Run tests to determine when customers are most engaged. Avoid sending emails at the top of every hour. Eventually, you’ll see a pattern to help you learn when the optimal time is to send emails.
7. Segment Your Subscriber List
Although it takes time, segmenting your email subscribers results in higher engagement. You could lump customers who have made a recent purchase together. Group those who live in the same country. Separate customers from prospects. Decide how best to segment your audience.
Email marketing best practices want you to use those segments. Don’t send the same email to your entire list. You risk sending irrelevant content to the wrong audience, putting your hard work to waste. You have segments for a reason, and that reason is to send targeted emails to the right people.
8. Keep the Email Design Consistent
Whether you hire a graphic designer or create a template yourself, the email design must align with your brand identity. You want the recipient to know that it was you who sent the email. As soon as they open the message, they should recognize your brand. Make sure you use the right colors and prominently display your company’s logo.
Also, reduce your copy to three paragraphs and break it up with images. Readers don’t want to see large blocks of text. It’s intimidating. Keep the email light, lively and upbeat. Further, stay up-to-date with the latest email marketing best practices regarding whether to use automation to streamline your process.
This was a guest blog post written by Ester Adams.
by Mark Bloom | Jul 11, 2021 | Agency Advice
Why Do Businesses Need Email Marketing?
Small and medium-sized businesses need to take advantage of every opportunity to compete. Marketing helps you gain customers and grow. Traditional marketing isn’t an affordable option for many smaller businesses like yours. But you can opt for more modern, inexpensive and effective marketing methods like e-mail marketing.
Many businesses find customers online in this post-pandemic era. Using email marketing, businesses attract and capture customers more easily. Small and medium-sized businesses enjoy the following five benefits by adopting these marketing strategies:
1. It’s Easy to Use
All businesses must employ a reliable email marketing system. Then, all you need to do is write a single email. The system then broadcasts it to the email inboxes of all your e-mail subscribers. After all, the reason to capture email addresses is to use them in marketing and newsletter campaigns.
If you’re looking for an email marketing system, test VerticalResponse free plan for email marketing and enjoy 60 days with free support. With this system, you even have the option of A/B testing your emails. No matter which product you use, the goal of email marketing is to reach your prospects and customers to keep them engaged and interested in your products and services.
2. It Includes Effective Calls to Action
The calls to action you create in your marketing messages entice all your readers. Calls to action lead your subscribers and prospects directly to a product or service to purchase, a social media page with more information or a blog post you want them to read. All they have to do is simply click the link or button in the email.
When potential customers land on your website, they may have to wade through a number of pages before they get to what they want to purchase. They do their online search, read a review or two, and may even visit your competitors’ websites. Instead, increase your sales and keep your customers engaged with simple and effective calls to action that bring them directly to what they’re looking for.
3. It’s a Cost-Effective Marketing Method
Regardless of the size of your business, marketing is an expensive endeavor. You must allocate your resources efficiently to grow your customer base. Email marketing as a marketing strategy compares favorably to other marketing methods in terms of cost. Email marketing systems are not expensive to use. And you can expect an ROI of about $40 for every $1 you spend.
For a small and medium-sized business, the returns from email marketing come with small startup costs. That means you can get started right away instead of having to save up or borrow before you’re ready to begin. Plus, your business can spread its resources across other departments and activities at the same time. You don’t have to stop your processes just to market your products and services.
4. It Builds Stronger Relationships with Your Customers
Your business more easily connects with your customers through email marketing. Your words go directly to your customers’ email inboxes. You stay top-of-mind as their business of choice. You keep in touch with your prospects, too, providing updates about their favorite products and services.
Consistency is one of the major drivers of email marketing. You have to write emails to your customers on a regular basis, but you don’t have to write your emails every day. In fact, you shouldn’t write to your customers every day; it’s too much. A weekly or monthly email that your customers look forward to is enough to keep them engaged with your business.
To build a good relationship with your email readers, send them informational emails regularly. Don’t just promote your products. Send your customers emails that provide them with useful information for their daily life. Encourage your readers to connect with your social media pages to increase your credibility.
5. It Allows for Customer Feedback
Another benefit from email marketing is getting customer feedback easily and quickly. You can design polls to send to your customers. When your email readers reach the poll in your email, they answer your questions right then. You’ll receive their feedback as soon as they submit their responses.
Email marketing systems allow you to design a poll for your customers without needing a programmer. You get forms to make questionnaires, which ensures that your small and medium-sized business knows what your customers are thinking at various times during the year.
Conclusion
Different-sized businesses employ different marketing strategies for their growth. Email marketing is one of the most effective strategies for small and medium-sized businesses. This approach builds engagement and your relationship with your customers.
Email marketing allows you to communicate easily with your customers and prospects. It’s a cost-effective marketing method so it won’t break the bank. Do it yourself or contract the experts at Ray Access.
by Mark Bloom | Jun 28, 2021 | Agency Advice
What Do You Mean, Being an Expert Isn’t Enough?
Consider Albert Einstein, one of the foremost authorities in advanced physics since Isaac Newton. You may think that his discoveries and calculations were the most difficult aspect of his work, and there’s no doubt his discoveries were groundbreaking. But if he couldn’t communicate his ideas to others, they would have remained undiscovered.
As a result, he developed analogies to explain his complex theories. Regarding how time worked in his theory of relativity, he famously said, “If you spend an hour with a loved one, it seems like just a second. But place your hand on a hot surface for a second, and it seems like an hour.” So it is with business.
How Is Business Like Albert Einstein?
Being an expert in your field isn’t enough to make your business successful. You need to be able to communicate your expertise in a way that your intended audience can understand. You have to be able to market your products or services the same way Einstein explained his theories. But this dilemma brings up a number of questions:
- Who exactly is your intended audience?
- What language do they speak (technical, slang, jargon, etc.)?
- What do they want to know about you?
- What’s important to them?
- Why should they care about you?
The list goes on and on. It means that being an expert isn’t enough to reach your audience. You have to give them what they’re looking for, in a language and style they can understand. You have to help them understand why you and your business — your great idea or new theory — is so important to them.
How Can I Reach My Audience?
It’s a good question, for which there’s no easy answer. To increase your odds of being successful, stop being the expert and become the audience you’re trying to reach. If you can answer the above questions, you’re closer to your goal. You can also try creating one or more personas to get closer to your target audience.
At Ray Access, our writers and editors do the research to discover what your audience is seeking. We answer questions in your website content — questions your visitors are asking. We can do that because we’re not the expert; in other words, we’re not coming from the point of expertise. We are the conduits between you, the expert, and your audience by providing:
- Instructive how-to blog posts
- Informative website pages
- Engaging content that’s clear and succinct
- Meaningful newsletters readers want to open
How Can I Be More Like Albert Einstein?
Einstein’s theory of communication, his trick for explaining complex ideas, was to stop being an expert and boil down difficult topics to their essence. The idea that time can bend, speed up or slow down is mind-bending for most people. But creating the analogy about how people perceive time helps them come to grips with at least this one aspect of his theory.
Using analogies works on many levels, if you can find the right one. But you’re an expert in your field, not an expert in communication. That’s where Ray Access can help you, the expert. Once we understand what you’re trying to say, we can help you find that analogy or example or explanation that more clearly communicates your value in business. Contact us today!
Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.
by Mark Bloom | May 19, 2020 | Agency Advice
Assessing Your Productivity vs. Your Health Risk
In many ways, your home office resembles your office at work. That is, the things you put in place to make you more productive are the same things no matter where you’re working, whether you’re working in a cubicle farm or whether you’re in a work from home arrangement on a porch with a long extension cord. And it works when you incorporate the most common productivity tips, such as:
- Create a space that’s your own, where interruptions are minimized
- Set up a comfortable environment that has a supportive chair, an ergonomic desk and proper lighting
- Keep your desk clean and clutter-free to help your mind focus
- Maintain your schedule, which includes specific break times
- Review what you want to get done every day before you start
Is It Safe to Return to the Office?
Every state seems to be on a different schedule for opening up. Some states have implemented strict containment orders, while others have thrown open the doors and invited workers back. If you have the kind of job that allows you to work from home, you’ve likely been working the entire time during the shutdown, assuming your state had a stay-at-home order.
As society loosens up, it makes sense to ask when or even if you’ll be leaving the home to return to your normal place of business. A lot depends on your employer, but you should have some say in the matter, as your health may be in danger if the pandemic is still raging. You can still work from home and be productive, as you’ve demonstrated over the past eight weeks.
A health assessment should be your first step. How are the infection numbers in your area? Is your local media still reporting deaths? How safe do feel leaving the house? If you return to work, you can expect — you should expect — to wear a mask and perhaps even gloves. Your office should be arranged to leave six feet of space between desks too. These new social norms will still be with us for months to come.
The Benefits of Working from Home
This is a popular topic that we’ve written about in our blog. But that was in March 2019. If you read that article, you can add to the list of benefits that “small” thing about staying healthy. There are many benefits you get when you work from home.
Maybe your employer will see the benefits as well. Why pay for office space when the team can work from home and still be productive? When communications technology is so advanced, team meetings are still easy to pull together, and you don’t need a conference room when you all can be in the same Zoom room.
Will the Future Embrace Work from Home?
No one knows for sure what the future of work will look like. Will cubicle farms go extinct? Will companies ever need a central, open-floor-plan office ever again? Can we all be productive without being in proximity to each other? The quarantine bubble may turn out to have positive consequences, as companies learn to trust their employees and working from home gains mainstream acceptance.
At Ray Access, we’ve embraced working from home since the beginning. While the principals used to meet in person every week, all the work gets done at home. Even when we added writers, we didn’t need a central office. In fact, our writers are separated by hundreds, if not thousands, of miles.
Your company’s needs may differ from our needs, but it’s time to really consider whether you need an office, especially if you’re not producing a physical object. Web developers, web designers, project managers, content producers and SEO firms can all work from home. For now and into the future.
Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.
