Should You Hire Someone to Write your Blog?
If you have a website or even a Facebook page, you may have considered a blog, either self-written or produced by a paid writer. The informational content of a website has a huge impact on how effective your web marketing efforts will be. Design, graphics and technical excellence are all important elements in digital marketing, but in the final analysis people return to your website because the content is engaging, informative and useful. The web is full of pretty sites that fail at web marketing because people view them once and never return.
The quality of a website’s written content has a direct bearing on its search engine ranking and on your internet marketing success. Google, by far the most important search engine ranking organization, has made this clear in its “Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines.” Those guidelines state that, “High-quality pages and websites need enough expertise to be authoritative and trustworthy on their topic.” The guidelines go on to say, “…it should, likewise, be written in a professional style and will need to be reviewed, updated, and edited regularly in order to ensure that it remains current and authoritative.”
One of the “killers” for webpage ranking and web marketing success is the presence of poorly produced, out-of-date or plagiarized written content. This is especially true for sites that fall into the “YMYL” (Your Money or Your Life) category. This is Google’s term for sites that can affect a viewer’s happiness, health or wealth. These sites ask you to spend money, frequent a professional practice, buy a product or service, shop at a given store, or make life changing decisions. In short, these are the types of webpages that are produced and maintained by a business marketing organization or an online marketing company like Axiom Administrative Services.
A great many personal websites would not benefit from hiring a professional writer. They are meant to be personal expressions, not business marketing or internet marketing solutions. If the webpage suits the needs and tastes of the owner, leaving it “as is” will hurt nothing of consequence. However, if your webpage or blog on Facebook has a serious online advertising or digital marketing purpose, hiring a writer to do your blog or other content writing may be a good idea.
Keep in mind the fact that this advice is coming from Axiom Administrative Services, an internet marketing company. Obviously, as an online marketing company, we believe that professional help in search engine optimization and web marketing will benefit almost any type of website. However, we also realize that professional help in writing web content and blog articles is not always useful. If your website is intended to help people find your restaurant or to order a pizza, hiring a content writer is not going to help much. For other types of websites, the situation is far different. Clients, patients or customers often visit these sites looking for useful information.
Imagine that you are an accountant or a principal in an accounting firm. Some people might visit your firm’s website simply to get directions or a phone number, but how likely are they to return? Not very, unless your digital marketing content interests or informs them. If your homepage contains a leader into a topic of interest to the viewer, you are far more likely to hold their attention. In tax season, a concise, well written explanation of Form 1040, line 37 might get a casual visitor’s interest and this makes it far more likely that they will stay ‘tuned in’.
Few people would argue that well-written content does not improve a blog or website, but there is a legitimate question as to who should write this material. The best-informed people about the services or products offered by any organization are the people on the “inside.” On the other hand, those people may already have their hands full taking care of business as it is, and they may not be inclined to write anything. Communications experts recommend that when writing assignments are given to in-house employees, they should dedicate a specific amount of time to be spent on the assignment. Most doctors cannot take an afternoon off to write a blog about good immunization practices, most attorneys can’t take time off to write about state probate laws and most small business entrepreneurs are all too busy to take added responsibility.
If the blog, web content or newsletter is part of an ongoing series, this becomes an even greater burden. This is the time for a professional practice, non-profit, small business or entrepreneur to consider hiring an outside writer. We say “small business” because most large firms have their own in-house communications departments that do this task for them. Here are some questions to ask yourself when considering this issue:
- Is the written content important to the website? This is not always the case; some websites rely more on embedded videos, visual material or other media.
- Do I have the skill to write this material myself? Get someone to read your material and give you an honest opinion. You may be surprised.
- Do I have the time to do this and is the task worth my time? For many business and professional people, the answer to this question is, “No!”
- Can I sustain a blog, a newsletter or the task of updating page content over the long haul? Writing one blog is easy, writing one a week for a year is not.
- Can I locate competent writing help? This may be the hardest part!
Content writing is only one part of a successful web marketing, digital marketing or internet advertising effort. The professionals at Axiom Administrative Services (AAS) can help you to master the digital marketing techniques needed to achieve an effective web presence. Axiom is more than an internet marketing agency. AAS is able to combine traditional marketing techniques like printing and direct mail marketing with its creative web marketing services. Please visit our home page to find out how Axiom Administrative Services can fill your web marketing, search engine optimization and other digital marketing needs. You can also call us at 800 888-6348 for a free consultation.
What can SEO do for your website?
Search Engine Optimization or “SEO” is a buzz word in the world of internet marketing. Do you really understand SEO and what it can do for your website? Read a full explanation at our blog article, “What Is SEO and What Can It Do For You?”
How can SEO help your organization?
You have probably heard about Search Engine Optimization and what it can do for your local organization. An important part of SEO is knowing and correctly placing keywords and key phrases. Learn about this important topic by following the link, KEYWORDS AND PHRASES.
What are backlinks?
What do you know about BACKLINKS and their importance? BACKLINKS lend credibility to your website. Click on the link to find out more.
How Do You Know What Keywords and Key Phrases Are Important?
Believe it or not, there is actually a field of study called “Keyword Research.” Keyword research is a method used in search engine optimization (SEO) to determine which actual search terms people enter into search engines. Professionals in SEO use this information to attain improved rankings in search engines. There are several keyword suggestion tools that aid the process, including Google’s “Adwords Keyword Planner”, the “Bing Adword Planner” and numerous SEO strategy consultants who offer thesaurus and alternative keyword research suggestions. These companies can do in-depth research and analysis that relate specific keyword usage to a country or region, even down to a given zip code.
If you are a typical business person engaged in local trades and services, a professional practice, a ministry or non-profit organization, the choice and positioning of keywords and phrases is critical to your webpage search ranking. This is good news for small business, local non-profits and professional practices. By choosing a search engine optimization company that has the time and resources needed to research keywords and phrases, these local small businesses, professional and non-profit organizations can actually outrank national giants in local results.
This is a critical point for small business and SEO. If you are a local plumbing contractor, a small business operating in a given area, you do not have to outrank Kohler or Home Depot in national rankings. You are only interested in getting to the top of the rankings for “plumbers” or “plumbing contractors” in your zip code and surrounding areas. By matching keywords to the other data available to search engines (such as the user’s location, past search history and cookie library), an SEO strategy professional can vastly improve a webpage ranking.
Sometimes this is not very obvious. In the broad search engine topic of “plumbing”, how often are the words “faucet” or “drain” or “leak” used? The tools mentioned above can give you an evidence-based answer. Let’s take a specific example. Consider a person living in the Daytona Beach, Florida, area who is looking for an assisted living facility for themselves or a loved one. The search engine they are using knows their location and has a cookie file with their past search history. Using the two terms, “assisted living” and “retirement homes” turns up very different search results.
Using the keyword search, “assisted living” turns up:
- Daytona Beach, FL Assisted Living Facilities | SeniorLiving.Org
- Assisted Living in Daytona Beach, Florida | Caring.com
- Assisted Living: Facilities in Daytona Beach, Florida (FL)
- Senior Care Assisted Living Facilities near Daytona Beach, FL
- Riviera Senior Living | Holly Hill, FL – Assisted & Independent Living
- 100 Assisted Living Communities in Daytona Beach, FL.
The keyword phrase, “retirement home” yields:
- Daytona Beach Retirement Communities | yellowpages.com
- Retirement Communities in Daytona Beach, FL | Homes.com
- Daytona Beach Area 55+ Active Adult Retirement Communities
- Retire in Daytona Beach, Florida | topretirements.com
- 55+ Community Central FL | Retirement Homes Ormond Beach
- Senior Communities Daytona Beach
These are completely different results generated by keyword search terms that could be easily confused by a typical consumer. The same browser and search engines were used. That is why it is critically important to have data specific to the keyword and keyword phrases unique to your particular product, service and location. If a small business owner or non-profit administrator has the time and the skills needed, he or she can search publicly available sources from Google, Bing and others. More specific data can be obtained by subscribing to SEO software from proprietary sources.
Knowing the best keywords for a specific situation is only part of the solution. The placement of those keywords inside the website is also important. Good SEO technique places keywords and phrases in strategic places like page titles and the ‘metadata,’ a part of the website that is unseen by typical viewers but is very important to search engines.
For most small business people, professionals like attorneys or realtors, or non-profit administrators, this is a task better left to SEO professionals. At Axiom Administrative Services, our staff is proficient in traditional skills like graphic design and webpage technology, but also in the professional SEO services, like keyword selection and effective local SEO optimization.
If you are serious about your website, about finding good digital marketing solutions for your small business, non-profit or professional practice, you probably need the professional SEO services of an organization like AXIOM. AXIOM understands the needs of small businesses, professional practices and non-profits. Please visit AXIOM’s small business services page by clicking this LINK or call Axiom at 800-888-6348.
How can SEO help you?
We keep coming back to a very important concept: What Is SEO and What Can It Do For You? The answer is, “It can do a lot for you”, so click the link to read more.
FULL SERVICE is what AXIOM is about
FULL SERVICE. That is what AXIOM is about. AXIOM can help you with branding, responsive web design, effective organic SEO plus graphic design services, direct and Email marketing and even old-fashioned printing. Visit FULL SERVICE FROM AXIOM to get an idea of what AXIOM can do for you
What Is SEO and What Can It Do For You?
If you have had much experience with internet marketing, online advertising, or email marketing, you have probably heard the term “SEO”. SEO or search engine optimization is the art and science of making your website visible to search engines like GOOGLE, BING, YAHOO and others. Good SEO brings viewers to your website naturally or “organically”, without using paid advertising.
You might be very pleased with your web design but this is only the start. Now you must get your website noticed by the people you want to reach, and SEO is the key to doing this. In the competition for search engine ranking, you may feel completely out of your league because of the huge number of players and the resources they can wield. In any given field, large corporations can spend millions of dollars on internet marketing and paid online advertising, so how can a small business compete?
This task may seem daunting, but as a small business, professional practice, non-profit or local service provider, you actually have an advantage! You do not have to beat Toyota or GM to the top of national search rankings for “cars” or “trucks”. If you operate a new or used dealership, you need to be at the top of the rankings for more specific search terms such as “trucks” plus “Daytona Beach” or “cars” plus “Atlanta.”
This short blog cannot cover all the details of SEO or the strategies used to achieve the best internet marketing results. Instead, let’s be sure we understand some basic SEO-related terms and concepts:
- Search Engine Results Page (SERP): this is the page of results you see after entering a given search term.
- Search terms (or keywords and key phrases): these are the words a person enters in the search box when looking for a given result. This may be a word, several words or a phrase. Search terms like “Chinese food”, “Chinese food Ormond Beach” or “Chinese food to go” might yield very different SERPs from the same search engine.
- Paid Ads: these are links whose sponsors have paid a fee to the search engine producer (GOOGLE, BING, etc.) to have their sites listed. Paid ads are usually at the top of the SERP and consist of the word “Ad” or a similar phrase in gray text, followed by a link in a bright, distinctive color like green. One might look like this – Ad · www.cars.com/Cars
- Organic Results: the links (usually below the paid ads) that are the result of good SEO. These links appear because the keyword search terms have been researched and properly utilized by an expert in SEO.
A GOOGLE search for the term “trucks” results in links to sites like www.ramtrucks.com (Dodge Trucks) or www.chevrolet.com. “Trucks Daytona” gives a totally different set of results. That is the list a Daytona area truck dealer should want to dominate. A perfect job of SEO for a plumber in Holly Hill, Florida, would put this business at the top of the organic or natural results for a search term like “plumber Holly Hill.” To do this you must know what keywords or search terms are most frequently used by people looking for plumbers, plumbing services, licensed plumbers, shower fixtures, sinks, etc.
Experts in internet marketing, such as AXIOM, have SEO in mind from the very beginning of a web design process. They ask themselves what market they are targeting, what are the most common keywords and keyword phrases that capture that market, and then go about constructing a web design with these SEO requirements in mind.
Web design and SEO specialists use professional services to track the popularity of the keywords and phrases related to your products or services. They know how often keywords are searched and how their search volume has changed over time. Using this data, these SEO experts place the best keywords in the best possible positions. Some of these placements are in a website’s ‘metadata’, a place that is never seen by the typical website viewer and is unknown to most people.
Properly placed SEO terms in the domain name or the H1 (largest) heading can have more impact than the same keyword or phrase used in random places. Sometimes the data may be hidden in the filenames of images inserted into the web design. A stock image renamed ‘Toyota Truck on Daytona Beach’ may get better results than one generically named and uploaded as ‘image 41c.jpg’ or similar random name. Likewise, the page names given to a website’s home page and the site’s subpages have greater importance than keywords scattered in the contents.
Today, an important element of SEO success is making the website “mobile friendly.” This means that the web design is easily viewable on smart phones, tablets and other non-computer devices. Several years ago, the number of internet searches done on these small devices passed the number of searches done on traditional computers; search engines now give preference to a web design that is “responsive” to the smart phone or other mobile environment on which it is viewed.
If you are a professional practitioner, a business person, non-profit manager or other lay person, this is what should matter to you in the field of SEO:
- You want to get to the top of organic search engine results for a particular market in a specific area.
- You need to know which SEO keywords, keyword phrases and search terms are best for your market and location today.
- You need to place the keywords correctly in your web design, even in unseen places like the metadata, image and page names.
- You must be certain that your web design is well-viewed across all viewer platforms, including traditional computers and mobile devices powered by Android, Apple or Windows operating systems.
- You should consider combining excellent search engine optimization with paid ad tools like Google AdWords or Bing Ads.
Content management systems have taken some steps toward making SEO accessible to non-technical users. However, most small businesses, professional practices, non-profits or service providers do not have the time or inclination to deal with these issues. The typical small business website would be better served by getting professional help.
Brief mention was made above to the paid ad results that appear at the top of SERPs or search engine results pages. Entering a non-specific search term like “computers” in GOOGLE or BING returns a SERP headed by paid ads from large companies such as these:
- Ad · Store.Acer.com/Laptops
- Ad · deals.bestbuy.com/Computers
However, a more specific search phrase like “computers Daytona” returns a SERP with the paid ads of several local computer vendors in the Daytona area. These paid ads are not the result of organic SEO, but of paid advertising by small, local businesses. If the search was done in GOOGLE, it included a Google Maps graphic with the locations of several businesses that have been added to the Google Map service.
These paid efforts can work with organic SEO to place your website in front of the maximum number of viewers, people who are looking for your store, your practice or the service you provide. Paid efforts like Google AdWords™ or Bing Ads can be quite cost effective and help put your web page on top of search engine results. These tools can work with the web design, internet marketing and email marketing services offered by AXIOM to drive your results.
Axiom Administrative Services can build an internet marketing strategy that starts with professional web design and then provides a full range of web services. Axiom will coordinate internet marketing, online advertising, SEO, an email campaign and the full range of internet marketing services that you need. Start now by thinking about your internet marketing needs and then contact Axiom Administrative Services.
What are backlinks and why are they important?
Backlinks lend credibility to your website and boost your search engine visibility. A well placed backlink helps to draw clients, customers or patients to your website, and AXIOM’s internet experts can show you how. Read about backlinks and what they can do for you by clicking on Backlinks and Your Website.
How Can I Promote My Website?
If you are an individual service provider, the manager of a business or operate a professional practice, you have probably thought about or already had some experience with website advertising and promotion. The truth is that this has become a highly technical and sophisticated field; thousands of people devote their entire professional lives to the skills involved in web design, internet marketing and search engine optimization (SEO).
Still, there are some things that you can do on your own to increase the effectiveness of your website and online advertising efforts.
- If your business or professional practice has a physical location, use it to make the public aware of your website. Make printed material concerning your website available to customers or clients. Include a reference to the site in your billings if you mail them out.
- Give the target audience a reason to go to your website. Include a menu, a way to pay bills, reminders about service dates for a car or routine checkups for your customers, clients or patients.
- Make visiting the website a useful or profitable thing for your target audience. Recently, a large pizza chain offered customers half off the price of a pizza if they ordered online and picked it up. Many small businesses or service providers cannot do this, but they can offer a coupon, a reduced price or some other incentive for using the website.
- Use direct mail or email marketing to promote your website. Direct mail campaigns are still an effective way to make the public aware of your service and your website too! Think back to the recent political campaign season. How much direct mail did you receive, much of it asking you to go to a website and view the candidate’s credentials. You would not continue to get direct mail if it did not work.
- If you are familiar with social media, this is one of the best ways to promote a website. The people in your social media network are likely to share your interests and tastes, and they are a free word-spreading machine.
- Write a blog or have a guest blog about matters that interest your potential audience. You are the best judge of what topics are appropriate to your website and the audience you hope to attract.
- Learn SEO. SEO is a method of increasing the visibility of your website to search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo. This is done by including the words and phrases that are most commonly used in search queries.
- Investigate tools like Google AdWords and Facebook Ads. These can often be cost effective ways to reach a specific audience.
All of these are valid points, but the fact is that the typical small business operator, service provider or professional practitioner does not have the time or the expertise to manage these tasks. Running any small business, nonprofit or professional practice is a full-time occupation. SEO, web design and social media management are particularly important and demanding of time and skill.
Consider this: when you do a Google (or Bing, Yahoo, etc.) search for any topic, do you ever go very far past the first three pages? It is not likely, nor is it for the audience you want to reach. Don’t be discouraged! In a way, this is good news for small and local business and service operators. You do not have to get to the top of page rankings nationally or world-wide, you just have to rank high in your town, city, community or the zip code in which most of your target audience and customers reside.
To get more people to visit your website, you must make it search-engine friendly (search engine optimization) and submit your information to those search engines. This takes time and know-how. The use of tools like Google AdWords and Facebook Ads may be of huge benefit, but like SEO, using these tools effectively takes time and competence. There are “do it yourself” books and online resources that can help you. However, the bottom line is this: if you want it done correctly and do not have the time to become your own expert, you should contact a professional.
There is simply too much to know about internet marketing, web design, SEO, managing social media, coordinating email marketing and direct mail for most people to deal with. If you are putting up a “hobby” website for your own use, you may be able to accomplish limited goals on your own. If your website has a serious business or commercial purpose, then you would be wise to investigate professional help.
Axiom Administrative Services can build an internet marketing strategy that starts with professional web design and then provides a full range of web services. Axiom will coordinate internet marketing, online advertising, SEO, an email campaign and the full range of internet marketing services that you need. Start now by thinking about your internet marketing needs and then contact Axiom Administrative Services.
