While there are several flavors of project management for different industries, we’re going to discuss what a project manager at this particular outfit does to keep the Upswept engine running.

Start with Digital Matchmaking

At Upswept, the project manager’s work begins before a contract is signed, with evaluating inquiries that come in from our customer maybe-matches. It requires preparing questions and notes for consultations that help determine whether what the customer has in mind is a project that we can slam-dunk. When everyone can say, “Yes, absolutely!” the next step is to put together a proposal that lists out exactly what the customer will get out of the project, what the process will look like, the estimated timeline, and the price. Once everyone signs off, we’re clear for take-off!

Gather the Necessities

You can’t deliver  awesome results if you don’t have the tools or components. That means collecting information that will give our craftspeople the strongest start—passwords, relevant links, visual assets, and bits of inspiration. At Upswept, we have a Client Portal that gives clients a single place to fill out Discovery forms, drop files in shared Google Folders, provide passwords, and schedule face-time with us. It’s the project manager’s responsibility that this portal is easy to use and that all the information that’s entered in it gets back to the people who can act on it.

Plot the Steps

For the creative folks who are about to make digital dreams come true, a systematized approach avoids time-wasting confusion. We have internal project management software that comes with a series of task lists for each of our projects—the client onboarding process, the discovery process, roadmap creation and delivery, website builds, the works! It’s the project manager’s job to set up that series of steps that lead from beginning to end, assign dates, and update with relevant information as it comes.

Keep Things Clean and Clear

There’s nothing like dead air to kill a creative project. It’s the project manager’s job to make sure questions get to the people who can answer them, and check in frequently until they get answered. This is where an organized approach to email becomes a must to maintain one’s grasp on the timeline. You can read more about this in one of my earlier blog posts about the Email Processing Ecosystem.

Tie It Up in a Beautiful Bow

When a project comes to an end, it’s no time to leave clients hanging! The project manager is responsible for reviewing everything that has been done and making sure the client has suggested next steps to use their new website or continue on with a successful social media presence. They also document the process internally, analyzing what happened over the course of the project and what can be done better in the future.

A good project manager must be proactive while keeping an eye on the details as well as how those details come together to create a bigger picture. Most of all, they’re responsible for ensuring everyone is moving in the same direction and reaching a destination that’s satisfying for both the client and their team. So if you’re feeling lost, reach out to your friendly project manager with your questions. It’s literally what they’re there for.

To many people, “fresh content” brings blogging to mind. Depending on your offer, your brand, and a number of personal factors, that may or may not be true.

How a Blog Can Help Your Website

If keeping a blog sounds fun to you, and you’re able to generate the topics needed to update a couple times a month or more: fantastic. It’s an excellent way to keep your search engine optimization in tip-top shape—a way to use SEO keywords that meet the needs of your audience. And that’s the crux of it. The purpose of the blog is to be useful to your website visitors.

When people come to your website, they have questions. They might be looking to buy your offer, or they might be looking into who you are as a business. They also might just be looking up an answer to a general question they have related to your field.

• A fitness instructor might write about how to supplement marathon training with strength exercises.
• A tailor might write about simple sewing tricks like how to replace a button that’s popped off your sweater.
• Someone who works for a website design company might write about deciding whether to blog or not (OMG that’s what is happening right now).

That’s right: you are a subject matter expert! What do you know that your customer might not? While it’s important to keep your content high-level and concise on top-level pages of your website, blogging lets you get into finer detail about things your audience might be curious about.

What Your Blog Shouldn’t Be

At the risk of dating myself, I come from a time where the reason one needed a blog was so they could share their inside thoughts with the capital-I Internet. Blogs were synonymous with pouring your heart out to strangers, and dare I say being a bit…emo. (Yes I had a Livejournal, a Xanga account, and asymmetrical bangs with a side part.)

That honor is now reserved for one’s social media accounts. Blogging is now largely the domain of thought leaders and businesses. Sharing on your business blog shouldn’t be about keeping a public online diary.

Am I saying you should keep it sterile and impersonal? Not if you want people to read it. In fact, if you’re unable to muster the enthusiasm to keep up regular blogging, or if writing in general fills you with existential dread, just don’t do it! There are other options.

Refresh Your Content without Blogging

There’s more than one way to refresh the content on your website. Here are a few other ideas:

Update your products or offer information regularly.

If you’re like most businesses, you don’t have one single offer that stays exactly the same year after year after year. Even if the offer is the same, there are still elements about it that are different. Going into detail about your offer gives you more opportunities to display how they change. Maybe you added an additional service to your package, or a new flavor of kombucha, or you changed the design of your bicycle frames. Tell folks about it on your website.

Outsource the content to your customers.

Your customers can do work on your website for you, although you will have to do a little legwork to get them to do so. Frequently asking for reviews, then posting snippets of them on your site, can provide the social proof to folks that you are out there killin’ it on the regular. And it reminds the website crawlers that your page should continue to be indexed and prioritized.

Show off a little bit.

Did you just finish up a cool new project? Are the photos currently on your website looking a little stale? Get yourself some new photo or video and get them online. Updates that include visual content can be effective in getting positive attention—and keeping it.

Do What Feels Right

If you like writing, and you feel that you can share something with your customers that they’ll get value out of—get clickety-clacking on that keyboard. If that doesn’t seem like the best use of your time and energy, keep working on the things that are. It’s that simple.

And no, I am totally not listening to Fall Out Boy right now. Well, not right now anyway.

Imagine you’re having a party at your house (I know I have been imagining it a lot this year!). What would you do to make a guest at your home feel comfortable and meet their needs?

Your website is your business’s home online, and seeing yourself as a friendly guide will help you find the words and images that will make your website visitors want to stick around for a while.

Show Website Visitors They’re in the Right Place

Unless you’re throwing a backyard blowout, you would probably greet your customer at the door. You wouldn’t just leave the door unlocked for them to wander into like they’re in a gothic horror novel, trying to figure out whether this is actually where you live.

You also wouldn’t leave them standing on the porch as you give them a long list of facts about your house. They’re going to get uncomfortable and, if you’re in Oregon like we are, cold and possibly rain-soaked.

When someone lands on your website, let them know they’re in the right place in a concise and friendly way. Don’t write a wall of text on your homepage about how great your company is or your life story. Let them know that this is where the party is, and then get ready to guide them to the next step. They can learn about who you are along the way, or once they’ve made themselves comfortable and are ready to have a conversation.

Escort Them to the Main Event

Your guests are there for the party, not to chit chat in your foyer or stare at your cabinet full of figurines. You also want them to join the party (why else would they be there? ).  Sure, they might be able to wander toward the sound of music and voices to find the party, but walking them into the room yourself makes it far less awkward.

A good host guides their guests to where they want to go and gives them a clear vision of what they can do when they get there. Show them to the place where they want to go so they can see what awaits them.

“They’re grilling out on the patio if you’re hungry, and people are setting up to play board games in the living room if you want to play.” 

You and your website visitor have a common goal—to find out what your offerings are and what they can do. Don’t make them dig around to find your offers. Tell them immediately where to go to find the thing that they want to buy from you or learn about. Someone on your website isn’t going to hang out just to be polite if they don’t like the scene. They’ll just bounce.

Make Them Feel Welcome

Ever walk into a room of people playing a game or having a conversation and just feel totally lost? At the most awkward of parties, nobody introduces you around, nobody welcomes you or gives you background on what’s going on, and you end up just standing there, trying to figure out what to do with yourself. Don’t do that to your guests!

On your website, it isn’t enough to just name your offer, then list its features and price. The visitor won’t be able to see how they fit in unless you show them. How do they use your product? What will your services do to make their lives better? Invite them to see themselves as part of your offer so they don’t get bored and leave.

Point Out What They’re Looking For 

If your guest is holding a plate of cookies, or if they have to go to the bathroom after a long car ride, you don’t want to leave them hanging. It’s courteous to tell them where to put their food, where the bathroom is, where they can hang their coat and other house rules. And it starts your evening off on the right foot by helping them orient themselves to their surroundings.

In the same way, create a space on your website where people can ask you questions, find answers to questions before ever needing to talk to you, and fulfill other needs like making returns or accessing membership perks.

The way you interact online is different than how you interact in the real world, but you’re still inviting real people into your digital space. Make that digital space as comfortable as possible, and they’ll want to stick around—and maybe even come back!

1. Who are you and how did you get into my house?
2. How do I find good keywords without having to spend a bunch of money on online tools I won’t actually use that much?
3. How do I incorporate words that the search engine robots will like without actually sounding like a robot myself?

The truth is, SEO keywords give your website a better chance of getting traffic. And you can, in fact, use them without sounding like the flying saucer dropped you off on earth and told you to “act natural.” All it takes is a little bit of thought and a little bit of research after—and I can’t stress this enough—getting into your ideal customer’s head a little bit.

Pick Keywords and Phrases that People Will Actually Search

You’ve probably heard us say this before, but nobody knows your subject the way you do! That’s both an encouraging line and a word of warning. On the one hand, you’re an expert, and you know what product you are selling or what services you are offering inside and out. On the other, yes you’re an expert, and you think of your product or service in the language of an expert…which means that you run the risk of discussing your product in a language your customer doesn’t understand at all.

Think about it. A person who just wants to fix their back pain is probably not going to do a web search for “integrative medicine.” They’ll probably just look for something like “help for back pain.”

Once you’ve got a word or phrase that you’re confident a customer might search, use it to generate a list of other words. There are plenty of tools online to do that. Some of them are expensive, but some of them are free. For example—you can use the Google search bar as a free tool by typing in your keywords and seeing what it suggests. 

Sure, it might seem tricky, but if you don’t want to spend money on Google Adwords or another subscription, this is another great way to use the power of algorithms to your advantage. Once you’ve got a collection of about 10 keywords, you can get started using them on your web pages.

Don’t Overdo It

Back in the early 2010s, you might remember seeing SEO keywords and phrases used in ways like this. 

“Do you need linen tunics in Portland, Oregon? We are here with all your linen tunic needs right on the beautiful Portland waterfront. Get ready for summer with a breathable linen tunic!”

Gosh, any idea what the key phrase is in that piece of poetry?

Do not do this. Nobody likes it, and Google won’t reward you for it anymore. Here’s why.

In a past blog I talked about how your SEO content should be usable, relevant, high-quality, and fresh. Repeating the same word over and over again isn’t going to make people want to read what you have to say. When people don’t engage with your website content, your bounce rates (the speed at which someone closes out of your site) get higher, and your rankings will actually go down.

You should try to use the keywords in more than one place on your page. The best places include:

• Your title
• Your H1 (i.e., biggest and first header on the page)
• At least once in your copy, as close to the beginning as possible
• In the filename for the featured photo on the page
• In the alt-text for that photo

But if it sounds super weird when used in a particular place? Just don’t use it there. And if it sounds weird EVERYWHERE, you should probably find a different keyword.

Try Different Keywords If You Need To

Once you get started using Keywords, don’t be afraid to experiment. One of the best things about the internet is that you can always edit your work! Keep track of your metrics and see what seems to be working and what isn’t. Notice a phrase that you’ve used to optimize your page isn’t getting any traction? Go back to that list of ten words you researched earlier and try one of those instead.

SEO keywords are just words that have to do with the product or service you’re offering. If you pick the right ones, you’re on your way to better search engine rankings, more eyes on your website, and ultimately more sales.

“Should I make that into a task?” has become a punchline in our weekly Upswept team meetings.

But no love for planners, software, or stationery can overcome the reality of being a human.

Humans, despite our best intentions, have fluctuating energies that often produce a gap between what we think we can accomplish and what we actually do. I’ve been learning this the hard way in 2020, as I imagine many of you ambitious business-oriented types have.

How Resolutions Tend to Go

A lot of people in my circles, and possibly yours, are giving up on New Year’s Resolutions altogether. It makes sense—they don’t work for most people (80% of people ditch them by February by a recent estimate).

On the other hand, we constantly hear how important it is to make SMART goals, ones that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. But that doesn’t always work for everyone either.

When I started to write this blog, I began by going back through the past few years of my resolution lists, and I discovered something a little disconcerting. I’ve been making similar resolutions every year for the past three years. Even though I’d made well articulated plans with manageable milestones to hit month-by-month, I still hadn’t made the progress I’d set out to make.

Time to try something new.

Looking Back on What Really Happened

I know, I know. You probably think you didn’t do a thing this year, but that probably isn’t true. When I spent a little time pondering the past year and journaling, I came up with a whole list of accomplishments and insights that surprised me.

Your resolution to visit your relatives more may have been torpedoed, and you may have given up on learning Mandarin on Duolingo after a few weeks. You may have lost all motivation and abandoned your blog. However, I’m going to bet that one of the following still took place.

You achieved something that you haven’t given yourself credit for.

You nurtured a relationship with someone in person or remotely. This could be a family member, friend, partner, or pet.

You developed a new method of self care. For instance, I finally got into different kinds of tea, which is something I’ve wanted to do for years.

You learned something new. Yes, a comprehensive knowledge of Kate Bush’s musical catalogue counts. So does figuring out how to set up your Mailchimp account or host a webinar.

Reflecting on the things you did manage to do in this nightmare of a year will tell you something about your values and the things that bring you comfort. What can you take away from this list and apply to the year to come—whatever challenges it may hold?

Do More of What is Working for You

There has been enough upheaval in our lives in 2020 that trying to force ourselves into the patterns that we think make people “successful” is asking for intolerable stress. Instead, I suggest you take the things you’ve learned from your reflections and focus on what you know you can do rather than the results that you think you’re going to get by doing things “the right way.”

Maybe you’ve discovered that your creativity comes alive at night. Loud online entrepreneurs might be screaming that only morning people are truly successful. Forget ‘em. Instead of forcing yourself to wake up at 4 a.m. every day to do 2 hours of writing, keep doing your work at night and let yourself sleep in a little.

Maybe you managed to land a new client that you enjoyed working with. What did you like about them? How did you connect with them? Instead of saying, “I’m going to find 5 new clients,” upsell that client so you can work with them more, or ask them for a referral.

Maybe you spent a lot of time connecting with other businesses on Instagram. Instead of saying, “I’m going to bring in 500 new social media followers by using Facebook ads,” you could focus on nurturing those connections you’ve already made on your preferred platform and seeing how you can partner with them.

You might need to widen your net later on, but for now, start with what’s been working.

Change Course Whenever You Want

You might burn out on Instagram. You might get too tired staying up late and working. Maybe your client’s needs have been fully served. There’s no shame in shifting tactics rather than doubling down.

While the turning from one year to the next is a wonderful time to reflect, regroup, and create goals, our motivation and preferences shift. Don’t fight it—use it. The paper you’re writing your resolutions on is two-dimensional, but you’re not. Instead of flattening yourself, build your resolutions around who you are.

Interested in getting a little guidance on how your business can show up more effectively online without keeping your personality confined? Sarah is hosting a Purpose Powered Website program in January, for those of you who want a website that reflects who you are, and makes life and business easier. Reserve your spot here.

I sorted email with folders when folders were the thing. Then, when everyone realized how annoying that was, I switched to using labels. I’m still working on perfecting the art of the Gmail filter, and may be doing so until the day the grid collapses.

Yes, yes, like my fellow Upswept-ers, I’m a nerd. But, also like my fellow Upswept-ers, I loathe a cliché. 

The concept of “Inbox Zero” seemed like nothing but a buzzword, and, frankly, a waste of time. Why not just keep your recent emails at hand? What were a few rows of text if you could easily find what you needed anyway? Wasn’t this just another way for tech bros to flex on normies—like wearing black turtlenecks daily or waking up at 4 a.m. to drink a glass of cold water and do 50 push-ups?

Preparing our online class on email management led me through multiple methods of inbox management. I had scaled down to about 30–60 emails in our company inbox over the last few weeks, and I thought, “Aaaaw…why not give this thing a shot?”

What it Feels Like to Totally Empty Your Inbox

The concept of Inbox Zero means that you create an email processing and archiving system that leaves your actual inbox with nothing in it by the end of the day (or whatever point in time you decide). When you get there, all of your emails have been sorted or acted upon in one way or another. 

So I finally buckled down and tried it, and it was like the first time I jumped off a diving board as a kid (although my second grade cohorts weren’t there goading me into it—just a chorus of faceless bloggers). Looking at a big white box with only the words “Your Primary Tab is Empty” gave me a free-falling sensation in my gut the first several times I looked at it.

You’ve gotta get your socially-distanced kicks somehow I guess.

This doesn’t mean that you just delete everything that comes in, however. Inbox Zero requires you to have tools and the systems in place to actually deal with things as they come. It almost demands that you have a plan for how to act on whatever message is zapped your way.

Respecting Your Digital Ecosystem

The biggest thing that I’ve learned about email processing in the last week is that it’s much more than just a collection of messages. It’s not a digital desert island receiving communications via virtual carrier pigeon. To really be able to deal with your inbox, you need help from other apps. 

Think of it this way: if you needed to write a book review (yes, I’m talking about books again), sorting your bookshelf into alphabetical order would help you find what you need more easily. However, it’s only one step to get organized and get the result you want.

Your calendar shows you when the report is due, and helps you plan when you’ll work on it. The assignment is going to be part of your to-do list, because you doubtlessly have a lot of other things going on. Of course, you probably also have a notebook or notes app to write down all the important points and get your drafts in order. Then, you have a word processor to complete the article itself.

Your inbox’s ecosystem extends beyond what goes into your account—into the realms of your calendars, your to-do lists, your project management systems, and your personal note taking software. It takes more than a few color-coded categories to get all that you need to get out of your inbox.

Trying out Inbox Zero has really emphasized the importance of dealing with your email as it comes. It has given me perspective on how the way you deal with your inbox can help your workday move more easily—especially as a project manager! 

My recommendation is if you’re truly going to embrace your inner nerd, you’ve got to be willing to jump right off that diving board and over your hatred of cliches. It’ll probably help you get some work done too.

Here’s another link to that class if you’d like to hear more about how I did it.

To keep the definition simple, website “content” is anything that the website contains that informs or entertains the client. Things that make your site work well and look nice, including layout, color scheme, form fields and fonts are not under that umbrella. When we say “content,” we’re talking about blogs, sales copy, photos, videos, audio, comments, and reviews.

Your content is what makes people want to visit—and hang out on—your site, and it’s also your main method of communicating with the crawlers that index it. (Not sure what a crawler is? Check out my last SEO blog.) To help your content to get and hold the attention of both the search engine and your potential clients, there are a few parameters to consider.

Is your content usable and relevant?

As I emphasized in the first blog in this series, content optimized for search engines should be relevant and authoritative, and those two categories also pertain to whether the content is useful. People use search engines as a way to answer questions for themselves. Every time the search engine gets a query, they seek information that will specifically answer the user’s question. Anticipate what questions your ideal client would ask of you, and form your content around that. (Perhaps the most obvious way to do that is to make sure you’ve got an FAQ page on your site.)

On the other hand, if you use keywords, or a click-baity headline to attract customers to your site, but then don’t answer their questions, they’ll probably lose interest right away. That will contribute to your “bounce rate,” which will knock you down a few pegs in the search rankings. 

Additionally, writing content that has nothing to do with your product or service will be out of step with what Google has interpreted from your site thus far. If you’re selling sports equipment, Google will have observed that most of your content is about sports equipment. If suddenly you write a review of your favorite romantic movie, Google will not see you as an expert on that content. That article is not relevant to your expertise, and probably won’t be ranked highly.

Are you offering high quality content?

Quality is tied to relevancy and usability, but it also has to do with how much care was put into the content creation. While you want your sales copy to be snappy, and you don’t want to bore your audience, search engines do prefer pages with more content on them, usually around 300 words or more. There are ways to reach that mark without the dreaded wall of text, which I’ll discuss a little later. 

Additionally—and you may think this goes without saying—excessive grammar and spelling mistakes are going to make your content appear to be lower quality. Yes, the crawlers can tell. (All the more reason to hire a copywriter or editor to help. Wink wink.)

Do you keep your content fresh?

If you go to a website and see that, in their footer, their “copyright” hasn’t been updated in 2 years, what would you think? Would you wonder whether or not the business still exists? 

You, as a human being, may know that the business is still active, but if there haven’t been any recent updates on a website, the search engine may think it has been abandoned. Search engines like your content to be frequent and varied. It’s how they can tell your business is still active, and that you’re making an effort to provide relevant information to your customers.

When you’re thinking of how to regularly update, you might think first of a blog. It’s true that blogs are a great way to let people and the crawlers know you’re still in the game. Depending on who you are and what you’re selling, however, you might rather be covered in literal spiders than have to write on a regular basis. Luckily, a blog isn’t the only way to freshen up your website content. A few ways you can frequently vary the content on your site are to: update photos, add new products, encourage reviews or comments, add videos, or alert people to special offers.

Hopefully we’ve clarified SEO “content” a little bit for you. Don’t let it intimidate you; if you’ve already got a business, you know that you have something to offer. Just think of “content” as another way to reach out and let people know all about you, what you offer, and the way your business has been growing or changing. And if you need a little help figuring out how your content could be better, we’d be happy to help you out.

I apologize for the arachnid symbology, as I often have to when discussing SEO. 

Let’s talk about crawl accessibility! If you read my last blog “What is SEO Exactly?”, you might remember that I talked about something called “indexing.” That’s the process where search engine bots find your website, then “crawl” through and add every page to the digital library that makes up the internet.

Build a Crawlable Web with Your Site Structure

You are responsible for making sure these crawlers don’t have to jump from page to page with no links for them to follow. Every page on your website that you want to be easily found should easily link back to your homepage URL without too many other pages in between. You can think of these as “internal links”—and the more you have of them, the more likely that the web crawlers won’t miss a page.

(Note: This doesn’t mean that you have to put everything on one page! In fact, we don’t recommend doing that from an SEO or a content strategy standpoint. It just means you’ll want to make getting from here to there as simple as possible.)

Let’s say you’re selling a peplum top on your store’s site. Linking from the homepage can be as easy as… [Homepage] → [Shop] → [Tops] → [Peplum]

That’s three clicks, and the highest recommended number is usually four. And depending on the way your homepage menu is set up, it could be even simpler than that. You might have a “Shop” menu item that drops down to show all the different clothing-item categories customers can choose from. That means you get from homepage to peplum in two clicks.

A good standard to keep in mind: the more vital the content, the fewer clicks it should take to get there. If an item or topic is more specific, then it’s okay if it takes more clicks to get there.

Make things easy for the robot spiders, and people will be more likely to see your sassy shirt in search results.

Search Engine Crawlers Don’t “Get” Images or Animation

What you’ve heard is true: your audience loves video! Here at Upswept, we also love to use photos to give all our readers a feast for the eyes. But while the presence of these photos make for diverse content and a great user experience, getting a search engine to pay attention to them requires some extra setup.

When a search engine spider crawls your site, it doesn’t see the images that many of us do. They understand HTML, which is made up of a lot of words. There are two ways to communicate the meaning of your images, video, or animation with words: file names and alt-text.

If a photo you want to use has a filename like “IMG1212.png”, that doesn’t give the crawler any useful information. Using a filename that is quick and relevant to the content of your page, like “Purple-Peplum-Top.png”, is going to bump up the relevance of your image a lot more, especially if the name of the page is in the file name, too. Just make sure you don’t use more than 5 words.

Nearly every website content management system has a field for alt-text when you load up a photo. Leaving that space blank is a missed opportunity. For alt-text, you can use a few more words, but you should keep them honest and concise. 

Another important, non-SEO reason to do this is to make your site more accessible to people with visual processing disabilities, or anyone navigating your site using assistive technologies. Setting up alt-text is a winning idea all around.

Other SEO Opportunities to Consider

There are a couple other places where people miss easy SEO content opportunities. For example, in addition to images, the crawlers can’t read PDFs. If you have information in a PDF that’s important to a search engine, consider copying that content to an actual web page, and save that PDF for your more direct marketing efforts. 

Similarly, search engines also can’t parse audio files! So, if you want the content of a video or audio file to contribute to your searchability, consider springing for a transcription and including it on your website.

There are also important ways to boost your crawl accessibility that, if you’re not a web developer, you might need some help with, including page redirects, security certificates, and submitting sitemaps. And if you’re looking for some help with that, I happen to know somebody who can take a look.

In microseconds, the algorithm delivers its results. These results come from a never-ending process of collecting data from every website on the internet and indexing them within a virtual library.

And it’ll probably turn up something like: “SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the process of increasing quality and quantity of traffic to a website through organic search.”

Right now, there are search engine spiders (also called “crawlers”) wandering all over the internet. These crawlers follow strands of the world wide web, using links to travel from one site to another, then record every web page they can find and rank them according to their usefulness.

And the “usefulness” bit is where your SEO efforts come in, because search engine optimization isn’t primarily for the crawlers. 

The crawlers are trying to determine what *people* want when they search for something. And that means SEO is, ultimately, for people. You are not writing for Google, or Bing, or any of the other search engines out there. 

You are writing for your client.

Organic search means you are not paying to be featured, you get there by what might be considered “merit.” Like establishing a reputation in the business world, SEO is an ongoing process, and you build it by paying attention to changing search engine standards and adding more and more of the right kind of content to your site.

What Search Engines Look For

The search engine wants to answer queries (i.e., what people type into the search bar) with content that is relevant and authoritative.

And that is why SEO should be part of your overall marketing strategy, not just some technical thing that’s off in a world all its own. And that’s why, when you’re doing it, you need to get in a sales and marketing headspace, way more than you need to get into a “tech” headspace. You need to consider it along with the words you use across all of your marketing, print and social media included, and all be part of building a cohesive overall strategy or individual campaign. 

Granted, there’s a lot more than just marketing that goes into SEO, and some of it is pretty technical. I don’t even think I could cover it all in ten blogs, but let’s start with a general overview of what you need to take into account when you are trying to make your website appeal to both human beings and our robot web-librarians.

The Elements of Good SEO

In future newsletters, I’ll be going into each of these points in depth, but the following elements are things to consider when you are doing SEO work on your website:

• Crawl accessibility
• Good content
• Powerful keywords 
• User experience
• Shareability

If this seems like a lot, that’s fine. It is a lot. But as long as you work on your website with an eye to how helpful and easy-to-use it would be for someone else, you’re on the right track. Stay tuned for more info on how you can use your site in a way that satisfies both your customers and our search engine overlords.

Maybe you are looking for a way to cut costs. Maybe a valuable employee has a long surgical recovery coming up and wants to spend some of that time working. Maybe a team member is moving out of state.

Or maybe there’s a global pandemic keeping everybody inside.

Whatever the reason, you may be considering a move to full- or part-time remote work for your business. And I am here to recommend that you do, if you can.

Here’s why you might consider telecommuting as an option all-year round and not just during voluntary quarantine for COVID-19.

Everyone saves money

It’s true; there will be a set of unique costs to having employees work from home. Professional/business tier plans for project management apps, conferencing software, and data storage are these businesses’ bread and butter. However, you are probably spending money on similar services already. Plus, business owners can save thousands on overhead including furniture, rent, utilities, in-house servers, phones, heating, and air conditioning

Some rough calculation shows that a 30 minute commute to work, via a post-2018 model car, might cost around $500 each year. That doesn’t even account for parking and maintenance. Childcare costs are giving rent a run for its money (so to speak), coming in at $11,322 a year in the state of Oregon alone. Taking those costs off of your employees’ plates is good for them. And unless you literally live alone at your office, it’s probably good for you too.

Everyone gets more done (yes, really)

Sounds weird, huh? Home is where your TV, dog, and laundry are. Wouldn’t one get sidetracked? Harvard Business Review reported on a study that compared the productivity of employees who volunteered to work from home with a control group. For this business, the remote employees got far more done than the people who kept going into the office every day.

The nature of all work is different, and not all employees flourish under the same conditions. Some employees may get distracted by the sound of others on conference calls, or the siren song of the vending machines downstairs. For people who have work that is intellectually demanding, or just requires focus, a little privacy could be a huge boon.

There’s a better employee pool

When you think about it, the reason many employees leave a job they like is because they can no longer be physically present in the office—maybe they have a baby or move to a different city. Letting people go either full or part-time remote means you can keep people on staff that you wouldn’t be able to otherwise. And less turnover means what? Lower costs.

Say someone leaves for a different reason (they start their own business, they go back to school full time, etc.). What is stopping you from hiring an employee who lives literally anywhere else? You have a much better chance of finding someone who has the exact experience, education, and skills that you need to fill that person’s shoes. These people can be found through online services such as Flexjobs and even LinkedIn.

You’ll contribute to cleaner air

Think about how many cars will not be on the road anymore if you make this choice. According to the EPA, about half of carbon emissions from transport comes from personal vehicles. Global Workplace Analytics reports said that remote work has prevented 3.6 million tons of commuting-related greenhouse gasses in 2019. If you care about the environment and are unsure of how to contribute to its health, permitting remote work is a pretty darn good option.

When shouldn’t you go remote?

If you have a restaurant or retail space, that option might not be on the table. Going to a more e-commerce based model could help you keep fewer people on-site, and could also be a good way to ease the economic effects of a downturn (like we’re experiencing with COVID-19). However, that could be a much more complicated changeover than office-based work.

Another concern could be that employees won’t do their jobs if left to their own devices. Just like in any workplace, low morale can contribute to lower rates of productivity, and that can be harder to monitor when people are not in front of you. However, if your concerns are because you don’t trust your team, you may have problems beyond the scope of this blog.

Now that you’ve got the reasons why this is such a good long term idea, you’ll probably want a few tips on how to get started. You can begin by checking out one of our recent newsletters, and be sure to subscribe while you’re over there to get more of our pro-tips.