As far as you’re concerned, your new website is a well-oiled marketing machine, ready to compel visitors to buy your products or engage your services. So you leave things alone.

And nothing happens.

There’s no flood of visitors. There are no compliments on the super-cool design you paid a lot of money to develop. And people are still just calling you instead of using your online forms.

Unfortunately this is a familiar scenario for many businesses.

Putting a new website up is like listing your business in the yellowpages. It won’t matter how big your typeface is if you’re under the wrong category–nobody is going to be able to find you. What you need to do is put your business in context.

It’s about Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Effective search engine marketing seeks to establish a relationship between your business and the keywords that describe it. In doing so, you give search engines the proper roadmap for indexing content on your site.

You also need to pay attention to the traffic you’re driving to the site. For example, you probably wouldn’t advertise men’s golf polos in a fashion magazine targeted at women. Similarly, giving little to no thought about what types of searches your audience is performing may result in the wrong people coming to the wrong pages of your site.

Looking Within

As a first step, good search engine marketers will examine your website to ensure your content is consistent with the best practices for page relevance in search. In other words, is your page really saying what you think it’s saying to search engines? There are 5 primary factors to consider when doing this:

1. Content
2. Keywords
3. Page titles
4. Meta descriptions
5. Keyword density

For more information about each of these factors and how to implement them effectively, check out this post about these important SEO factors by our rockstar copywriter, Jack Armstrong.

Building Silos of Information

The next big step is to make sure your external references (aka links and citations) are enticing enough to draw visitors to your website. External references like Google Places, Bing Local and Yahoo Local act as silos of information for your business. In these areas, you can at least list your business name, physical address, and phone number, but often you can also upload a logo, pictures, store hours, and even encourage customers to give you a review.

Each of these references has different values to the relevance and ranking of your site, but identifying the important ones and claiming them as soon as your new website is online will be important to its success. Google+ Local is probably one of the most important, and we’ve even written some general guidelines on how to optimize your Google Places listing.

Once you have these silos established, don’t forget to encourage your customers to write you a review whenever possible (on Google or Yelp, for example). Positive reviews help build your credibility in the eyes of search engines and customers. And if you ever get a bad review, be sure to respond to it.

Search engine marketing is not an exact science and the formula will be different for each business. But following these well-established guidelines will help to contextualize your business in an increasingly digital world.

If you’re not sure of what your next steps should be, contact Avelient. Our search engine experts can help establish a plan for your website and put it in the proper place for increased visibility in search for customers and prospects.

The post Your New Website is Up, Now What? appeared first on Avelient.

We’ve been with Zendesk since they were just a start-up. While they do provide a great service, we have found that, with their focus on enterprise customers, the application no longer fits with our support model — among other technical reasons. We wish them well and recommend that if you need a medium- to enterprise-sized support system to give them a shot.

Our support team was drawn to HelpScout because it integrates better with our natural way of communicating with customers. Instead of forcing the support staff to communicate in a specific way, HelpScout fits into our way of working.

Some of the benefits of HelpScout include:

• We know who you are – There is smart integration with Highrise, so that when a customer sends in a support request we have their latest contact information — and if we need to update the client, it’s a quick click or two to update their information in Highrise.
• It feels more personal – As previously mentioned, HelpScout integrates seamlessly with our team’s existing email habits, making it easier for us to provide a more personal level of service.

Over the last two weeks, we have been running HelpScout in tandem with Zendesk to make sure we’ve got all the bugs worked out and are now ready to switch to HelpScout full-time.

What does this switch mean for you?

You shouldn’t have to do anything differently to get help from the support team. As before, you simply email support@avelient.com or call 888-333-3731 and select the support option, and our team will provide you with the support you need.

If you saved an email address for the old support system, be sure to send any new support requests to support@avelient.com and update any reference to an old email address. In an effort to make your life easier, you can download our support department’s vCard and add it to your address book.

We’re working hard to improve our customer service and will continue to make changes like this to ensure that we are always there to help each of our customers.

The post Providing Better Support with HelpScout appeared first on Avelient.

Representing your business on the web with an attractive, modern web design and useful content is a great first step in your online marketing plan. But a new website will not work as an effective marketing tool for drumming up new business if nobody can find it. This is why search engine optimization (SEO) is so important.

By optimizing your content for keywords that relate to the services or products your business provides, and the geographic areas it serves, you can help prospective customers find your business through search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing.

Unfortunately, some businesses, despite their best efforts, have difficulty improving their search engine visibility in the first several months after launching their website. Why? It depends on the website, but the main reason could simply be that the site is new.

When I say “new,” I’m actually talking about two different kinds of new websites: a website with a new design and a website on a new domain. Each type requires a different approach and timeline to remedy the problem.

General Diagnosis for a Website with a New Design

If you’ve recently launched a new website for your business on the same domain as your old site, your business may not be ranking well because your content has changed.

As long as your content is relevant and useful for prospective customers, you should be able to recover your previous search visibility and even improve it by focusing on optimizing individual pages on your website for search. Check out our previous blog post, “The 5 Most Important On-page SEO Factors,” to learn more.

General Diagnosis for a Website on a New Domain

If you’ve recently launched a website on a brand new domain, and it’s not ranking well in search, you may have a long battle ahead of you. Google generally does not rank websites on newly created domains very well because, as far as their crawl bots are concerned, your website is not old enough or popular enough to hang out with the cool kids yet.

All other factors equal, Google will usually favor websites with older domains and with lots of links from other websites, especially sites that are related to your industry. Obviously, there’s nothing you can do to affect the age of your domain, but you can start improving the popularity of your website right now by doing three things:

1. If you had an old website for your business on a different domain, make sure you setup a 301 redirect pointing from your old domain to your new domain. This is the best way to ensure that potential customers and search engines are directed to the new domain.
2. Start building links to your new domain. Links are like popularity votes for your website. There are too many link building techniques to cover in this post. For now, focus on getting links from local organizations you sponsor, business membership organizations, your city’s chamber of commerce, etc.
3. Optimize the page titles, meta descriptions, headlines, and content on each page for your target keywords. Even if you’re just having difficulty showing up for your business name on Google right now, you’ll want to optimize for search early on to speed up the entire process.

By following these general steps, your website should start seeing an improvement in its search engine placement in time. If you want help increasing your new website’s search engine visibility even faster, contact our Search Engine Marketing team by filling out our Start a Project form below. 

The post Why Your New Website Might Not Be Ranking Well appeared first on Avelient.

Sure, you can grab a WordPress template, throw some content together over the weekend, and maybe, if your product or service is in high-demand, you might see some results — but that’s not what the majority of businesses experience. Most who take this approach revisit their website in a few months and wonder why it’s not making them money.

Many people assume that content and design are completely separate and should be treated as such. This is simply not true. Great content tells the story of who you are and why a visitor should care. Great design frames that content in a way that makes it attractive and easy to digest. These two components must work together to compel a visitor to act — whether it’s buying your product or engaging your company for services.

Get Better Results By…

• Waiting until you’re in love — Don’t just jump into bed with the first design mockup you’re teased with. If you’re exploring design ideas and haven’t even bothered to talk about content, you might be making a huge mistake that you’ll regret for a lot longer than the morning after. 
• Spending twice as much time on content — So many people rush through the content part, like clearing your plate before you get dessert. Whatever time you have allocated for producing your content, double it.
• Involving others — Very rarely does the entire message for a website come from one person. Involve others in creating the message, you’ll be amazed at the results when you throw another person into the mix.

Test, Measure, & Refine

If you produce a quality website, it will weather the test of time. With the proper tools, you can test for results and begin a process of refinement. Instead of throwing your website out each year and starting from scratch, you can now shape and refine the message of your website with actionable data. This will save you money in the short term, and make you money in the long run. 

The post Successful Websites Have a Message appeared first on Avelient.

I confess that I am a self-proclaimed member of the Grammar Police. I am not obnoxious about it in personal circles, and I overlook it often on social media sites where it seems to run rampant. However, if you want to get on my bad side, go ahead and try to send a mistake-riddled message to one of my customers.

Go on, I dare you.

It is not that I think people are stupid when they make grammar mistakes–far from it. Many people I know who make these mistakes are actually quite brilliant. To the recipient, however, the sender’s brilliance is marred by the “your” that should have been “you’re”, or by the made-up business jargon (synergize, anybody?), or the misuse…or overuse…of punctuation to get a point across!!!!!!!!!!

One key to a business’ success is its ability to communicate ideas and solutions effectively to its clients. If you don’t take the time and care to make sure your message is striking the right tone while also being easy to read, you instill little confidence in your ability to do anything else with the proper attention to detail.

I’m not saying that people can’t make mistakes or that I’m perfect, but I do insist on taking the time to read and understand a message before sending it (as in an email) or presenting it to the world (as in a website).

In this fast-paced world, it is still important to occasionally stop and breathe. It gives us a chance to collect our thoughts and not rely on our stream of consciousness to generate a literary opus to be passed on to the next customer. With a clear and concise message, we give people confidence in the service we provide and demonstrate a concern for the kind of impression we make in all situations.

It is not a recipe for success, but it’s certainly one of the more important ingredients.

Do you need help writing or editing the copy on your own website? Contact us, and we’ll have someone from our copywriting staff help you frame the right message for your business.

The post Why Language Matters appeared first on Avelient.

If you’ve spent any time researching search engine optimization (SEO) in the last several years, you probably have a good idea of how complex the process can be. There are literally hundreds of factors, on-page and off-page, that contribute to a successful SEO campaign.

But you shouldn’t let that scare you away from taking action. Search engine optimization is all about helping potential customers find your business online, and there’s no better way to start than by focusing your efforts on five key on-page SEO factors.

1. Content

By and far, the most important on-page factor for SEO is content. And not just any content—great content. Search engines are designed to work for the user, not the business. For a webpage to be indexable for a given keyword, it must have content that fulfills the user’s search query.

Do it: Write content that is interesting and helpful for the user and make sure it is at least 50 words in length. More is definitely better, but most experts agree that 50 words is the absolute minimum.

2. Keywords

Keywords have been the lifeblood of the SEO industry since the very beginning and are still one of the most critical factors for SEO success today, which is why any attempt to optimize a webpage for search should begin with keyword research.

Do it: Brainstorm a list of keywords you think a potential customer might use to find your webpage and then run them through Google’s Keyword Tool. Select the keyword that makes the most sense for your page and has a decent number of monthly searches.

3. Page title

Once you’ve chosen your keyword, you’ll want to make sure you include it throughout your webpage, especially in the page title. The page title is not the header. It’s what you see in search results and at the top of your browser window (see below).

What a page title looks like in search

What a page title looks like on your website

Do it: Use your keyword in the page title and try to get it near the front (e.g. Chocolate Cake Recipes – Allrecipes.com). Also, shoot for about 70 characters in length. That’s the maximum number of characters that will display in search results.

4. Meta description

The meta description is what you see below your page title in search results. This is where you describe the content of the page for users. The goal is to get them to click on your listing. Search engines will often grab excerpts from your content and use them for the meta description if you don’t have one in place or if your description doesn’t seem relevant to the search.

Do it: You want to include your keyword in the meta description, if possible. It doesn’t help search rankings, but it does give you more control over what a search engine chooses to display. Shoot for about 155 characters.

5. Keyword density

Back in the early days of SEO, keyword density was all that mattered for SEO success. You could simply fill the page with your keyword of choice and top search rankings would follow. Obviously, search engine results suffered. Nowadays, broad keyword usage on a webpage is what matters most.

Do it: Try to use your keyword at least four times on the page, and don’t shy away from using variations as well to maintain natural-sounding content.

Follow these five critical on-page SEO factors, and you’ll be on your way to building more targeted traffic on your website. If you need further assistance or would like to pursue SEO more aggressively, fill out our Start a Project form.

The post The 5 Most Important On-page SEO Factors appeared first on Avelient.

Evernote is a fantastic tool and service that Avelient uses to keep our business and personal lives organized and accessible from just about anywhere, at any time.

Evernote has been around for quite some time. Even before figuring out how to use it for business, people have been using Evernote to organize their lives — from storing ideas, photos and contacts to drafting blog posts. In the most basic way, Evernote is just a database that organizes everything into an attractive, easy-to-use application for everyday people.

In late 2012, Avelient made the switch from Backpack to Evernote to organize and store business-related information because Backpack was no longer being developed. We didn’t want to store valuable information and invest time into a service that would eventually close down. We made the move to Evernote Business and haven’t looked back!

How We Use Evernote

• Meeting Notes – When we have group meetings, we use Evernote to store agenda items prior to the meeting to keep ourselves on task and to be efficient during the meeting — no one likes meetings.
• Planning – When we have a new product or service that we want to roll out, we use Evernote to brainstorm, plan and flush out the details for the program.
• Articles & Knowledge Base – We have turned Evernote into a knowledge base with guides and training materials that anyone can access easily, even after hundreds have been added.  The program allows us to use tags to organize our Notebooks for easy browsing and uses a powerful search to find what we need quickly.
• Storage – We store some universal HR documents and forms in Evernote so that our employees have access in an easy, searchable interface.

Notebooks keep you organized

Create a curated library of information for your team

Just The Facts

• Cost: $8/mo per user for a business account.
• Ownership: Your data is your own; they don’t snoop, and they don’t share / sell any of your information
• Deployment: Easy to deploy to a small business, and requires 5-10 minutes of training
• Apps: Windows, Mac, iOS, and Andriod and a full-featured web interface that you can access with any device that has a web-browser and is connected to the internet

Evernote has become the nerve center of our business for collecting and organizing important files and allowing our team to collaborate with ease. We recommend that you explore it for your business.

If you like productivity, GTD, and finding ways to make your business more efficient, you can always get in touch with me through the contact options here in the site, or by connecting with me on Twitter and LinkedIn. 

The post Get Organized with Evernote appeared first on Avelient.

While I could certainly spend a lot of time recounting the genesis of our company, I would prefer to start 2013 looking ahead and providing a better sense of what services we offer now.

I wanted to write about this not only for the benefit of our existing customers (who may not know about some of the new services we offer), but for people checking us out for the first time who want to get a sense of what we do best. In short, we focus in three main areas:

Web Design & Development

At the core of our business is our website design and development services. I am proud of the kind of work this group has produced over the years. Our designs are professional and sleek, and they incorporate the best practices of website development to deliver a company’s message quickly, efficiently and effectively.  You can see examples of our work here.

We’ll be focusing a lot this year on projects with responsive design, a technique for developing websites so that they readily work on mobile devices without requiring a separate mobile site.  While it takes more time to develop than a traditional web site, Google recommends responsive design as the preferred method for serving up mobile content, and it’s therefore something that at least needs to be part of any project discussion.

Additionally, we have become quite adept at deploying sites for networks of independently owned companies. Think of insurance agents, mortgage brokers, or financial planners. By defining a program for these organizations, we can keep development costs low but still deploy a beautiful, effective site for the business owner.

I look to the future with continued emphasis on improving this program and churning out well thought-out designs with really solid content. We will always have an eye on best web practices and deploying projects we can be proud of.

Search Engine Marketing

I’m excited to have seen this area develop over the past year and a half, and I think we have a really great team in place to help this area grow even more in the next year. We have several well-defined packages to fit a variety of budgets, each having a significant impact on the ability to connect the right kind of visitor to our clients’ websites.

A lot of our efforts focus on local search and the businesses that need it. Google has increased the visibility of local search results over the last several months (specifically with its much-publicized Panda update), and it’s critically important that any search engine consultants consider these results when developing a strategy for their customers.

Ultimately, though, content is king, and for this reason we’ve put more of an emphasis on our copywriting and copy editing services. There are many great writers out there, but few understand the importance of honing your writing so that it’s appropriate for the web.  Just read some of our copywriting posts here to get an understanding of what I mean.

Consulting

We began the company as consultants and continue to provide this service to several customers today. We have a couple of good people in this area with fantastic experience in validated systems, the software development lifecycle for Fortune 100 companies, and expertise in the Pharmaceutical arena. We apply what we learn as consultants to the operation of the rest of the company, which results in high-quality, careful project planning and execution.

I’m excited for 2013 and the new opportunities that it will bring, and I’m excited to see my team’s creativity flow into new projects that come our way. If you have a need that fits into one of the categories above, I would love to have the opportunity to show you what we’re all about.

The post The Avelient of 2013 appeared first on Avelient.

Learn how to get higher search engine rankings for your website, find out what’s new with Google Places, become a better blogger, and more.

Read about our upcoming educational Webinars below. If you find a Webinar you’d like to attend, click on the link to register. It’s free!

• Understanding Conversions with Google Analytics - Google Analytics is a very powerful tool. With its Ecommerce feature you are able to see where your sales come from and how well your website is performing. Find out what you need to know to track conversions on your site inside Google Analytics.
  Tue, Sep 18, 2012 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM PDT  Click Here to Register
• What’s New with Google Places, Now Google+ Local (That’s What’s New!) - Over the last 5 years, Google Places has grown and brought new features to local businesses. Now they are switching gears and moving over to Google+ for Business. What does this mean for your business? We’ll show you all the new features, what features have gone away and what you can be expecting in the future.
  Wed, Sep 26, 2012 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM PDT Click Here to Register
• 5 Marketing Items All Insurance Agencies Need to Do - To be successful in online marketing, your insurance agency needs a plan. We have a five step plan you can follow for success. Attend this Webinar to get all the details.
  Wed, Oct 10, 2012 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM PDT Click Here to Register
• Be a Better Blogger - Blogging can be fun and very rewarding. There are many great tools to help you write creative posts, bring in images and help with Search Engine Marketing. In this hour long Webinar, we’ll show you everything you need to know to be a better blogger.
  Wed, Oct 31, 2012 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM PDT Click Here to Register
• Getting Up to Speed with Google Analytics - Google Analytics is AWESOME! Here at Avelient, half our day is spent inside of this web based software collecting and analyzing valuable data about our clients’ website traffic. Attend this Webinar so you can learn what to review in Google Analytics.
  Wed, Nov 14, 2012 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM PST Click Here to Register
• 5 Pillars of Social Media - There are so many outlets for Social Media these days. Facebook is obviously #1. But what is number #2, #3 and so on? Attend this Webinar to see what is most important in Social Media today.
  Wed, Nov 21, 2012 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM PST Click Here to Register
• How to Get Better Search Engine Placement - Search Engine Optimization can be confusing. How do you get higher rankings for your website in the search engines? Where should you start? What techniques should you be using? Who should you work with? How much time is needed? Attend this Webinar to get all these questions answered.
  Wed, Dec 5, 2012 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM PDT Click Here to Register

We look forward to seeing you at one or all of our Webinars this fall. If you have any questions about any of our upcoming Webinars, feel free to contact us.

The post Join Us for the Fall 2012 Educational Webinars appeared first on Avelient.

As an example, let’s take a closer look at the often misunderstood semicolon.

Basically, semicolons are used to connect two or more independent clauses in a way that shows a closer relationship than a period. They serve a specific purpose in writing, but you may have noticed that they’re not used very often anymore, especially in writing that is meant for a wide audience like newspapers.

Most journalists avoid using semicolons because the average reader doesn’t completely understand their function. Writing for the Web is very similar in that it’s about appealing to a wide audience.

If you want to sell your product or service, your copy needs to make sense to the prospects who read it. So even if you know how semicolons work, you risk turning off a portion of your audience by using them.

Semicolons are almost never necessary. You can easily replace them with a dash or a period and lose none of the meaning. They have fallen by the wayside in most online writing, and it’s not your job to pick them up and dust them off—not on your Website anyway. They are best saved for creative fiction or articles in The New Yorker.

The job of Web copy—and all marketing copy, for that matter—is to sell your product or service. So anything that will keep you from achieving that goal should be removed.

The same goes for big words, long sentences and huge blocks of text. People don’t read copy like they read an article or a book. They’re not in it for the experience of reading complex, deeply meaningful prose. They’re in it to make a purchasing decision based on the information you provide and the emotions you evoke.

By keeping your copy simple and your message compelling, you’re chances of persuading a prospect to fill out your contact form, or request a quote, or pick up the phone and call are greatly improved.

So when you’re crafting copy for your Website or writing for your business blog, just remember to old sales adage—K.I.S.S. or, more specifically, “Keep It Simple, Stupid.”

The post Copywriting Tip: Don’t use semicolons appeared first on Avelient.