by Mark Bloom | Jan 12, 2014 | Content Marketing
Website Trends to Watch in the Coming Year
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.
by Mark Bloom | Nov 29, 2013 | Content Marketing
And Is Content Still the Way to SEO Results?
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.
by Mark Bloom | Mar 20, 2013 | Content Provider
How to Protect Your Business’ Good Name
Recently, we came across a blog post by Rich Gorman on Tamar Weinberg’s blog, and we thought it an apt topic to share with you. Ray Access is a content provider. As such, we encourage our clients to post new content on their websites no less frequently than every week. This influx of fresh, relevant content attracts visitors, establishes your authority, and (as a cool consequence) improves the page rank of your website.
So, we are involved in the world of SEO (search engine optimization) only in a tangential way. We don’t claim to be SEO experts, although we are involved in improving a website’s SEO through our work. We like to keep abreast of the industry, though, which means we do a lot of reading.
In Gorman’s article, he writes about what to do when your website or your company is fairly or unfairly given a poor online review. Just as your blog posts are always available and never go out of print, so a bad review is potentially always available. As Gorman says:
“A sterling reputation is worth its weight in gold — figuratively speaking, of course. That’s why businesses work for years, sometimes even decades, to earn the public’s trust, and to gain as much consumer goodwill as possible. In this Digital Age, however, all of that hard work can be undone in an instant. It just takes one bad review.”
So what can you do? Gorman frames the issue:
“The obvious question, then, is how you can defend yourself. It goes without saying that you can’t exactly coerce people into giving you positive reviews, and you can’t get people to stop leaving reviews altogether. A bad review could appear at any moment; there’s nothing you can do to prevent it, or to erase it. What you can do is ensure that it’s never seen by anyone.”
In other words, if you post content that floods the search engines, that comment is liable to end up on Page 4 of the search results, where almost no one will find it. That’s where we come in. Ray Access provides content — whether you need it fast to defend your company’s reputation or whether you are just starting to build your brand. A continual flow of useful content works for you on many levels.
Click here for the complete article or go to: www.techipedia.com/2012/bad-reviews/.
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 Elle Ray | Mar 7, 2013 | Content Marketing
Why Your Page Rank Matters to Your Business
Creating a website can be cheaper than printing tons of brochures… and it doesn’t destroy any trees. You can update your website much easier than you can update your brochure, too. Best of all, you can save on mailing costs. Instead of mailing your brochure to customers and potential customers, you can email, text, chat, or post your website address (or URL) to whomever you want in any number of different ways. You can even put your URL on your car doors. Try doing that with a brochure.
The question is: Are websites more effective than brochures?
In this day and age, you can be confident that nearly everyone is online or can get online (thank you public libraries). If someone has your URL and wants to visit your website, they can. They don’t need your four-color tri-fold. All they need is your URL scribbled on a cocktail napkin or printed on a business card. Of course, reaching your potential customers can still present a challenge — and that’s where search engines and page rank come in.
Make Your Message Count
Websites can do so much more than brochures as marketing tools, if you play them correctly. Websites never wear out. They are online 24/7. Your website serves as an advertisement for your company when customers look for your products or services. How can it fail?
Your website only works if your customers can find it. We’re not talking about cryptic URLs, which can be a problem. We’re talking about finding your site through an Internet search. Chances are good that people will find your website, but only if it comes up on the first or second page of a search result. That’s considered a high search ranking, with the first page being the ideal, the “Holy Grail” of all business websites. If your website doesn’t appear until page three or four — or worse — forget about it and keep passing out your business cards and brochures … because that’s the only way customers will find their way to your site.
The Puzzle of Internet Searches
The Internet is fast and convenient — and that’s what people have come to expect. Internet users aren’t accustomed to wading through page after page of entries on Google or Bing. They want instant gratification. If they search for buggy whips, they’ll visit a site that comes up on the first page. They might shop around, visit one or two sites for comparison, but more often than not, they’ll buy from the first site they hit. If your buggy whip company isn’t listed until page three, you’re out of luck and out of a customer. And not that many people are buying buggy whips these days.
No matter how slick your site, regardless of how low your prices are, if you can’t get your website to be listed on the first or second page of an organic search — meaning based on a phrase naturally entered by someone looking for something on the Internet — your site might as well be invisible. In fact, it is.
When a person uses a search engine like Google or Bing, it begins an intricate process that weighs complex algorithms, paid advertisements, and many, many other factors to deliver the results — and the order in which they’re posted — in mere seconds. Worse, this process is subject to change without warning.
Solving the Search Engine Puzzle
You can hire a team of Internet marketing specialists, called SEO (or search engine optimization) experts to help you rank higher on Internet searches. They understand the intricacies and can advise you on different strategies for getting the best results. These strategies often work, over time, but SEO experts are expensive and often work for large companies who have large marketing departments.
Alternately, you can take matters into your own hands and play the same game. Learn as much as you can. Spend the time tweaking your website to find the magic bullet that jumps your website to the top of the charts, so to speak. But be forewarned: this is a time-consuming venture.
Fortunately, there is a real solution. Not surprisingly, it involves us.
How Search Engines Work: A Primer
Search engines ultimately want to deliver to their customers a list of websites that most likely help, websites most likely to contain the information, products, or services the person is searching for. Search engines are looking for sites with clear content, consistent and relevant information, and useful copy. In other words, they’re looking for websites that are clear and easy to understand. These are the sites most likely to deliver whatever it is the user is seeking, even if it’s buggy whips.
The complex algorithms the search engines use are merely ways to try to find those clear sites. Your website can be one of them. It starts with clear text on your site, with the right words and good images on each page. It continues with a constant stream of new material, delivered over time.
Why is new content important? Search engines troll the Internet for fresh content all the time, to keep its “index” up to date. If your website is static, search engines will never have a reason to check back, driving your site lower and lower in rank. If your website continues to deliver good, useful information week after week, it will naturally rise in rank, not to mention get readers involved and result in links from other sites.
So don’t go to all the trouble of creating a new website if you’re only going to use it as an electronic calling card. Instead, take advantage of the marketing power of search engines and drive new visitors to your site. Post new content on your site daily or at least weekly. That’s one of the keys to driving your page rank higher.
If you don’t have time to write new stuff every day — because you’re also trying to run your business — then contact Ray Access. That’s what we do.
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 | Mar 2, 2013 | Content Marketing
How to Get Ranked Higher for Search Results
This is the question on every business-owner’s mind. If a company has a website — and what serious company, no matter how small, doesn’t? — the visibility of that website becomes a major concern.
When a business thinks about ways to grow — ways to advertise its products or services, and ways to attract new customers — a new hot website seems like a no-brainer. It’s the old “If you build it, they will come” philosophy. In reality, however, the world doesn’t work that way.
So, after an initial push to launch the website, it just sits there. All optimism soon fades. The site is written off as a loss.
It doesn’t have to be that way, of course. Building the site is just the first step. There are ways to nudge the search page listing toward the top (aka, increasing the page rank of the website, getting more potential customers to look at your site, and then turning them into clients).
Build It the Right Way
We recently took a seminar put on by Chris Kaminski of Lone Bird Studio. He’s been in marketing for 30+ years and in the website end of it for 13+ years. He knows of what he speaks.
Chris ran through a litany of proper ways to build and code a website. Part of the trick is to develop and employ the right keywords, not only for your business, but for each page of the website. Everything has to be relevant, and every keyword has to match.
But That’s Not Enough
The really interesting thing about the seminar, however, was what Chris had to say about the key elements of the keyword use (and we’re paraphrasing here): “Stuffing keywords into text on the page no longer works. In fact, it may work against you. The copy has to flow naturally.”
To put that in layman’s terms, he said, “Search engines today are content-driven… It’s all about the quality of the content.”
What It’s About
This confirms what Ray Access has repeated here many times: the best way to raise your page rank is to provide quality content — useful and relevant information — to your website continually over time. It’s the best way to attract visitors, establish your authority, and yes, move your listing up on the search pages. Find out how Ray Access can help your website’s page rank.
Having your website rank higher based on the site’s content is not only the most effective way to do it, but it’s also the cheapest way to do it. There’s also a term for it: it’s called organic. Organic means that you’re putting the time into your website to add value. Search engines, regardless of the current algorithm for determining rank, will always be attracted to organic value. Or as Chris put it: “Organic buzz rarely comes without quality content.”
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 Elle Ray | Feb 13, 2013 | Editing
Editing Your Content and What It Means to You
What does it mean to edit a piece of writing? Let’s look at an example.
Joanne is a small business owner. Her business is called Bits & Pieces. She sells automobile accessories, everything from steering wheel covers to custom hubcaps. She’s excited about her growing business and has just launched a new website.
While she has employees to do the nuts and bolts work of finding or making items and then selling them, she’s been reluctant to hire someone solely for the purpose of marketing. So she hired a friend to build the website and wrote all the text herself, often staying up late at night to finish.
So she’s appalled, when browsing the new site, to see on the About page that she’s misspelled her company name. Worst than that, she used a “T” instead of a “B.” As she hurriedly places a call to her friend for a quick fix, she wonders what other errors are lurking on the site and what kinds of backlash they may cause.
How Editing Can Help
At its most basic, editing is simply getting another set of eyes to look over any writing before it’s published — online or in hard copy. Mistakes like the one described above are caught before they become a nuisance… or an embarrassment.
Effective editing goes beyond simple proofreading, as it well should. Editors fix grammatical and spelling mistakes, true, but they also make writing stronger, clearer, and shorter, which is most important to your online audience.
A good editor rearranges the thoughts on the page to make your case more persuasive. A good editor finds the perfect word or phrase to replace ho-hum writing. A good editor makes your prose come to life.
Ray Access Does the Hard Part
Too often, in our vast experience, we’ve seen business owners get discouraged by the writing process and stop blogging. This is a missed opportunity. A regular blogging practice on your company website can attract an audience, get your company noticed, drive up the website’s page rank, and establish you as an authority in your field.
But business owners aren’t necessarily writers. It may not be where your passion lies. But it is exactly where our passion lies. Let Ray Access tackle the blogging for you. Your company will still reap the benefits, and you’ll have more time to devote to the things you do best.
Ray Access has helped many companies increase their bottom lines. Our rates are surprisingly affordable, and you’ll start to see results in the first year. Don’t miss an opportunity to grow your business 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.
