Here's an excerpt from our latest post:
"A mistake many companies make after a website redesign or when beginning online marketing efforts, is assuming they can blog themselves all the time. It’s often far more cost effective to hire a good writer or social media professional than it is to take the time out of your day to learn about what your audience wants, research topics, and develop compelling material."

What we’ve learned over the past year:

1) Better ways of identifying the knowledge needs of your target market
2) More effectively fulfilling content needs which distinguishes your company as a thought leader
3) Stronger methods of crafting your image and conveying your offering and to your target market

We started working with Survey On The Spot a few months ago, writing industry-targeted, optimized website copy for their newly-designed website and beginning work on their blog. Survey On The Spot has created a very easy to use app which helps restaurants and other service businesses gain real-time insights into customer satisfaction, by enabling customers to submit survey results using a smartphone while they're in the place of business. In addition to giving restaurants invaluable actionable insights, this helps improve customer engagement and build an email marketing list, as well as employee motivation to improve service. They've taken a relatively simple concept, and have applied it to fix a previously archaic industry which involved tedious, costly, and often inaccurate traditional paper surveys. The blog topics we are writing include how to get the most out of surveys, ways surveys can be used to improve service, employee motivation, as well as pieces about consumer psychology and survey-taking.

A lot of people ask us how we are able to write authoritatively across multiple industries. We're of course not experts in everything, and don't think we need to be. You don't need to be an engineer to write about engineering, or a real estate agent to write about real estate. It's a matter of understanding the value, customer, using the right language, and not using the wrong language. Here's how we write with conviction across multiple industries:

1. Understand the value the business is built upon. Go beyond the value proposition, even try to re-write the value proposition. Ask a lot of questions about why anybody would want what the business is selling, and why the business can deliver it better than the competition.
2. Gain a profile of their ideal customer and learn what that customer responds to. This goes beyond demographics, you need to understand the state of mind the potential customer is in when they need what the business is selling, and why they're there, and how to get through to them personally.
3. Seek out bad writing in the industry you're working in and note their mistakes. There are a lot of really bad writers out there, and most marketers tend to be among the worst at sounding truly authentic. Read a bunch of website copy, blog posts, and articles you don't tust which pertain to your industry of choice, and take note of what not to do.
4. Especially in the early stages, frequent reviewing by the business owner or marketing director is essential to make sure you're using the right language. This is the best way to use the right wording, especially when it comes to writing with a more technical focus.

M.A.K.E. Website Copy Writing

1. Market – determine your target market profile and what you offer to them, especially what makes you special and how you stand out among the competition, as well as which keywords they’re searching for online
2. Attitude – discuss and consult with you on how to best write for your audience and what language they respond to
3. Knowledge – share useful knowledge which can help your website visitors and build trust with them
4. Evaluate and Evolve – As time goes on monitor which pages receive a lot of traffic, and which pages aren’t working out as well, and make constant improvements to your website copy and keywords over time

T.R.U.E. Blog Writing

1. Trends and Topics – determine trends in what your target market is looking for online, and topics which will help your potential customers find what they’re looking for online
2. Relevancy – content needs to be relevant to your target market and include keywords which will help drive traffic to your website
3. Useful – Content should be more than informative, it needs to truly be useful to your readers to establish trust and thought leadership
4. Evaluate and Evolve – your blog topics will evolve in terms of topics and style as we determine over time what is getting the most response

R.I.S.E. Thought Leadership Development

1. Research – what are your potential customers looking for online when they’re in a position where they need what you have? We will determine where your target market hangs out online and the type of things they’re searching for or reading when they’re in a position where you can help them. We will research websites, blogs, and articles you should be commenting on.
2. Intelligent Commenting - We will comment when necessary on these blogs, as well as contribute material to them in the form of helpful trust-building content which links to your website. We want to build both real-life goodwill and SEO backlinks.
3. Space – We will gauge the online space you’re marketing yourself in online and seek out additional online marketing and promotional opportunities.
4. Evaluate and Evolve – At the end of each reporting period, we will evaluate the progress we’ve made and tweak our practices accordingly.

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• For example, there are just over 22,000 monthly global searches for the phrase: "SEO Copywriting", and there are 161,000 results with the phrase "SEO Copywriting" in the meta title. This means you'd have a hard time ranking for this phrase, and showing up on the first page would take a tremendous amount of effort and time.
• There are the same number of searches for the phrase: "Search Engine Optimization Copywriting", yet there are only 6,250 results with the phrase in the title. This means there may be an opportunity to capture more people searching for the same exact thing, with much less competition from other sites.

If there are many searches for a keyword, and even more results, then the competition may be high. If there are fewer results than the number of searches, then there may be an opportunity to optimize your page differently to fill the gap between. While using this tool isn't an exact science, it's helpful to understand how many other sites are focused on competing with your keywords enough write them in their meta information and simple changes you can make to your keywords to capture more searches.

The way to check this out is easy: enter a search term into google, and enter the word "allintitle:" before it (no quotes). For example: allintitle: SEO Copywriting will show you how many web pages have "SEO Copywriting" in the meta title. To check out how many people are searching monthly for your keywords, use the google keyword tool.

You need both to have a successful web presence. A nice website without good content is like a well-decorated restaurant with bad food. Conversely, while not the same for all of the world, people don't always enjoy fine dining while squatting under a half-baked attempt at a roof and four walls, either. A balance of the two is what you should be looking for.

Good content, and the news of good content, can drive traffic to your website and engage relevant visitors to win over their trust in your company. A well-designed website can both convert this traffic into leads as well as appeal to visitors aesthetically to gains trust as well. You want your website to be a well-decorated restaurant with awesome food.

In addition to revamping site content, writing blogs, and finding fresh keywords, a few of our clients are in need of serious website redesigns as well. Check out the portfolios of three of our favorite Boston web design firms:

Growth Spark (www.growthspark.com)

Growth spark specializes in wordpress websites for services firms who want to use their website to build online authority of their company and convert traffic into leads.

Fresh Tilled Soil (www.freshtilledsoil.com)

Fresh Tilled Soil specializes in designing web applications as well as wordpress websites for companies who are starting web-based businesses and services.

Oat Creative (www.oatcreative.com)

Oat creative is a design shop which focuses on highly-creative web and print design and balances artistic elements with smooth user interaction.

We've seen an exceptional amount of companies get caught up in trying to market their companies with blogs full of top ten lists and regurgitated expert advice. While these types of posts may drive traffic initially for a short, viral period of time, they often do not have lasting effects and don't always matter a whole lot to your website visitors.

We like to pick topics based on questions or circumstances your potential customer may be experiencing when they're also in need of your services. For example, one of our clients is an industrial process engineering firm, called SPEC engineering (www.spec-eng.com). When helping to write SPEC's blog, we worked with them to look at trends in the industry and problems their potential customers are having within this trend. We took the rise in biofuels and found that there were issues with scaling up facilities due to different types of feedstocks (corn, switchgrass, a feedstock is what eventually becomes ethanol). Using keywords they're targeting, and researching different viewpoints on the subject, we came up with a post which can both drive traffic to their site as well as provide help to their visitors.

Think about different trends the industry you serve is facing, and research problems your potential customers may be having. Yes, this is essentially marketing 101, except you're doing it over and over again within your blog. And instead of simply stating that you can help alleviate your customer's problems, provide a solution in the form of a well-researched blog post so your visitors start to see you as an online authority. They'll hire you when they need you, what your blog is doing is gaining trust for you over your competition. By writing a more substantial post on an important topic rather than simply throwing together a top ten list, you're also providing far more value than visitors could find elsewhere.

You don't want your writing to look robotic, stuffed with keywords, or totally vacant of keywords either. We've noticed a serious void between good online writing and bad online writing.

Let's start with how not to use keywords in your writing.

1. Don't overstuff your site page or blog post with your new keywords. This makes the writing look unnatural, or like you're trying too hard. While having a lot of relevant keywords can sometimes be useful for search engines, as soon as someone visits your site and reads what you have to say, it's fairly easy to recognize bullshit.
2. Don't write like a robot. A lot like with overstuffing your writing, writing robotically means you are so careful at using your different keyword phrases in your writing that it doesn't look like it was written by a human. This writing looks mechanical and forced. Also not good for earning visitors' trust.
3. Don't take 1 and 2 so seriously that your writing is totally devoid of keywords. You need relevant keywords in your writing and in your meta information to appear in search results and appeal to the right kinds of visitors.

A good way to use keywords in your site content and blog posts:

Write normally! Write as if you're writing an email to a friend or colleague. Be informative, to the point, and sound like a real person. Use keywords naturally in sentences and titles. Replace words you've been using which don't have evidence of enough traffic with synonymous keywords that do, like you might do when using a thesaurus. The less it looks like you're trying to use a certain phrase or keyword, while in fact doing just that, the more effective your writing will be. Google will love you for being both relevant and not stuffed with keywords, as will your readers when reading a natural page or post written by a real person.