Visual People Design

Four bad approaches to creating content for your small business website and how to stop

2013-01-11T22:13:05Z

It’s the year of content. Or so say the web marketing experts. We’ve always worked with our clients to create as much quality content on their sites as they can (yes, we know you’ve got families and are running businesses and don’t always have a spare half hour to write a blog post!).

Why is content important? Two reasons: Search engines and establishing expertise with potential clients.

Google loves to see unique content and its software is advanced enough to be able to tell if your content is “borrowed” or used from another source, how well written it is and how relevant the information is to your business. That means you’ve got to produce high-quality content that is only published on your site in order to rank above your competitors in web searches.

Just as importantly, good content tells potential customers that not only are you an expert, but you care about educating and sharing. Will a visitor to your site read 50 blog posts about your business? Probably not. But he or she will pick a couple to get a flavor for what you do, and scan headlines of the rest. The impression you’ll leave is that you know what you’re doing.

We’ve found that there are roughly four types of bad approaches that our clients and potential clients have to creating web content. Do you see yourself in one of these profiles?

THE BAREBONES ADVOCATE. “I don’t really want to spend a lot of energy on the website. I just need some sort of web presence so people can find me,” says the Barebones Advocate. His website consists of a home page with a photo and single paragraph of text – maybe an “about us” and “contact us” page as well.

The problem is that you’ll need to have more than a three-page website to get a high quality score in Google. Think about it this way: The more pages your site has, the more opportunities Google has to match up a search request with your site. That doesn’t mean that quantity of pages is everything, though – those pages still need to have the good-quality content we’ve talked about.

Sometimes the Barebones Advocate simply doesn’t want to share too much (maybe competitors will learn too much about the business! oh no!) and sometimes he’s just not focused on or aware of the need to have more worthwhile content on his website.

How to Overcome: Start slowly and add content to your site. You may have to reconsider the goals for your site. The “build it and they will come” ideal is no longer a reality – you must identify areas where you can use your site to appeal to your potential customers and bring in leads. Don’t worry about giving away too much information to the competition – the way you do business and treat customers is the key to how successful you’ll be, not whether your competition learns about and starts to copy one of your business practices.

THE EXCESSIVE SHARER. This business owner or manager tells the world everything about his or her business – maybe too much! While this is usually a problem when it comes to social media tools like Facebook or Twitter, a business blog can get weighed down with too much not-relevant info.

Sure, we’ve seen people do a good job integrating their lives and jobs – branding themselves as a well-rounded person and sharing some personal stuff with their customers. Nothing wrong with connecting with your customers as a human being – but the Excessive Sharer is just over-communicating and potentially driving people away. It’s OK to have 50 blog posts about the new products your business is carrying. It’s probably not OK to have 50 blog posts about your mother-in-law’s upcoming surgery, your latest vacation plans or how potty-training your little one is going. Save that for your personal blog or Facebook account.

How to Overcome: Make a list of business topics and stick solely to those. Don’t lose your personal touch, but work on making it more professional. You want to educate and inform the people coming to your site, not distract them from doing business with you or even drive them away. When in doubt, ask a trusted employee or business mentor to assess the appropriateness of your topics.

THE QUITTER. This one hits a bit close to home! You start out with the best of intentions, but then real life gets in the way. Your plan to blog three times a week and post a couple times a day to your social media accounts gets pushed to the back burner in favor of all the other things that a small business owner has to do every day. So you have three weeks of regular blog posts and new articles and then… nothing. Your site hasn’t been updated in several months!

How to Overcome: There are probably a lot of things you want to do besides add content to your website. You either need to buckle down, create a schedule for writing/recording new content and learn about tools that can help you manage the content creation process. Either that, or hire your favorite content creation/internet marketing company (like us! hint, hint) to help you.

THE SEO OBSESSER. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the art and science of improving your ranking on a page of relevant Google or Bing results. But some people take this a little too far. Ever read a blog post or marketing copy that is just a bit too packed with keywords? (“Our fantastic high-speed blender will blend anything you need to have blended. With superior blending power, the B351 Blender from Our Company is a blending phenomenon.”) The SEO Obsessor has an admirable goal but is going about it the wrong way.

There needs to be a better balance between appealing to the search engines and appealing to real, live humans. Your SEO-focused content is not so fun to read, and search engine software is actually getting good at identifying this type of copy and giving it lower quality scores, which defeats your purpose.

How to Overcome: Stop writing and creating for search engines. Instead, make what real people want to read your sole goal. If you are writing for your customers, you’re going to naturally include keywords and phrases in your content. Talk about solving problems, industry news, best practices, satisfied customers – but write like you’re sending an email to a friend. Aim to not repeat the same major keyword or phrase more than a handful of times (no more than once a paragraph is a good rule of thumb!).

If you think you may fit into one – or more – of these categories, it’s a good time to reassess what your goals are, and maybe talk to a trusted outside source for input. Content is more and more important, and you don’t want to throw away time and energy creating what doesn’t work. Need a trusted opinion? Give us a call at 541-752-9922 for a free website evaluation, which includes advice on your content.

The one page you need to add to your business website

2013-01-08T00:04:56Z

If you write one new piece of content for your website this year, or revise something that’s currently on your site, it should be your FAQs.

FAQs, or “frequently asked questions,” are a great way to communicate with potential customers. In our experience, it’s one of the first pages that a visitor to your small business website checks. And, it lets you set a good tone for your business, your style and your philosophy.

FAQs don’t have to be formal, but they should be professional. If you’re an individual proprietor, or the public face of your business, think about answering them in first person. Third person is fine, too, but try not to get caught up in overly flowery prose or “marketing speak.” Write like you were sending an email to a casual friend (but double check spelling!).

Almost any business can create an FAQ page. To get started, think of what things a customer asks during a phone call or initial contact. Some of these will be pretty basic (“Do you take credit cards?” “What are your hours?”) – but that’s fine. Don’t worry about repeating information that’s elsewhere on the site, either. Repetition is a good way to make sure that people find the information they’re looking for quickly.

Questions and answers can also be longer, and describe the way you do business and how you differ from your competitors. Don’t be afraid to address controversial issues, as long as you can do it without sounding defensive. Stick to the facts and have a trusted employee or business mentor read through what you’ve created before going public.

One nice thing about an FAQ is that it can be a work in progress. You don’t have to have it finished to get it up on your site. Start small and make a goal of adding one or two questions and answers each month. Keep track of what your customers are asking in other places and what is commonly asked in forums and social media pages that are related to your business.

FAQs are also a great source of ideas for other website content. Could you expand on an answer in a new blog post? Would a video demonstration help answer a common question more effectively? Look for ways you can expand an FAQ answer to write, record or otherwise better inform your website visitors.

Finally, if you haven’t had an FAQ page before, where should it be located on your site? Sometimes it makes the most sense to have it be its own section, listed in your main navigation. (If you need help adding this, ask us!) In other cases, you can easily create a page under your “About Us” or “Resources” sections (or other relevant area). Be sure to promote the new FAQ in a short blog post, a Facebook post or a Tweet.

What is your small business mobile strategy?

2012-09-23T01:00:43Z

It’s not enough to just have a website for your small business. You want to be sure you have a site that can be viewed on popular mobile devices, since more and more traffic is going to come your way from iPhones, Androids and tablet PCs.

A Web.com Small Business Report from this past spring reports that more than 61 percent of small businesses have no mobile strategy at all. They aren’t yet thinking about how to appeal to customers and potential customers who use their smart phones for browsing the internet and interacting with companies on social media.

At the same time, small business owners are realizing that they’ll have to do something, and soon.

One popular restaurant we work with has more than one-third of traffic coming from smart phones and tablets. That makes sense, because when you’re downtown and trying to decide what to have for dinner, you’re using your phone to look up options and review menus.

A downtown retail store has more than 20 percent of its website traffic coming from mobile. Customers want to know their hours, the brands they carry and what events they are putting on.

It’s not just the upper crust using mobile these days. A mobile device is cheaper than a computer, internet line and phone service and so may be the least expensive choice for those on a tight budget. And even those without much disposable income eat out sometimes, buy presents for their kids or need a plumber – so they need to be part of your overall marketing plan, as well.

The ways customers find you can vary depending on your business and industry, but it’s clear that people use mobile devices to look up companies and make purchases (either in-store or online). Global Smartphone Users report from February found that 1 in 5 people who search for local businesses on their phones made an online purchase; over half called the business; and 49 percent looked up the business on a map.

So what can you do to make your efforts more mobile friendly? We offered some hints in a previous blog post, When Do You Use a Smartphone?. Here’s some expanded thoughts.

Check your website on smart phones and tablets. Even if you don’t use one, borrow a few different types from your friends or customers to review. Does it look OK? Can you use it to find a product, a menu, or your business phone number? Do you have to scroll from side to side to read?

Think about usability. For example, drop-down menus are great on websites, but we’ve been steering people away from using them because they can be a pain to navigate with smart phones. (More tips on this in the aforementioned Smartphones blog post.)

Consider building a “responsive” site instead of having a separate mobile site. You want to minimize the number of things you have to update; two different sites don’t make a lot of sense for most time-crunched business people. Responsive design takes into account whether the user is viewing your site on a computer monitor, a tablet or a smart phone and adjusts the site accordingly, on the fly. You only have to update one website, and it looks fine wherever it is viewed.

Make sure people can find your business when they search. While a full explanation of search engine optimization techniques for mobile is worthy of a separate series of blog posts, you can start by making sure your business website can be found locally when people Google your name or your industry. Make sure you claim your Google Places page and that you list your business location prominently on your website, just for starters.

Give thought to your mobile strategy before 2013 hits, and get ahead of the curve. Give us a call at 541-752-9922 if you have any questions!

Note: If you have Google Analytics, you can check to see how much of your traffic is currently coming from mobile devices. See marketing expert Christopher Penn’s short YouTube video on GA Mobile to learn how to find this information. Or ask us for more information about all your website stats and how to use them to form a comprehensive internet marketing strategy.

Why just any image won't do for your small business marketing

2012-08-13T17:27:25Z

“Wrote a great blog post. Now I’ve just gotta find a photo to go with it,” you think, as you search Google images for something – anything – that’s remotely related to your topic.

Don’t do this! If this is something you’ve done in the past, or might do in the future, read on for why original, relevant images are more important than ever. (This extends to stock photo use as well, although if you are buying rights to use an image you won’t have to worry about copyright.)

You may be violating copyright. When you take a photo from the internet, odds are it belongs to someone who has created it for their own use, or for marketing of a specific product. If you’re using it without permission, you may get a legal request to remove the image or a bill for its use.

Images that are used a lot tend to look familiar. You don’t want to use the same tired photo to illustrate your blog post that dozens of other people have used. This is why inexpensive stock photos aren’t usually a great idea, either.

Your own images look more authentic. Users may not consciously register that something feels “fake,” but if they come to your site and see nothing but stock images, they may not get a sense that your site and business are trustworthy. Photos of your employees, working in your store, will win out over slick, posed photos of some random people who look like they’re in your industry.

If you don’t know where your images came from, you don’t always know if they’re safe to use. One client we had used a stock photo image of a man who was the “face” for their company on all their materials. They later learned he was convicted of child molestation and was in prison, which led to a mad scramble to replace the image they’d built their brand around.

Google likes original images. As Google, which is used for more than 70 percent of all online searches in the U.S., continues to put an emphasis on original, quality content to boost your rankings, you’ll need to focus on what’s unique to you. That means a decent-quality image you take of a product you’re selling online will give you better results than the stock photo from the manufacturer that’s used on dozens or hundreds of other sites that sell the same thing.

Of course, the ideal is to have professional images taken of your store, your employees, and your products. The cost is often reasonable since a professional can accomplish more in less time than you can. Professional quality lighting can make your store look brighter and more inviting. Call us at 541-752-9922 for a quote on your photo needs.

When do you use a smartphone?

2012-07-30T23:08:04Z

If you’re like many adults in the U.S., you use your smartphone to go online – at least some of the time. A Pew Research study from last month (June 2012) found that 88 percent of adults have a cell phone of some kind. And 17 percent of cell phone owners do MOST of their online browsing using their phone… not a computer.

So, what are you doing to welcome people looking for your business through their mobile phones? Make sure you’ve thought through how people will use your website from a phone or tablet. Here are five things to make sure you do:

Give mobile users what they want. People using cell phones may be interested in reading your blog post on the 10 best interior decorating tips for spring, but more likely, they want to find out where you’re located. Sure, they’re interested in your restaurant’s culinary philosophy, but first, they want to see menus! Don’t force people to go through your whole site to find what they want.

Display your phone number close to the top of the page, and in plain text. If it is part of a graphic, a mobile phone won’t be able to see it. If it’s text, the phone can detect that you’re referencing a phone number, and will automatically make it a link so users can simply click to dial. Having the number close to the top makes it easy for mobile users who just want to find you and call you.

Use simple but well-considered navigation. Don’t include too many categories (we suggest eight or fewer) that help users figure out where to go. Most important, make links easy to see. That way, mobile users browsing your site won’t struggle to figure out what information is available.

Make your website responsive. That means that the site sizes itself automatically based on what type of device it is being viewed on. But it doesn’t just get smaller so it’s hard to read; a true responsive site will scale to be narrower and longer as it is viewed on a smaller screen. (Take a look at a site we recently finished for Nicholson Dental in Albany. View NicholsonFamilyDental.com on your desktop computer. Then check it on your smartphone. See how it works well in both?) This eliminates the need for a completely separate mobile site.

Be easy to find in search. If a mobile user is looking for your business, make it easy for them to find you. Think of the main ways people will search for you and the terms they will use. Incorporate those in your site so you are more likely to show up in a Google or Bing search for those terms.

Need help? Want to make your site “responsive”? Contact us today using the form on the right or via phone at 541-752-9922.