Like we’ve always said: it’s no longer enough to have a website. Everyone and her brother have websites. To gain a competitive advantage, you now need an active website. If your website isn’t offering useful information to your clients and potential clients, it’s not reaching them.
Your website should be doing marketing work for you, attracting readers who turn into customers. If your website isn’t part of your marketing budget, with a constant investment, then you’ve wasted the money you’ve already spent on the site. It has to stay active to be effective.
Adding Content Isn’t Enough
In the past, we’ve said time and again that you need to keep adding to your website — such as with regular blog posts — to keep attracting readers to your business. The newest trend, however, suggests that simply adding content isn’t enough. You have to add useful content.
Useful content means answers to your clients’ questions. It means tips that can help your customers make better, more informed decisions. Your website content, as well as your blog post topics, should focus less on you and your company and more on your customers. Delivering useful content will help you stand out from your competition and pique the interest of search engines.
“Content Marketing” Is the New Buzzword Phrase
Search engines are refining how they rank pages. If you can deliver quality content, your site will be recognized, both by human readers and robotic search engines. Quality in 2014 will trump quantity.
Keywords will remain important, but if they are forced into the text unnaturally, Google and other search engines may penalize you. Instead, deliver clear, readable English that assists the people who are seeking solutions. Help these people, and they may become loyal customers.
Building Your Reputation, One Page at a Time
As you add useful information to your website, you are building value. That value will gain an audience, which will simultaneously build your company’s online reputation. If you are offering content that’s interesting, provocative, timely, and — most importantly — useful, then you are building value into your website.
Value, over the long haul, increases your online presence and your website page rank. Useful content delivered consistently over time ultimately translates into authority. So if you want to be seen as the authority in your field, your active website is the perfect vehicle to achieve that goal.
Quality Content Equals Good Marketing
To get ahead in 2014, think of your website as a marketing tool. Budget accordingly. If you don’t have the personnel to devote to this effort, outsource it. Ray Access specializes in content marketing. Let us turn your website into a marketing engine. You could say your company’s reputation depends on it.
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.
Back in February, on Mark’s birthday no less, we published a blog post pronouncing that Content Is King. Here we are, some 10 months later, and we have to ask the question: Is content still king (or queen) when it comes to SEO and best practices for your website?
Our initial response is: Yes, of course content still rules the roost. After all, it’s content that draws readers to your website. It’s content that delivers SEO keywords. It’s content — useful, valuable information — that makes any site worthwhile.
We’ve always said that quality content is what will win the SEO wars, that Google and other search engines will eventually figure out how to recognize useful information from keyword-loaded crap. That’s still in the future, apparently.
Content Is Evolving
The definition of content is changing. Infographics are the current rage. Video is getting a lot of attention these days. Where does this leave the lonely word?
Words will never disappear. They are the foundation of language, even online. Infographics need words. Videos need scripts. And how often do you look for the pop-up “tooltips” that explain exactly what that little button or icon means?
The concept of content may change, but the goal has always been the same: to provide useful information people will want to read or watch and then share. If your content doesn’t reach that goal, then I don’t care how much SEO you’re buying, your website isn’t working.
Rethinking SEO
We came across an interesting article from CopyPress.com that talks about this idea. Basically, the article says:
To be good at SEO, you need to stop thinking about SEO.
In other words, the goal of SEO is to get beyond it. A local SEO expert told me once his idea of SEO was “creating community.” Not much about keywords in that sentence.
So, when you’re ready to treat SEO as a means to an end instead of as an end unto itself, contact us.
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.
We are writer/editors. We produce content for websites. We work alone, in front of a computer. We could live anywhere. Why did we choose to live in Western North Carolina?
Everyone comes to Asheville for a different reason. For some, it’s the mountain air. For others, it’s just the mountains. Some people, and you know who you are, get out every weekend to go tubing, fishing, kayaking, hiking, mountain biking or rock climbing. Or all of the above.
As writers, we live a more sedentary lifestyle, but we enjoy the mountain views. We like driving the Blue Ridge Parkway whenever the opportunity presents itself. But there’s more to Asheville than its scenic environment.
Asheville Has It All
Asheville boasts terrific restaurants, cozy musical venues, safe neighborhoods and independent stores. Downtown is human-sized, small enough to walk around in. Breweries abound, and hotels are springing up as fast as the leaves are dropping. The culture is artsy without being pretentious. It’s a small town with some big city amenities.
Best of all, Asheville is friendly and supportive. It’s a place to make real connections and to develop real relationships. It’s the kind of place where you see friends and people you know as you go about your daily errands. Who wouldn’t love that?
It’s a Good Place to Live and Work
We chose Asheville because we like it here. We chose Asheville because it has everything we need. We chose Asheville because we want to support the local businesses run by passionate, creative people.
Our business is helping other businesses. We can (and do) work for companies outside Asheville, since the work we do doesn’t force us to be local. We aren’t selling widgets or fixing drains. We can work for anybody that speaks English.
But we chose to live and work in Asheville because it combines the best of everything: healthful living and a thriving marketplace. While not every local business depends on tourism, every local business needs to be online. And so we can help every local business.
Life isn’t all work, though, and when we take a break and leave the computer, there’s a restaurant or coffeehouse or park where we can get away to. And isn’t that what you want from a hometown?
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.
Even in a business community as small and insular as in Asheville, businesses face competition for their services. Asheville restaurants, Asheville architects, even Asheville dentists need business blogs to give them an edge. Why? It’s all about visibility.
It’s All About Visibility
Blogs not only add flavor to a staid website, but they attract potential customers. Blog posts can be about anything, potentially tying the business blog to almost any topical subject. In fact, if you’re using your blog merely to tout your monthly specials, you’re not getting enough visibility out of your blog.
Use the space to educate your customers. Write about not only what sets you apart, but also about the inside tips about your industry. Write about Asheville and why you chose to live and do business here. Regardless of your subject matter, if you provide useful information, visitors will not only remember you, they’ll come back.
Climbing the Ranks
An active website helps its page rank, too, which is another way to increase business. When anyone searches for your business online — not by your company name but by the product or service you provide — the first five listings (after the advertisements) are the links most likely to be clicked on. The competition for those spots is fierce, but an active blog helps.
What’s an active website? A site with changing content. That doesn’t mean you have to redesign your website every week. That wouldn’t help anyone. But when you add valuable information (like blog posts and new pages) over time, it gets attention from the search engines and from Internet surfers.
Finding Services in Asheville
Since consumers are turning away from the yellow pages and moving online, your Asheville business needs to make sure your listing shows up when those consumers do their searches. As Asheville grows, the new arrivals are going to be looking for new dentists, realtors, gardening stores, home decorating stores, and more. If you want their business, you have to be where they’re looking.
So update your website. Start a blog. Get busy finding the consumers who are out there trying to find you. We’re experts in website content, which means we’re experts in helping your customers find you online.
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.
Linda and Mark at Ray Access claim to be able to write about any topic they can research. And it’s true. They’ve written about plastic surgery, retail furniture, medical issues, construction, website development, and a whole range of other topics. Yet the prevailing “wisdom” in the industry is to specialize. Why?
Specialization Creates Experts
In today’s world, people gravitate toward experts. Experts speak the truth, they get paid lots of money for their intimate knowledge of their chosen field, and businesses and the media seek them out for advice. What’s not to like about specialization?
First, it limits your market and your audience. If your specialization is computers, you may occasionally write a piece that appeals to a wider audience, but most of the time, you’re writing for geeks. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. If your specialization is construction, you’re going to be writing for businesses in that field. Period.
While it’s easier to brand your services as a writer if you specialize, you also limit your marketing reach. An expert only matters when someone needs an expert in that field. Most days, they don’t.
Generalization Creates Opportunity
Since we can write on virtually any topic, we can write for virtually any client. Are you a dentist? We can create a terrific, engaging blog for you. Are you a landscaper? We can provide dynamic website text that’s SEO-friendly and written for the common man (or woman).
Being generalists means we specialize in a new field with every new assignment we take. We can still relate to the general population, so we don’t get bogged down in jargon. We get to learn and write about lots of different topics, and that suits us fine.
So regardless what your business is, it’s in good hands when you hire us to write about it. We offer a free estimate.
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.
An earlier article by a content marketing firm revealed that the fastest growing companies get at least 40 percent of their leads from online marketing. That’s impressive enough, but the tactics of online marketing are so common sense these days that it’s a wonder everyone isn’t doing it.
Your Website Can Work for You
The most obvious online marketing strategy is using your website to attract potential customers and to reach out into the Internet to actively find potential customers. How can this work? Here’s a football analogy:
If a team has the fastest wide receiver in the game, that’s a tactical advantage. If the quarterback never throws to that receiver, however, the team has lost any tactical advantage and might be better off without that super fast receiver, who probably cost them a lot of money.
Your business website is just like that super fast receiver. You can have the slickest site in the world, but if you don’t use it properly to gain a tactical advantage, you might as well post a single page with your phone number on it. That site probably cost you a lot of money that you are now wasting.
To get the benefit of any website, whether it’s a super fast receiver or a third-and-long specialist, you need to make it active. An active site attracts the very people who are looking for your business. Those people are potential customers. It’s that simple.
How do you make a site active? Again, the simple answer is to keep it fresh. An active blog adds content to your website weekly. Adding information and changing content on other pages — even your About Us page — keeps the search engines busy re-indexing your site while moving your site up the page rankings.
Don’t Forget the Other Obvious Strategy
The other obvious online marketing strategy is SEO. SEO, in case you’ve been under a rock since 1999, stands for Search Engine Optimization. This strategy involves making each page of your website a clear destination for a specific question. Everything from the copy to the photos to the title should all say the same thing: what the page is about.
Keywords play a large role in SEO, but too many can backfire. Keyword placement on the page is important, but again, consistency is the real key. A content provider (gee, like us) can rewrite your website content to be SEO-friendly as well as human-friendly. It’s a win-win.
Hence Our Motto
We truly believe these strategies can increase traffic to your website without breaking your budget. It led us to our motto, which is: “If you’re ignoring your website, it’s likely ignoring you.” We mean it, too. Keep your site active and updated, and your company will benefit. Remember, according to CopyPress.com, the fastest growing companies get 40 percent of their leads online. What’s your percentage?
So when you want to use your website to grow your business, we can help.
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.
Believe it or not — and this is a big admission from a couple of writer/editors — not everyone loves to read. Online, these preferences are exacerbated. So, let us present our three reasons to have a website video:
1. People Don’t Read Online
Many Internet users scan the websites they visit, hoping to find the content or information they’re seeking. Very few actually read the words you’ve so carefully crafted on your home page. That’s why it’s important to include headings and subheadings: they help direct visitors (not readers) to the key information you have to share.
A video allows people to sit back and watch instead of leaning forward to read. A video presents information, instead of forcing a visitor to find it. A website video can connect with more potential customers than a page of text.
2. People Don’t Learn the Same Way
People have different preferences, which are innate to them and colors the way they learn. Some are listeners. Some are more visually oriented. Others learn by feeling as they go. Not everyone enjoys dissecting the words to find the true meaning of your message.
A video can connect with those people who are visual learners. Auditory and visual learners are drawn to video more than to text. A well-done video also can touch a viewer on an emotional level, too. All these advantages can make video a more compelling presentation than a page of text.
3. People Love to Watch Videos
Many people would rather watch a video than read a page of text. A video can be more entertaining, but it can also get a message across quickly and effectively. A website video also keeps a visitor on your site longer, and if it’s good, encourages the visitor to explore the rest of your site. A video is an ideal complement to solid writing that engages the readers.
A video appeals to Internet users looking to be entertained while they get their information. If you want to tell your story, get your message across, or increase sales, you should consider what a video will do for your website … and your business.
We Do Website Videos
Luckily, Ray Access can help. We can produce a website video for you that helps you realize your goals. Attract a bigger audience. Improve your website page rank. Sell your product or service. We can help you to creatively reach out. Watch a sample of our work and imagine the possibilities:
Addiction Recovery & Prevention (1:50)
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.
Most savvy business owners today get a website before they even open their doors for business. While some actually need the site to run their companies, others do it just because everyone else is doing it. Is that a good enough reason to dump time and resources into something you’re not even sure you need?
If you’re a business owner, especially if you’re a small business owner, you know you have limited resources. Not just money, but time and energy, too. Building, maintaining and marketing a website, like any other business strategy, can use up those valuable, and limited, resources. Therefore, you should carefully consider your options and your needs before you rush to hire a web designer.
Go through the same process you would for any other business expense. Ask yourself why you need it, who you’re trying to reach and how it’s going to help you build your business. Know what you’re getting into before you invest. Below are our top four reasons to get a site of your own … as well as a few tips on when and how to use it.
1. Contact
Hardly anyone uses the yellow pages anymore. Is it worth the money to get your little square published alongside all your competitors? You’ll likely get a much better response with a good search engine hit. Even when people know your company name and just want to find your phone number, they’re more likely to search online through their home computers or smart phones than to pick up the yellow pages.
Make it easy for people — your prospective customers — to find you. Put your phone number, email address and physical address on your home page. Put this contact information in a conspicuous spot. In this era of instant gratification, visitors will click off your site in a heartbeat if they can’t find what they’re looking for. See our previous blog posts for other tips on how to optimize your website to attract visitors.
2. About You
Before future clients call you, however, they may want to find out a little bit about you and your company. Especially if your business requires a substantial investment, they will browse your site to see if you’re the right company to hire. For shoppers who do their research, provide clear, concise copy that highlights your goods and services. What do people need to know about your business to make the decision to hire you?
Furthermore, if your business is a brick-and-mortar destination, such as a restaurant or retail store, add a map or simple directions beside your address. Make this information easy to find. Make sure your hours of operation are listed on your home page too, because that’s one of the most common things customers look for online.
3. Unique Information
Another good strategy for attracting potential customers is to provide information that’s not available anywhere else. That’s the value of a well crafted blog, newsletter or set of articles on your site. When people search for a related topic, they’ll see a link to your web page, and they are now one click away from your website.
How does this work? Here’s an example. According to the Pew Research Center, a think tank that tackles all kinds of interesting issues, 80 percent of all Internet users have used the web to look up health information. That’s 93 million Americans. If you can write about a health-related topic that ties into your own business, you can tap into that market. If you own a shoe store, for example, provide information about hammer toes and flat feet. Write about how your food is gluten-free or low-fat.
4. Entertainment
Don’t underestimate the power of engaging entertainment. Most Internet users go online to be entertained. Satisfy them by providing some gossip about your area or your industry. Add videos and links to YouTube that relate to your business. Add top ten lists, a la David Letterman, and share funny quotes.
Give your readers reasons to keep coming back to your website. Marketing is about keeping your name in front of their eyes on a regular basis. Make your site so inviting that visitors will bookmark it and send links to their friends. “Hey, did you hear about the joke that Auntie May’s Cookies put up on her site today?”
If you can accomplish these four things on your website, you’ll have a successful site … and likely, a successful business. To learn more strategies for improving your website, 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.
First, let us state that we are not in the SEO business. Our core business, however — writing blog posts, press releases, and especially website copy — can directly effect a website’s page rank. The problem for many online marketing professionals, SEO firms included, is that Google continues to tweak its algorithms for what it values … and what it punishes.
Past SEO Practices
It used to be that you could load up on backlinks — essentially, links back to your site from other sites, reputable or not — and enjoy a high page rank. No more. So here are some SEO tips. As CopyPress.com recommends, “create a compelling site (i.e., engaging content)” and “use social platforms to increase [your] visibility organically.”
At Ray Access, we see the new paradigm as a positive development. What is SEO after all except the process of positioning truly useful websites at the top of applicable search results? Google wants you to use its search engine, and so it works hard (too hard, say some) to deliver useful results every time.
Creating a Compelling Site
Again, advice from CopyPress.com, so you know it’s not just us making things up:
With so much content created everyday online, it’s not enough for a company to mass-produce dull copy and then push it heavily on every social site with a heavy paid social campaign. If you’re satisfied with a quick spike in your social traffic that will disappear as soon as your budget does, then by all means you should continue.”
Indeed, as we’ve been saying since Day 1, quality content will eventually win the SEO wars. Quality content attracts both search engines and potential customers. Quality content — without tricks or hidden costs — increases your website’s page rank organically.
Increasing Your Visibility
How does quality content do all that? People online often want answers. If you can deliver those answers in your particular field, people will find you, learn to trust you, and share your content. Yes, Virginia, quality content has “shareability,” and it’s a trait every business wants.
“Shareability” means that your content can go viral. It increases your reach on social media outlets as well as in search engine results. “Shareability,” in other words, increases your website’s visibility. And it all starts with quality content.
To learn more about how your company can benefit from the kind of quality content that we develop at Ray Access, contact us. We’re always happy to discuss our passion: clear communication.
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.
Search engines are refining how they rank pages. If you can deliver quality content, your site will be recognized, both by human readers and robotic search engines. Quality in 2014 will trump quantity.
Asheville boasts terrific restaurants, cozy musical venues, safe neighborhoods and independent stores. Downtown is human-sized, small enough to walk around in. Breweries abound, and hotels are springing up as fast as the leaves are dropping. The culture is artsy without being pretentious. It’s a small town with some big city amenities.
Another good strategy for attracting potential customers is to provide information that’s not available anywhere else. That’s the value of a well crafted blog, newsletter or set of articles on your site. When people search for a related topic, they’ll see a link to your web page, and they are now one click away from your website.