Small Business Website Design

Your website only has a few seconds to make a stunning first impression. That means the design has a lot of work to do in a short amount of time. The colors have to be inviting. The images need to be compelling. The layout must be user-friendly. Your business brand and mission have to be communicated clearly and effectively.

Scribizzy builds sites that have style, substance, and purpose. We specialize in small business website design, and our goal is to create a site that resonates with your target customers, a design that reflects your brand while showcasing your products and services.

All of our sites are built using a robust content management system, which allows you to log in and manage the content on your site. You’ll be able to add pages, alter the text, work with images. It’s as easy as using web-based email! So you don’t have to rehire us every time you want to make a small change to your site (although if you want to hire us to update your site, we’d be more than happy to oblige).

Because we’re dedicated to serving small business owners, we developed our website design services to be flexible and affordable. We’re also focused on delivering designs that resonate:

• Brand Consistency – a look that aligns with your business logo, image, and philosophy
• Customer-focused and user friendly – we create your website with your customers in mind
• Flexible – if you want to tweak or upgrade your design later, we won’t have to rebuild it from the ground up
• Manageable – you’ll be able to change the text and images on your site in minutes
• Affordable – we can work within your budget and deliver a professional site that’s also affordable

If you have a tight budget today, we can create a simple, cost-effective design for you. Since we use a flexible design system, you can start with the basics and upgrade your design later. In other words, we can build a site that will grow with your business, not a site that has to be rebuilt from the ground up every time you’re ready to expand.

Want to learn more? Visit our Website Design page. Ready to get your small business website design underway? Get a quote online.

A Rough Guide to Business Blogging for Absolute Beginners

So, you have a small business and you’re thinking about adding a blog to your website. You’ve heard that a blog can help your business attract new customers while building loyalty among existing customers. And you’re right; business blogging is a great way to grow your business online.

But blogging is a world unto itself. Think of your blog as a house on the web. Other blogs dealing with topics that are similar or relevant to yours make up your neighborhood. Like all houses, your blog needs to be carefully planned and maintained. And if you want to be a successful member of your community, you’ll have to connect with your neighbors.

Like a home, a blog is an investment. You can invest dollars by hiring a professional blogger to manage and maintain your blog or you can invest your own time and to learn how to do it yourself.

The Rough Guide to Business Blogging

This guide is for small business owners who want to explore business blogging as a way to grow their online presence. The list below includes basic elements to help you get started blogging. It’s by no means an exhaustive list. There is an endless array of blogging activities that you can do to build and grow your blog. But this list does include the bare essentials.

Check Out the Neighborhood

Start by subscribing to blogs in your niche. Find businesses like yours (some of these will be your competitors) and find businesses that complement yours. If you’re an architect, find blogs about construction. If you’re a hairstylist, find blogs about makeup application. Use an RSS reader or subscribe by email. Then, incorporate blog reading into your daily schedule. This is the single best way to get familiar with business blogging. Watch and learn. And make sure you visit the blogs you read directly so you can check out the features on site and view the comments.

Draw a Blueprint for Your House

Once you’ve familiarized yourself with blogs in your niche, start putting together a plan for your blog. What topics or issues will you address? Make a list of possible post titles. Write down the categories that you’ll use to organize your posts. Be sure to think about features you want for your blog, such as plugins that make your blog more attractive to readers (CommentLuv) or that make your blog easier to find on the web (All in One SEO). Learn how to use these features to your advantage.

Put Your House on the Map

Once you launch your blog, focus on creating excellent content. Every article you post should be useful to your readers. And make sure you know exactly who your target readers are. What questions do they have? What kind of help or tips do they need? Answer their questions and fulfill their needs. Will you use your blog to reach out to customers? Other professionals in your industry? Are you establishing your expertise and credibility or are you sharing news and information about your service offerings? With business blogging, a healthy mixture of all these approaches will work best.

Hit the Road

Now that you know your way around your neighborhood and have your house fitted with great content, start connecting with other bloggers. Visit those blogs you’ve been reading and make it a point to leave comments. When folks comment on your blog, be sure to reply and then head over to their place to reciprocate. Set up a Facebook page and mention your posts on your Twitter stream. Add a link to your email signature. Tell your friends and colleagues about your blog and be clear about how they can benefit from reading it.

Build Your Community

You’ll start building your community when you’re out on the road promoting your blog. Return to home base every once in a while (be sure to keep those posts coming regularly!) to make sure your visitors are comfortable. Use questions to encourage readers to comment and participate in discussion. Throw a little contest, host a giveaway, and make your home the hottest spot on the block.

Bring it Home

Throughout the business blogging process, you’ll pick up a lot of blogging techniques and strategies simply by observing other bloggers. Notice how they format their posts. Do they use images or video? How does the layout affect you as a reader? What do they blog about? Ask yourself what other bloggers in your neighborhood are doing to be successful and then bring it home so you can succeed too.

Scribizzy offers a range of blog services to help small business communicate with customers and market their products and services on the web. Want to learn more? Get a quote online.

How to Plan Your Website: Design Tips for Non-Designers

In any website design project, the planning phase is the most critical. If you’re working with a website designer, it’s essential that you communicate your vision clearly so that the designer can make your vision a reality. And the designer must communicate her vision too, providing clear examples, ideas, and images that will help you understand what the site will look like once it’s completed.

There are three basic components to any design: the design itself (look and feel of the site), content (text and images that will appear on the site), and functionality (how it works).

As you work with your designer, you need to keep all of these components in mind. Additionally, there will be a learning curve for both of you as your designer studies the nature of your business in order to reflect it appropriately in your design and as you learn about the many options available to you in terms of how your business will be presented to an online audience.

Throughout the planning process, clear communication is key to building a good relationship with your designer and to your designer building a great site for you.

I thought I’d share some basic website design tips that will help you work with a designer to hammer out the details of your design plan. By working as a team with a shared goal and by focusing on communications and smart planning strategies, you and your website designer can build a stellar website together.

Website Design Tips to Help You Get Through the Planning Process

1. You Don’t Need a Vision — Most designers are thrilled when a client gives them complete creative control over a design project. If you’re not sure which direction to take in terms of design, consider giving the designer some leeway. Tip: Ask for samples to make sure you like the designer’s work, and pay special attention to the designer’s own sites since they’ll offer a good example of her style.

2. Use Examples — Nothing is clearer than a visual example. Spend some time surfing the web and find different website designs that appeal to you. Be sure to scroll through the pages and note what you do and don’t like. Collect a few URLs (links) and then send them to the designer with your thoughts about each one. Tip: Start with your competitors, but branch out into other fields too.

3. Don’t Overdo It — If you send your designer 100 examples, there’s going to be a lot of confusion. Shoot for sending your designer three to five examples of designs that you like with notes highlighting what appeals to you and why.

4. State What You Want — Be specific about what you like and what you want. If you send your designer three links to sites you like that are all extremely different from one another, she’s not going to be able to figure out which elements you like best unless you communicate your preferences to her. Offer comments about each site’s design. Do you like the colors? The layout? Does the site boast features that you’d like to see on your site? Is the content similar to yours?

5. Mention Your Dislikes — If there’s a design element you’ve seen but don’t like, make sure you let your designer know about it lest she use it on your site!

Avoiding Feature Creep

Try not to engage in feature creep. What’s that?, you ask (I’m so glad you asked). Feature creep is when you see the final design for the first time and suddenly come up with a bunch of new ideas that were not included in your original project scope and expect the designer to add these features to your design at no additional charge.

Examples of feature creep are as follows: Actually, I think I would like a form on the contact page after all. I know I said I didn’t want a blog on my site, but now I do. Those colors just aren’t working for me. Oh, by the way, while you were working on the site, I had a new logo made. Most feature creep requests are followed by a statement like, That’ll only take a minute or two, right?

It’s that last statement that qualifies a request as feature creep. Most designers do expect a project to expand a little as it unfolds and will build that into the price, but any big, time-consuming add-on (as well as a bunch of little add-ons) will incur additional fees. If you do want to make some serious changes, you should be upfront with your designer, because trust me, your designer wants you to be a very happy and satisfied customer. Just be aware that some post-design adjustments may show up on your final invoice.

Teamwork

Like any true professional, a website designer wants you to be pleased with the final product. But since it’s your website, you have an important role in explaining what you want your site to look like. As long as you communicate clearly and openly with your designer (and encourage her to do the same), the design process will flow smoothly and your website will come out looking exactly the way you want.

Scribizzy offers website design services for small businesses, independent professionals, and bloggers. Visit our website design page to learn more or get a quote online.

Five Quick and Easy Web Content Development Tips

If you have a small business, you probably don’t have time to sit around thinking about web content development. You’ve got a business to run and resources may be tight, but you know that you need to expand your online presence. Your  customers are on the web and you want to be able to reach them. Where do you begin?

The trick is to stop thinking like a business and start thinking like a consumer. What do your prospective customers want? What problems are they facing and how do your products and services solve those problems? What makes your business the best one to patronize? Most importantly, how are your target customers using the web?

It shouldn’t take you long to answer these questions. In fact, if you’re already in business or if you’ve started laying the groundwork for your small business, then these are a few of the first questions you should have addressed. But all business owners lapse into entrepreneurial thinking. We get caught up in our own industries and fields of expertise. We forget that the consumer sees from a different point of view and speaks a completely different language.

Keeping the customer’s perspective in mind, you can apply the following five web content development tips to start creating content that will reach the right audience and get them to buy tickets to your show.

1. How-to Articles

You’re a pro at what you do, but your customers are novices. Don’t ever forget that. In addition to the products and services that you sell, you can give away your knowledge (advice) to make the customer’s experience more pleasurable. Let’s say you’re an electrician. You can just go to people’s houses and fix their wiring or you can leave a lasting impression and give your customers a branded flier that offers some tips on how they can maintain their electrical devices. Now, post those tips to your website and you’ve just added some useful content for your website visitors.

2. Case Studies and Storytelling

Once you’ve been in business for a few years, you’ll have some stories to tell. You’ll have stories about customers who benefited greatly from doing business with you and stories about customers who suffered because they didn’t. In the meantime, be creative. Use storytelling to show (not tell) people how your business offerings will improve their lives. If the story is long, add a page to your website. If the story is short, post it via your Facebook group. If it’s super short (140 characters or less), share it on Twitter.

3. Solving Problems

You need to think of your products and services as solutions. And you also need to think of your customers as people with a problem. Now, put the two together and explain to your customers how you can solve their problems. Many business owners tend to think that the problem/solution model is obvious. For example, our friend the electrician believes that if his customers have an electrical outlet that’s not working, they also know he’s the one who can help. But he needs to detail the problem and emphasize himself as the solution: Power outlets not working? Did you know faulty wiring and broken outlets can be a safety hazard? I’m here to help keep your family safe and make sure your electrical wiring works.

4.Transparency, Credibility, and Loyalty

For a small business, the best customer is a loyal customer. These are not only the customers that come back again and again, they’re also the customers that run around telling all their friends how great you are. They send you a lot of referrals. How do you land these kinds of customers? You start by building credibility. Establish your expertise and back it up with excellence. You can do this by publishing web content that showcases your top customers or by engaging in transparency. Write articles about your business processes. Explain your reasons when you make changes to your offerings or pricing. Let the customers come behind the scenes and help them become fans.

5. Find Their Haunts

Once you’ve got your website up and running, you have to drive traffic to it so you can convert that traffic into paying customers. In order to do that, you have to create even more web content and publish it around the ‘net. I call this peripheral content. It can be as short as a tweet or as long as an in-depth article. And it can be based on any of the four tips above. But you’ll need to find the haunts where your customers hang so you can get the content up on the wall. Here are a few bonus tips to help you find your people:

• FREE – Are you selling music, trendy clothing, or cheap eats? Trying to round up the teens? Get a spot on MySpace because that’s where the teens and tweens do the internet thing.
• FREE – Facebook offers a few different ways to connect. You can create a page or launch a group and then invite people to join or become fans. How do you find those people? Send an invitation to all your Facebook friends. Post updates to your wall. And add one of those how-to articles.
• PAID – Facebook also sells targeted advertising. So does Google and a number of other ad networks. Your ads will be shown to people who are either already searching for whatever you offer or who have expressed specific interest in it.
• FREE – Twitter’s great for relationship building. If you can carve out some time to engage on Twitter every day (or a few times a week), you’ll make some friends and they’ll share links to whatever good stuff you’re selling.
• FREE/PAID – Let’s go back to our friend the electrician. His main customers are homeowners. All he has to do is find out where homeowners hang out on the web and voila! He’s found his base. Search for forums where your customers hang out. Use your favorite search engine to find “homeowner forums.” If you service a geographic area, be sure to narrow your search appropriately (e.g. “homeowner forums new york”). Join the forums and participate in the conversation. Add value and grow your network.
• FREE/PAID – If you have web development skills, adding a blog to your site won’t cost a dime. Or, you can hire someone to take care of it for you. Either way, blogs that are properly designed and maintained have a tendency to draw traffic to a website. Blogs are great because your website visitors can subscribe and because they’ll get regular updates, they won’t forget about you!

And then there’s SEO, which helps make sure customers can find you via search engines, but that warrants a post of its own.

Web Content Development for Small Businesses

Building an effective online presence can have an exponential impact on the growth of your business. Think like a customer to create riveting content, then use social networking, blogging, and other online marketing efforts to bring visitors to your site and then convert them into customers.

Scribizzy offers web content development services for small businesses. We’ll devise a plan that’s tailored to your business and then create the content that brings the plan to fruition. Start growing your content today by getting a quote online.

SEO Keyword Research and Selection Process

The English language is incredible. There are hundreds of different word combinations that can be used to communicate a single idea. And every combination is a possible SEO keyword phrase for some website. Maybe yours.

So how do you decide which words and phrases to use when you’re optimizing your website to increase search engine traffic? Do you choose the keywords with the highest search volume? The ones that you’re already using on your site? Do you pick keywords with the least competition?

All of these questions must be addressed through the course of developing a comprehensive SEO plan. But for a small business website, one question rises above the rest: Which search terms are your customers using?

SEO Keyword Choices

Putting together a proper SEO plan requires making sensible decisions about which keywords you’ll target and which ones you’ll ignore. Sounds easy, right?

Not so quick. As you conduct keyword research and start developing your ideas for an SEO plan, you’ll be faced with infinite choices regarding which keywords you should include in your SEO campaign. Many (too many) website managers make their decisions in a rash manner, often without giving any consideration to why one keyword might be a better choice over another.

I’ve actually witnessed small business owners and bloggers tackle the decision-making process in an arbitrary, freewheeling manner. So I thought I’d put together an article that addresses some of the considerations that should be involved in making choices among all of your keyword options. And chances are, you’ll have a lot of options.

Synonyms

A synonym is a word that has the exact same meaning as some other word. If you want to find synonyms galore, just open a thesaurus (or visit an online thesaurus). Look up the word buy and you’ll find out that one of its synonyms is purchase. This raises the question: Should you optimize your site with the word buy or with the word purchase? You’ll find that the synonym dilemma arises for every single SEO project. The ongoing challenge in the keyword selection process often involves deciding between synonyms and synonymous phrases.

Search Volume

Search volume refers to the number of searches a term receives in a given time period. For example, the word buy was searched about 68 million times on Google in January. Purchase only received about 6.1 million searches. Still, that’s a lot. A knee-jerk reaction might be to decide that you’ll use the word buy in your SEO because it gets more searches. But there are many cases in which it’s much better to target a keyword with a lower search volume (although you don’t want to go too low!).

Competition

If buy gets more searches than purchase, then more people probably use the word buy. Therefore, it will probably have greater competition, which means you have to work harder (publish more content, obtain more links) to see results. That’s something to think about. Maybe you could optimize for purchase and get a big chunk of the 6.1 million searchers within a few months whereas you could spend a year optimizing for buy and never see a single visitor as a result of your efforts. Don’t worry about which keywords get the most searches. Worry about which keywords will draw your customers and which ones will realistically lead to success.

Customers

The best way to start narrowing down your list of synonyms is to determine which words your customers use when referring to your products. For example, many musicians refer to their recorded music as “records.” They’ll say something like “We made the record for our fans.” But fans don’t search for records. They don’t buy or purchase records. So records are not what music lovers are looking for. The fans — the customers — the searchers — are looking for music. They want to buy or purchase music. Or songs.

Existing Keyword Traffic

Let’s say you sell music on your website. Should you optimize for purchase music or buy music? If you find that you’re already drawing a few visitors every month for the term purchase music but you’ve never drawn a single visitor for the term buy music, then you might be better off working on the former term. Whenever possible, leverage keywords that are already drawing traffic! For example, if purchase music brought in five visitors and you find your site ranked on page 35 of the search engine results pages, you should optimize and try to move up a few pages. Then, you should keep optimizing and try to move up a lot more pages.

Writer-Friendly

Some potential keywords and phrases don’t lend themselves to written content. This includes odd phrases that people will enter in search engines but that they wouldn’t normally say or write while communicating with other people. It also includes keywords that are misspelled (many searchers misspell their search terms). Keep in mind that when you finish your research and finalize your keyword selections, they will have to be implemented on your website, which means they will be written into the text. If you want the language on your site to be readable and correct, then you want to choose writer-friendly keywords.

Narrow the Search

Let’s face it, there’s a whole lot of music out there. You can get more specific about which music you’re selling. If you’re a full-service music store, you’d do well to choose a bunch of keywords with each one targeting a different genre or artist. You could optimize for purchase rock music or purchase pop music. Sometimes you’ll see better results optimizing for a larger pool of keywords that are highly specific and that have less competition.

Long-Tail Keywords

How specific can you get? I already mentioned artists and genres. What about format? Do you sell music downloads? Maybe instead of purchase rock music you should optimize for download rock music. As you add more words to your keyword phrase, it becomes a long-tail keyword, which is simply a keyword that consist of several words. These can be effective when used thoughtfully.

SEO is About Asking the Right Questions

When you start compiling a list of possible keywords, your head might spin. It’s truly mind-boggling how many words and phrases can be used to search for one product or service. As you go through your list of keyword possibilities, avoid making arbitrary or meaningless selections as much as possible. Try to cite a reason for every decision you make. If you eliminate a keyword from the list, make sure you have a reason why.

As you go through the process, asking the right questions is essential to informing your decisions. Think about each keyword and determine how many ways that term might be used by people searching for it. Are they more likely to be looking for your offering or is it possible the search term is even more applicable to something you don’t sell at all:

• If I optimize for download rock music, I might draw searchers who are looking for free downloads.
• If I optimize for purchase rock music, I might get visitors looking to buy sheet music or CDs.
• Should I optimize for buy rock songs online?

Sometimes you end up back at square one, and you have to go back and do more research. But it’s worth it. If you’re going to invest in a serious SEO campaign, you want to get the research and keyword selection right the first time.

Here’s a summary of considerations to keep in mind when making SEO keyword selections:

• Synonyms: Do you have a nice, long list of keyword possibilities to choose from?
• Search Volume: How many searches are conducted for each of the potential keywords?
• Competition: Which keywords are highly competitive in the SEO field?
• Customers: Which keywords do your customers use when looking for your products and services?
• Existing Keyword Traffic: Are you already seeing low volumes of traffic for some of these keywords?
• Writer Friendly: Lean toward keywords that are correctly spelled and fit naturally into written communications.
• Narrow the Search: To attract customers looking for exactly what you offer, narrow your language. Be specific.
• Long-tail Keywords: Be more specific. Use a larger number of keywords that have lower search volumes and less competition.
• Finally: Ask the right questions. Make sure you have a reason for each elimination or selection from your list.

SEO is a tedious process, especially the research and keyword selection phases. But once you get past the nitty-gritty grind of poring over lists of words, phrases, and statistics, you get to move to the next step: keyword implementation. And that’s when SEO gets fun.

Scribizzy offers a full suite of SEO services and can help you through any phase of your SEO campaign. Get a quote online.

How Online Marketing Strategies Level the Playing Field for Small Businesses

When I was a kid, there was this little Mexican restaurant in town. It sat right next to a movie theater, and it was a hot spot. Those folks made a mean burrito! Kids always stopped in on the way home from school for nachos, and whenever we went shopping or to the movies, we’d grab a bite. It was cheap, tasty, and popular.

But apparently, it wasn’t popular enough. Because in 2003, when a big-box store wanted to move in and take over the space, both the restaurant and the movie theater (plus several other small businesses) got knocked out to make way for a chain store.

Rather than relocate and start over from scratch, the restaurant owners closed their doors and walked away after being in business for 30 years.

Missing Main Street

This is not an unusual story. Big businesses are constantly kicking the little guys off the map.

There was a time when every town and city in America was home to small businesses run by hard-working and self-sufficient people — people who possessed an entrepreneurial spirit. They ran restaurants much like the one I just told you about. They owned grocery stores, cafes, and bookstores. But in recent decades, big businesses have slowly been taking over, eliminating the mom-and-pop businesses that defined main-street America.

Nobody believed that a chain of coffee shops could drive community cafes out of business, but Starbuck’s proved it could be done. And because ambitious executives are hooked on exponential growth and thrive on eliminating or overtaking their competition, corporate growth has proven that no industry is safe from its reach.

After all, bigger businesses have the advantage. They have more money to spend on research and development, marketing, and personnel. They can even use that money to affect law, supporting politicians and bills that advance their agendas or opposing those that would give better leverage to the little guys.

Small Business Concerns

They say some industries are safe from corporate competition. I don’t believe it. If there’s a way to make money, the big businesses are going to want to get in on the action eventually.

If you’re a small business owner or if you’re thinking about starting your own business, these are real concerns.

Can you go up against bigger or more established businesses? Even if you can compete now, will a corporation move in on your turf a few years down the road? Should you just get a regular job and forget about it? Or can smart online marketing strategies save your business?

Small Business is Alive and Well

The truth is that small business is alive and well. It just looks different than it did ten or twenty years ago. True, it’s more and more difficult to find a grocery store owned by people rather than shareholders, but there is a whole world of entrepreneurs. And that world is the wild, wild web.

Remember that little Mexican restaurant I told you about, the one that went out of business in 2003? That restaurant recently got itself a Facebook page. Sounds odd, I  know. Why would you set up a Facebook page for a restaurant that has been out of operation for almost seven years?

Maybe the owners are thinking of reopening and are testing the market. Maybe they’re just waxing nostalgic. I have no idea, but what I do know is that they already have hundreds of followers, a pretty good indication that their little restaurant may be gone, but their customers have certainly not forgotten them.

21st Century Entrepreneurs

The entrepreneurial spirit will never die. Someone, somewhere will always find a way to outsmart the big guys and either beat them at their own game or build a brand new game.

In 1999, when big corporations already had their arms wrapped around shoe manufacturing, a little company named Zappos hit the scene. It was unheard of. Why would anyone go up against Nike or Manolo? But Zappos found that by skirting marketing and customer service models that big businesses favored and by operating on the web, they could in fact succeed and compete effectively. Less than ten years after it was founded, Zappos was sold to Amazon, reportedly for over a billion dollars.

Hoards of independent-minded people have figured out ways to make money using online marketing strategies. Some of them employ tactics that may be questionable (are they really selling anything?) but most online entrepreneurs just want to offer a decent product or service that brings value to their customers. They want to run a real business, and they want to succeed.

Many of these people make a living from home. Some of them work in their pajamas. Others are working from their couches or backyards. A few of them don’t even realize they’re running a business. They’re blogging for fun, and one day someone offers them some money for something, and next thing you know, they just turned a profit. That’s business, and this is still America.

Online Marketing Strategies

But it’s an online America, a globally connected America. And what’s missing on the game board are small businesses that are doing business the old-fashioned way (with a brick and mortar store, or an in-person service, or some really killer art to sell), while simultaneously harnessing the newfangled marketing advantages that the internet offers.

Let’s face it; some things just can’t be done online (home repairs, haircuts, dining, just to name a few). So, as big business moves in on these industries, traditional businesses need to use the web to compete more effectively.

If a little restaurant that closed its doors ten years ago can use the internet to reclaim hundreds of its former customers without even having a business anymore, then what can your business do with the web?

Scribizzy helps small businesses succeed online. Visit our web content services page to learn more about our copywriting, design, and marketing solutions.

Why Generic Website Copywriting is Bad for Business

A few months ago I launched a quest to find a new dentist, and it was not an easy task. My last dentist, while trying to poke around inside my mouth, informed his assistant that I was a hypersensitive patient (and sent her off to fetch the nitrous oxide). I’m sure that had something to do with the fact that I was maniacally clutching the armrest while burrowing my head into the dental chair. Oh yeah, and my mouth kept closing all by itself every time he lunged at me with a sharp instrument.

A few dental procedures gone wrong had made me wary, if not downright fearful, of dentists. So I need a professional who is compassionate toward patients with dental phobias and anxieties. I’m looking for a dentist with an extra-special skill set.

Since I’m one of those technology-savvy generation Xers and because I am also an internet professional, I launched my search online. Google gave me plenty of options, and I got busy perusing the many dentists within a fifteen-mile radius. Within minutes I had about a dozen potential dentistry websites opened, and I got busy reading through them to see which one would tell me what I wanted to hear: We are sympathetic to your fear of dentists. We won’t hurt you.

I happened across one such dentist early in my search. The text on his site was friendly and comforting. There was even a photo of him. He looked like a nice guy and not at all like the demented dentist from Little Shop of Horrors. But I wanted a list of dentists to choose from. So I kept his site open and continued my search.

A short time later I found another one that looked pretty good. As I started reading through this other guy’s site, I got this weird feeling. Haven’t I read something like this before? Haven’t I just recently (in the past few minutes) read these exact same words in this exact same order?

Two dentists. Same city. Same exact copy. Bad for business.

Good Marketing vs. Bad Marketing

I realize that small businesses have budget guidelines they must follow and sometimes they have to take shortcuts. But using generic copy on a website is never a good idea.

First of all, it was a little creepy. I mean, why would two different dentists have the same exact message? I’m not talking about similarities where one dentist says “Scared of dentists? We understand.” and another says “We understand that you’re scared of dentists.” I’m talking about the exact same copy, down to the periods, commas, and conjunctions.

At one point I had both of these sites open and was clicking back and forth between them, trying to sort it all out. My first concern was that these two dentists had been duped by the same copywriter. I quickly deduced that they had indeed used the same copywriter, but it wasn’t an actual copywriter; it was a copywriting service. Except the copywriting wasn’t a service; it was a product.

The clues let me to an outfit that was selling generic website copy to professionals. Even worse, the professionals were buying it.

Let’s Get Personal

In some situations, discovering duplicate copywriting on two different websites might not rattle me one bit. I probably wouldn’t have thought much of it if I had been searching for a mechanic or a home inspector, professionals who offer relatively generic services. But I am searching for a dentist. I’m going to let this person medicate me, drill holes in my teeth, and then fill them up with strange substances. He might even pull a tooth, and he’s certainly going to do whatever it is that dentists do to give you a sparkling smile. And if the same text on his site is on several other sites, well, then I know the words do not convey his unique message and don’t represent him specifically. It’s just out-of-the-box text. And for all I know, he might not mean a single word of it.

Now, maybe the cost of losing one perspective customer was worth the savings that these two dentists enjoyed by buying canned copy rather than hiring a copywriter. But I doubt I’m the only individual who noticed the duplicate copy and I also doubt that I’m the only person who was completely turned off by it.

I realize that because I’m professional website copywriter, I have a special way of looking at this situation. And because I don’t sell generic text, one would expect me find such practices… well, distasteful. But I’m also a customer, a client, and a patient. Especially as a patient with some measure of dental phobia, I am anything but comforted by this plastic messaging.

When is Generic Acceptable?

Businesses are always trying to find a way to make a buck. I guess someone, somewhere thought it would be a good idea to write some web content for professionals and then resell that same content over and over. The idea is probably profitable for the person who thought up that scheme. It probably also seemed like a good idea to all of those professionals to whom they sold generic copy.

Some products and services can definitely get away with being generic. Website templates and stock photos are a good example of marketing materials that could be considered generic but are often employed, even by big businesses with large budgets.

But website copywriting just can’t get away with being generic. There’s a difference between a generic photo used for business and generic words used to speak to your customers. My own reaction was something like, “You don’t care enough about your patients (or your work) to send a more personalized message, and now you expect me to let you inside my mouth with pointy tools?”

Entrepreneurs and professionals need to be cognizant that marketing copy is a direct form of communication. While imagery and design can be powerful, language allows you to speak to your customers clearly and personally. There’s nothing clear or personal about canned text.

Last Words: Generic Website Copywriting and the SEO Effect

There’s one more consideration that I want to quickly address and will discuss at greater length in a future article: SEO (search engine optimization) and duplicate content. Because not only did these two dentists engage in online marketing tactics that have a distinct capacity to discourage (rather than encourage) new patients, this generic copywriting strategy could also have a detrimental effect on their search engine traffic.

Most SEO specialists agree that duplicate content across different websites is frowned upon by search engines. In other words, if a search engine sees that two sites are using the exact same copy, they both lose points and fall back on the search engine results page. This means that in addition to scaring off perspective clients, the copy that these two dentists were using could also be hindering the amount of traffic they attract to their websites. That means less visitors and less customers.

Like I said, generic website copywriting is just bad for business.

I’m sure that the two dentists have successfully brought in new patients from their websites. But they’ll never know how many potential patients they have lost.

Custom, Personalized Website Copywriting

Scribizzy provides website copywriting services to entrepreneurs and professionals who want to establish an effective online presence. Our copy is organic. It contains no preservatives and is hand-crafted, not canned. Get a quote online.

Small Business Website Design Tips: 9 Things to Avoid

When you’re shopping around for a small business website design, do you know what to look for and what to avoid? Do you know which design elements will make your site more appealing and which elements will turn visitors away?

If you’ve spent much time surfing around the web, then you’ve probably noticed that some websites have design elements that are distracting, annoying, or just plain ugly. We’ve all bumped into a few websites that make us want to scream. Luckily, escape is just a click away.

But if you’re a small business owner, you definitely don’t want visitors clicking away from your website, especially if they’re seeking escape because the design is unappealing or irritating.

10 Design Elements to Avoid

Here’s a list of design elements that people frequently complain about. Most of these recommendations have been on web designers’ things-to-avoid lists for years, but these frustrating features just keep showing up all over the internet.

1. Automatic-loading Music: This is number one on the list for good reason. Nothing startles a website visitor more than loud audio suddenly protruding from the speakers. Maybe the visitor is already listening to background music. Maybe they’re trying to focus on your content (and if your content is not centered around music, the sound is just a distraction). Maybe there’s a baby sleeping nearby. Be considerate and make audio optional.
2. Flashing, Blinking, or Scrolling Text: If it’s subtle, you might be able to get away with it. But like audio, moving text is nothing more than a distraction. Sure, you might be using it to get the visitor’s attention, but once you do and they start seriously perusing your site, it’s just going to become an annoyance.
3. Animations: Some animations work well with a design. If you’re an illustrator or an animated cartoonist, go for it. But if you’ve got a website that’s centered around some product or service that doesn’t include art or animation, then keep your content static.
4. Pop-up Windows: No. Just no. I don’t care if your windows pop up in front, in back, or right on the page. Don’t do it. Some websites are still using pop-ups or have returned to pop-ups. They will never be sustainable because they’ll ultimately annoy people.
5. Image Backgrounds: This one almost didn’t make the list because there are a lot of image backgrounds that work well, especially textures. So this is not so much a design element you need to avoid as one that you need to use judiciously. As long as the images are small and fast-loading, you should be okay. But if a solid color will work just as well, then get rid of your image backgrounds. And do note that most major (and hugely successful) websites don’t use them (Google, Amazon, etc.).
6. Frames: These days, with CSS and other design technologies so readily available, frames are just an unnecessary and outdated technique for organizing the content on a site. The problem with frames is that they are not compatible with all browsers and may render differently on different computers. So opt for a content management system (like WordPress) instead.
7. Excessively Wide or Long Pages: This should go without saying, but I still run into these types of websites on occasion. I always wonder if the designer is using an enormous monitor and has forgotten that most people use 12 to 15 inch screens. And try to remember that visitors don’t like to scroll endlessly down (or across) the page. Except on archived sections of your site, keep scrolling to the length of two or three pages.
8. Indistinguishable Links: Have you ever hovered your mouse over a web page and it caused a window to open or carried you off to some other page? That’s just plain weird. Links are meant to be clicked so make sure they’re clickable and make sure that visitors can distinguish a link from regular text.
9. Opening a Link in a New Window: There are some instances in which I don’t mind links opening in a new window, but usually I prefer to make the decision myself. All I have to do is command-click (Windows users can right-click and choose “open link in new window”). When web designers use this functionality, website visitors end up with dozens of open windows, and there’s a good chance the window with your site on it will get lost in the fray. Let people use the back button. That’s what it’s there for.

Exceptions to These Website Design Tips

These design elements should be avoided, but not always. Whenever you’re reading a list of tips, it’s important to remember that there are usually plenty of exceptions. In the list above, I’ve pointed out some obvious exceptions, but you should always remember to use your best judgment and keep in mind that sometimes breaking the rules or defying convention is a good thing. If you’re not sure about whether a particular website design idea would have a negative impact on your site, ask your website designer or consult with a web content specialist. Also, ask friends, family, customers, and professionals in your network. Nothing beats user feedback!

SEO Starts with Keyword Research

Whenever I’m working on a website copywriting project, I ask my client to fill out a questionnaire that helps me understand their business. This enables me to write copy that truly represents the client’s company, mission, and goals.

One of the items on the questionnaire used to be “Please list any keywords related to your website or business.”

I quickly found out that very few small business owners understood what I meant by “keywords.”  Sometimes, they would jot down something like “use your best judgment.” Usually, they’d list a few keywords, but it was clear that they weren’t researched keywords for SEO. They were simply words and phrases that represented the products and services that the client offered, and they had been selected at random.

Since most small business owners don’t specialize in web content and design, how could they be expected to know that when a web content specialist inquires about keywords, she means keywords that have been researched for SEO purposes?

Entrepreneurs understand business. They are concerned with their industry, profit margins, customers, sales, and ROIs. They know that establishing an online presence is essential to business, but they do not usually realize the complexities involved in developing an effective web presence. For many small businesses, getting online merely involves building a website. So it’s up to web content specialists to educate small business owners. That doesn’t mean selling them products or services they don’t need (and many small businesses do not need keywords or SEO), but it does mean helping them be more informed about their options.

It wasn’t long before I changed my questionnaire to read “Have you conducted any SEO keyword research?” Rewording the question had some interesting results. Some clients simply put “no.” Others became curious: What do you mean by keyword research?

Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing is an online marketing strategy that grows traffic to a website by increasing its visibility on search engines. This is primarily done through search engine optimization (SEO).

This is easier said than done. Search engine marketing is extremely competitive. Most small business owners think that by simply launching a website, they’ll automatically start getting traffic through search engines. But these days, to get traffic through search engines, you have to carefully optimize your website. That means researching and choosing keywords, implementing those keywords, establishing incoming links, and monitoring keyword and traffic performance.

Search engine marketing isn’t for everyone. If you’re on a tight budget in a field with highly congested keywords, you would be better off with an alternative online marketing strategy. There are lots of ways to draw traffic, and before you start an SEO campaign, you should do your research and make sure it’s a good match for your business.

Keyword Research

You can’t just pluck keywords out of nowhere. Well you can, but your results will be less than ideal. Keyword research can be a tedious process. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of possible keywords for just about any search term you can think of. When you conduct keyword research in preparation of optimizing your site, your goal is to find the keywords that will draw the most traffic. You also want the traffic to be targeted to your business offerings.

Let’s say you run a small, independent bookstore. You might think that a good keyword to pursue would be “books.” But that would be wrong. To gain traffic through a keyword like that would cost tens of thousands of dollars in research, content development, and other SEO efforts. You’d be much better off finding narrower and more localized search terms. Another option would be to forgo search engine marketing altogether and use another strategy to increase traffic to your site.

To discern which search terms would most benefit your website efficiently and effectively, you conduct (or hire someone to conduct) keyword research. This is a process in which you start with some general and obvious search terms and use various online SEO tools to expand the list of terms, so that there are plenty of choices. Then, you review each of the terms to determine how competitive each one will be, how much content you’d have to add to your site to compete effectively, and decide which keywords your target customers are most likely to enter into a search engine. For example, people searching for the term “books” are not necessarily looking for an independent bookstore (here’s a hint — “bookstore” is a more targeted keyword than “books”) and even if they are looking for such a store, they may be in a different geographic location.

Here are some of the questions you want to keep in mind when conducting keyword research:

• What are the primary products or services that the website offers?
• What alternative or synonymous keywords can be used?
• How much search volume do these keywords generate each month?
• Which keywords are potential customers likely to use in searching for these products or services?
• What does the competition for these keywords look like?

It’s important to note that when we talk about keyword competition, it’s not necessarily the same businesses with which we’re competing. In other words, there will be other sites that are using the same keywords as you, but their product or service offerings may not be directly competing with yours. You’re competing with them to get search engine traffic via keywords rather than competing with them in business.

SEO

For many small businesses, a little SEO can really boost traffic. The decision of whether or not to pursue SEO is one that must be made by each individual business, and the decision will likely rest on how competitive keywords are within your industry, the amount of resources you can dedicate to optimization, and the findings that come from keyword research. One thing, however, is basic: SEO starts with keyword research, and keywords should never be chosen on a whim. A little research can go a long way in helping you make smart decisions about whether search engine marketing and SEO is the right online marketing strategy for your business.

Scribizzy offers a full suite of SEO services. To learn more visit our SEO Services page, or if you’re ready to launch an SEO project, start now by getting a quote online.

Planning Your Web Content Development

We’ve already talked about how to lay the groundwork for your web content development by brainstorming. You jotted down all your ideas, did some research, and expanded on those ideas. You looked at the competition and learned more about what your industry is doing in the online marketplace. You took notes and made lists. You asked questions and came up with answers. You went in empty handed and came out with a better understanding of what your online presence should look like.

Once you’ve done your brainstorming, you should have plenty of possibilities for your web content development plan. Maybe you’ve got it scrawled all over a bunch of pieces of scratch paper. Perhaps you used an orderly mind mapping technique. Or PowerPoint.

Take a look at your notes. Those are the seeds that you’ve gathered. Now you need to plant those seeds and make them grow, you have to water and fertilize them, and make sure those seedlings get plenty of sunshine. To do this, you’re going to need a plan. A web content development plan.

The Benefits of Having a Plan

I’m a big fan of planning. If you spend a little time on a plan right now, you can save loads of time later. A good plan will also help you avoid mistakes and bumps in the road because as you build your plan, you’ll naturally contemplate various possibilities and scenarios. You’ll be able to work contingencies into the plan, as well as emergency exits and the notorious plan B.

Running a business is not easy. It takes up a lot of time and energy, especially when you’re just starting out or going through a renovation or expansion. If you don’t write a plan, then you might get caught up in your day-to-day business activities and forget all about the evolution of your online presence. This is especially true if you have a long-term business plan (please tell me you do).

A plan also provides you with a blueprint. There are infinite possibilities on the web and it’s easy to get lost among all the opportunities. If you have a plan, you’ll be able to navigate through your many choices with ease and confidence.

Tips for Web Content Development Planning

Prioritize

I believe that all good plans start with a sense of priority. Let’s say your first web project will be to redesign your website. You decide to scrap all three or four pages of written content because they are outdated, and you want to get rid of the layout, which is just dated. But you’d like to keep your logo. You decide you need about twenty pages of content, including one page for each separate product that you sell. You also want to get set up on popular social media sites. You’d like to use video as well. You’ve got a big list of big ideas and you can’t wait to see them come alive.

But first you need to step back and decide what matters most. This is how you organize and put things in order: Your website is more important that your social media. Your email marketing campaign is more important than your hopes for creating a viral video. Later, we’ll talk about contingencies, timelines, and budgets. But for now, keep in mind that no matter how hard we work or how carefully we plan, things change. You might get a golden opportunity in a few months and have to postpone some of your content development plans for lack of time (being busy is good, right!). You might have a difficult quarter and have to tighten the budget. You just never know what the future holds. So dream big, but then put your dreams in order.

When you’re dealing with a website, for example, you should definitely give your core pages greater priority. These include your home page, about page, products or services page, and contact page. Four simple pages that every business website should have. Viral videos are all the rage but millions of people post videos every day and there’s no guarantee that yours is going to be a phenomenon. A more reliable marketing strategy should come first. Put things in their proper order. Prioritize, and everything else will follow.

Flexibility

Nothing stresses me out more than a plan that has no flexibility built in. Let’s say you’re a middle manager. You have to get a project to your boss by Friday. Please don’t tell your subordinates that it’s due Friday. You tell them it’s due Thursday. Or better, Wednesday. That gives you some leeway in case anything goes wrong. And things do go wrong. Next year, your budget might be twice what it is this year (or it could be half). Even the very best plans, the ones that are perfectly executed, are subject to reality. And in reality, stuff happens. Unpredictable stuff. So create your plan, but don’t create it out of iron or chisel it into stone. And remember, technology is changing all the time. Be prepared because this year’s blog is next year’s Twitter, and who knows what we’ll be dealing with the year after that?

Timeline

A website doesn’t happen overnight. If you’re starting a brand new business, you’ll want the completion of your website to coincide with the launch of the business itself. If you’re doing a redesign and want to time it for a product or service launch, you’ll need to coordinate your timelines.

The biggest mistake I see small business owners making in the online world is not having any plan at all. The second biggest mistake is no timeline. They’re going to start publishing a newsletter, but when? They’ll update their online profiles, eventually. They’d like to add fresh content to the site. Someday.

Lots of people don’t like committing to a timeline. Well, that’s what flexibility is for. At least with a timeline, you can make some sound guesses about the future of your web content. At the very least, you can create a series of events and ascertain how long each will take and how much time you need between each one. For example, you can allot six weeks to creating a website. You might need two weeks to create an email marketing campaign. You don’t have to glue these projects to the calendar, but you can use a timeline to better understand how long everything will take. This will enable you align various facets of your entire business.

Budgeting

Smart businesspeople know how to budget. But we just talked about flexibility and the unforeseeable future. The fact that you cannot know for sure what the future holds also means you can’t know for sure what your budget will be in later months or years. The economy is unpredictable, the market is unpredictable, and consumers are getting more fickle by the day. Hopefully, you’ll have a bigger budget than you hoped for or at least be on track. But we all know how many businesses fail every year (if you don’t know, the answer is this: the vast majority!). And when disappointment comes knocking, the first thing that shrinks is your budget. Some businesses can avoid failure by having a flexible budget, or rather, by having a plan that’s flexible enough to adapt to changing budgets.

You should, however, budget for online marketing on a long-term basis. A lot of small businesses throw a few hundred dollars at a website and then forget about it. Three years later, they remember they have a website and they pay a few hundred more dollars to update it. This is not a healthy cycle. It could be costing the business customers, who are apt to think that if the website is half-baked, the company probably is too. Make sure you have a regular, ongoing budget for online marketing and website maintenance.

Contingencies

A contingency is something that might happen, but there’s no guarantee. It’s a what-if. As a writer, I’m thrilled by what-ifs. Questioning possibility is what drives fiction. It’s also what keeps me up at night. What if the video really does go viral? What if nobody responds to my Facebook page? What if the site become an overnight internet sensation; do I have the resources to handle the new business that the site could attract?

When you’re writing a plan, you have to include contingencies. You probably don’t need a lot of them, but contingencies work alongside flexibility. In your plan, you believe that if you build a site and launch a proper marketing campaign, you should be able to increase your current sales by 20%. So you build the site, but it’s drawing more customers than you anticipated. Will you be ready to handle the new business that’s coming in?

If things happen the way you plan, then your entire business will start to see benefits from your web content development efforts. And if things don’t go as planned, well, you should have a backup plan.

Plan B

If your plan doesn’t pan out the way you intended, what are you going to do? Nobody likes thinking about worst-case scenarios, but this is business and the reality is that success is not guaranteed. However, you can minimize your losses by having a solid backup plan in place. And you never know, a good backup plan might lead to another (and more successful opportunity). Let’s say you’re just out of college and want to be a freelance graphic designer. You set up a website and start hustling online. You do okay, but not great. Your designs are awesome, but sales isn’t your thing. A year in, you’ve invested a lot of time and money building your little business. But now, you’re not sure you’re in it for the long haul.

Secondary plans abound in situations like this. You can rework your website, turn it into an online resume and portfolio, and then use it find a regular job (you can always continue freelancing on the side). You can find a partner who specializes in sales and work together to grow the business. You can sell your site (aged websites have value, and aged sites with decent content have even more value — high traffic sites are worth a lot) and get out of the business altogether.

Yes, it sucks when things don’t work out the way we’d hoped. But it’s not the end of the world. If you have a plan B, you’ll be prepared and you’ll get through any major disappointments just fine.

Get Ready to Execute

Planning takes time and effort, but it can prevent unnecessary hassles later. Take some time to brainstorm your vision for your online presence. Then, turn that raw material into an organized plan, one that’s prioritized and that has a clear budget, a tentative timeline, and a lot of flexibility. Include contingencies and a backup plan. Once you get through that planning phase, you’ll be ready to execute. It’s time to start building!

Scribizzy Web Content Services

Need help putting together a plan for the future of your online presence? Scribizzy provides web content development services. You can even get a quote online.