The problem with being a writer or a painter is that anyone can do it. All it takes is a few strokes of the pen or brush (manually or digitally), and you’ve got something. So how can you tell if it’s any good? Given the state of art and literature today, you could realistically assume that “quality” is a totally subjective assessment.
Maybe that’s even true, but when it comes to writing online, for businesses, there are ways to determine whether the content on your website or in your blog reaches the heights reserved for the label “quality content.” Ultimately, it comes down to the objective question: Does it work?
Does It Work?
A website for a business is supposed to generate leads and convert visitors into customers. A business blog is supposed to attract people to your website, share insights into your industry, and tout you as a trusted professional. The goal of online content is to get your company noticed.
If it’s not working, you can tell. Traffic to your website is down. The people who do visit aren’t buying. If you have these problems, it could be that you don’t have the right content on your website. It’s possible that good content — content that’s useful to people doing searches, content that’s directed at your target market — can solve these problems.
How Does It Work?
Quality content attracts two distinct audiences: people and search engines. This order is important. Good content is written for people first (not for search engines). If people can’t read it and understand it, then search engines won’t like it either.
Web searches have to provide answers.
People are searching online for answers to questions (e.g., “How do I fix a leaking faucet?”), for specific information (e.g.,”Where can I buy a new faucet?”) and to find businesses (e.g., “Who’s the best plumber in town?”). If you’re a plumbing service, your website should answer all three questions. And more. By making your website useful to people, they’ll find you and remember you.
That in itself makes a website rank higher on a search engine results page. That in itself will help direct more traffic to your website and increase your business awareness and profits (both goals of quality online content). Remember, search engines have competition, too. They want to deliver the best websites to their customers.
More Tips for Creating Quality Content
The more search engines change how they work, the more important quality content has become. The cheap SEO tricks don’t work anymore. Now, it’s all about delivering useful content. That’s all people — and search engines — care about. Here are a few other tips for creating quality content:
Make your content readable. If the audience for your website is composed of nuclear engineers, by all means indulge in the esoteric math and computations of the industry. But if your audience is the general public, you will lose them the minute you start talking about half-lives. Make it simple. Keep it clear.
Formatting matters. No one will read a website featuring solid blocks of type. Every web page should have imagery that helps convey your message. The best images are original photos or graphics that aren’t on any other site, but even if you use stock photos, make sure they are relevant and add to the page.
Long-form content is more useful. The trend for quality content is to be thorough. The best websites average almost 1,000 words per page. So don’t just cover a single topic; delve into it. Explain how it fits into the Big Picture. Your website and blog should provide value to the people reading at home or at work. Make sure you use subheadings to make the content easy to scan.
Choose the right keywords. Yes, keywords are still important, but it’s no longer useful to stuff a web page full of the same keyword over and over. Choose a primary keyword phrase and supplement it with related secondary keyword phrases. For example: “Quality content” might be the primary phrase; “useful information” and “web searches” might be relevant secondary phrases.
Limit your advertising. Some demographics have accepted online advertising as a necessary evil. Search engines aren’t necessarily part of that crowd. When you’re building your website, focus on your audience and not on your pocketbook. It’s anti-intuitive, but it works. Your goal should be to provide value, not a platform for ad space. It will pay off in the end.
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.
If you’re an expert in your field, but no one knows it yet, it’s a problem. Make a plan (or a resolution) to tell the world about your experience. Believe it or not, people want to know. A professional willing to share expertise in an open-source manner, free of charge to anyone who needs the information, is a valuable and respected commodity.
Share Your Expertise
The best way to set yourself apart from your competition is to write informative articles about your industry. Share the latest research polls published by your industry association. Let others know about trends affecting your market. Write down your experiences in a way that inspires and motivates people.
In other words, become the expert you want to be. You easily can accomplish this goal through a regular blog posted on your website. But make it worth readers’ time. Give readers a take-away, whether it’s a useful tip or a juicy piece of information they can pass on to friends and coworkers.
Remember that old commercial that said: “When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen?” Your goal is to tweak that message by placing your name in that sentence.
Don’t Withhold Your Knowledge
You can do accomplish this feat if you continually give away useful information in a clear, jargon-free, easy-to-digest way that people can use. Too many professionals write for themselves and forget that it’s the readers (your potential customers) they need to please.
Craft blog posts and articles for your site and to publish in trade and local magazines that answer burning questions, make life a little easier and provide useful material. Write about one subject at a time and don’t try to fill a blog with too much information. It’s not that difficult when you have the desire to rise above the field and make a name for yourself.
The Value of a Consistently Good Blog
Eventually, you’ll be seen as the expert in your field, if only because you’ve been so helpful. Eventually, clients will seek you out because you’ve developed a reputation for being straightforward and forthcoming about the ins and outs of your industry. Your readers will flip for it. It’s all possible when you let your expertise shine through your writing.
If you have trouble stringing sentences into a clear narrative, however, let us make you sound like the knowledgeable expert you are. Ray Access can write for you to provide access to the readers looking for the latest and greatest. Whether you want to tell the world about your business or your products and services have a narrow target, we can craft articles for publication in magazines and blogs that are insightful, organized and informational. And we’ll even put your name on top as the author. After all, you are the expert, we’re just the writers.
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.
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.
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.
A common question we get asked is: “How do you go about writing blog posts for a new client?” Before we answer this very good question, let us provide some context.
What’s a Blog?
Blogs — originally called “weblogs” — began in the late 1990s as online diaries. Individuals wrote about their thoughts or experiences. They may have followed a theme or written free-style.
What made blogs different was that they were available to anyone through the Internet. In other words, these diary entries were public. Public and personal.
Business Blogs Arrive
So when business blogs eventually appeared, they had to go through several transmutations. What could a business say in a blog that would remotely seem personal? Businesses initially struggled with that question.
Business blogs matured into vehicles for outreach, consumer education, and industry insight. If they are well written and useful, these blogs reflect the personality of the company. They offer value and provide a place for interaction with some company personnel.
Today, a good business blog attracts search engines and potential customers alike while cementing the company’s authority in its given field. A useful blog benefits the company’s bottom line.
How We Work
So how does a third party, like Ray Access, even attempt to write blog posts for a company? What can a business owner expect from the process?
When we are hired to write a series of blog posts, we meet with company representatives to discover their target audience and dig into their field of expertise. Then we brainstorm a list of possible blog titles or topics. We present this to our client, who approves or selects enough to get us started. The company may also add to the list.
From there, it’s a straightforward process of research, writing, and editing. The first blog post we prepare requires a bit of back-and-forth with our client to refine the tone and the language, but we always present drafts well in advance of our deadlines for just this sort of issue.
Extra Credit
The blog posts we write contain keyword phrases as naturally as possible. Our goal is to prepare blog posts that people can read. Search engines, while important, are not the primary audience. We can also supply an image with the article for no extra charge.
Once our client accepts the blog post, it is usually the company’s responsibility to publish it. Then the cycle repeats itself, getting faster and faster with each iteration. When we run out of approved topics, we brainstorm another list. We will never run out of ideas. Never.
Now that you know how we work, try us out! We’ll even provide an estimate to write your business blog.
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.
Eventually, you’ll be seen as the expert in your field, if only because you’ve been so helpful. Eventually, clients will seek you out because you’ve developed a reputation for being straightforward and forthcoming about the ins and outs of your industry. Your readers will flip for it. It’s all possible when you let your expertise shine through your writing.
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.
The blog posts we write contain keyword phrases as naturally as possible. Our goal is to prepare blog posts that people can read. Search engines, while important, are not the primary audience. We can also supply an image with the article for no extra charge.