OpenVBX: Cloud-Based VoIP for Small Business and Personal Privacy

As Raleigh IT services provider, helping small businesses thrive is our passion. We help our clients develop cost-effective solutions to business problems, including everything from their websites to online marketing and sales funnels. One thing we've found is that it's quite common to see a brand new business start out with the owner listing their cellular phone number as their business number. This can create all sorts of problems as your business grows, so we conducted a market study of low-cost options for call-forwarding numbers and discovered OpenVBX, a free cloud-based VoIP soft-switch of sorts that you run on your own server to provide additional functionality to Twilio. It's quite popular for telephone and SMS marketing alike because you get a tremendous feature set at a price you simply can't beat, and you can port numbers in and out of Twilio as needed.

The primary reason to implement such a solution is to get more control over what happens with your calls while keeping your actual direct phone numbers more private. Combined with a well developed website and social presence, it can make a one-person-show look like a big office. You can create business hours for call handling schedules, create a menu to route calls, and have different announcements and messages – either with your own recordings that you upload, or the native voice (we'll come back to the voice further below.) In short, it has lots of great call-handling capabilities built right in. If you outgrow OpenVBX, you can simply change your forwarding in Twilio itself, port your number to another carrier, or upgrade to a more advanced alternative that we may offer in the future. It's in early beta, so things are still hush-hush about it.

COST SAVINGS

Let's go ahead and discuss potential savings. Twilio pricing scenarios vary based on how you receive the calls; calls to landlines cost more than cell phones or the native Twilio client. We'll compare the cost of OpenVBX to a very popular alternative, based on the assumption that you are sending the incoming calls to your cell phone (cell phone cost not included):

1. You buy service from a well-known VoIP provider which charges you $0.05 per minute and $3 per month for the number itself. If you get incoming calls for 60 minutes a day, over the course of a month this adds up to $69.

2. You run OpenVBX on your existing hosting server. With the same amount of traffic, your cost could be just $30 per month, and possibly even lower depending on how you receive the calls.

That's a $468 annual savings (over 50% off) by using OpenVBX for just one hour of inbound calls a day. All situations are different, but this can potentially rack up some serious savings on your small business communications cost. You can lower this cost even further by only giving callers the option to leave a message and then return their calls from another line that has unlimited usage, but you'll be giving up the privacy benefit of using your Twilio number, and never answering the phone live could hurt your reputation.

OPENVBX VERSUS UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS

OpenVBX is not Unified Communications (UC) by any stretch of the imagination. UC is about having a single platform that brings together all of your company's voice, video, chat, and sometimes even email and video conferencing, into a centrally managed platform with all of those communication channels interconnected. The capabilities are fantastic, but they aren't always the right fit. Such capabilities come with a price tag that might not make sense for certain types of companies. For those looking for more basic telephony needs, OpenVBX might give you everything a small business needs at a terrific price.

EXAMPLE SCENARIO

Suppose you have a main phone number for your business that's published around the Internet. That's a Twilio number which is configured to ring into OpenVBX on your server. The caller hears an audio menu that says something like, “Press 1 for sales, 2 for billing, and 3 for tech support.” When they make a selection, OpenVBX transfers them to some other number you own, such as the cellular phone of a sales person, a POTS line for your accountant who works out of their home, or even another menu with even more choices. All your caller knows is that they got a recording, pressed a button, heard ringing, and then somebody answered. You could even send the calls to other Twilio numbers with their own call-handlers. OpenVBX is open-source software, so if write your own plugins and extend its capabilities, the possibilities are truly endless.

Another reason to consider a service of this nature is that you can change your cell phone, home, or office phone numbers any time you want, while your main business number that's published around the Internet stays the same.

PERSONAL PRIVACY FOR INDIVIDUALS

OpenVBX has a huge potential benefit for private individuals. By giving out your Twilio number to people you do business with, you gain a level of control over how and when they contact you. Tired of someone that keeps calling? There are ways to blacklist numbers or modify the call-flow based on their caller ID. This means that you could choose to have some calls ring through to your cell phone, while perhaps others ring your landline at home. If you run your blog for any sort of commercial or monetary purpose, for just $1 more a month (plus usage) you can add another number. Make it “voicemail only” and you have instant call-screening at a very low price.

OPENVBX MOBILE APP

OpenVBX currently has a mobile app for Android, but the iPhone app which used to be available was pulled for some reason. That doesn't mean that you can't make an outbound call from your iPhone and have your business Caller ID appear as your business number, though. You can do this using third-party programs like TwiDial, but you should consider the information security implications of distributing your Twilio credentials first, since they're needed for TwiDial to access your Twilio numbers and place calls.

RISK MANAGEMENT AND SOLUTION ARCHITECTURE

The biggest problem with OpenVBX may be that it's so easy to get running that you're likely to skip past some very important things that you really should have considered more thoroughly. Like any I.T. application, you need to consider the required level of availability, backups, information security, and a general use-case analysis to be sure it's a good fit. In other words, treat this like any other I.T. application and do your homework. When your phone system is down because your web host is under attack or your provider implemented some new security framework that made it stop working entirely, don't say we didn't warn you.

To install OpenVBX, you'll need MySQL and PHP. Consider how critical inbound calls are to your business, and don't install this on cheap hosting or shared servers if you depend on phone calls for customer contact. There are a lot of ways to approach this incorrectly and end up hurting your bottom line. A shoddy installation can cost your business big dollars in terms of lost sales opportunities or a damaged reputation. At minimum, a robust installation would involve a cloud-based high-availability architecture running on full SSD with a live standby instance in an alternate datacenter on a completely separate hosting provider, as well as very important security improvements to your .htaccess file to help deter hackers. The reality is that most small businesses will probably choose the simpler – and cheaper – basic installation model to keep cost to a minimum. Both solution architectures are valid. The important take-away is that you make a fully informed decision about risk management and choose the model that's best for your business.

EXIT STRATEGY

If OpenVBX were to either break or become deprecated, which is to say not to be maintained and have no available support for the application, you can easily use Twilio to forward your number to an alternate service provider, or port the number elsewhere altogether. What this means is that you're never “locked in” with OpenVBX. If something were to go haywire, your I.T. tech can log into your Twilio account and change the TwiML code to temporarily forward all calls to an alternate number while you get your OpenVBX fixed. Just be sure you save the existing settings first so you can restore it afterward. 

HOW TO CHANGE THE DEFAULT VOICE

DISCLAIMER: We don't make any guarantee about the continued accuracy of this information. You could delete everything on your server if you do things wrong, so attempt this entirely at your own risk. We warned you!

Supposing that you've implemented OpenVBX in a way that's safe and reliable, you'll soon discover that while Twilio offers several voices, OpenVBX only lets you use the 'man' voice. There's no option anywhere to change it. We didn't like that, so we fixed it as follows. If you want to follow in our footsteps, this is how you do it.

1. Make a full cPanel backup;

2. Log into your hosting account's cPanel and access phpMyAdmin;

3. Expand the voice database assigned to your OpenVBX installation – this would have been determined during your original installation, so refer to those notes;

4. Select and expand the 'settings' table;

5. In the returned rows in the table, look for the row with 'name' equal to 'voice'. It should have a value of 'man';

6. Click the edit button on that row, and change the value from man to whatever voice you want;

7. Click 'go' to write the change;

8. Test to confirm that the new voice is in effect.

CONCLUSION

OpenVBX makes it possible for a small business to have a professional appearance at a remarkably low price, and it gives individuals more control over their personal privacy. It includes capabilities for office hours, call trees, and loading customized greetings and recordings, and has both web-based and Android clients. As long as you don't mind the risks of running it on your own server, it provides a terrific set of features at a price you simply can't beat. It does not have some of the analytics and other features you might want in order to optimize the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and get a little more sophisticated with your call flows. We are considering making available to clients our own advanced solution which includes additional business intelligence, better iPhone and Android clients, and more, but we have not yet reached a determination about its market viability. If you need an IT consultant to help you sort through technology decisions, visit our website or inquire with us if you're interested.


DISCLAIMER: Subject to our terms as posted on our website at http://extellior.com. No warranty or guarantee of any kind is made or implied. This information is of a general nature, may not be accurate, does not fully explore the product or all possible use cases and implications, and should not be construed as a recommendation or suggestion that any particular person or business should or should not use OpenVBX or any other service. Consult a VoIP industry expert in order to determine whether OpenVBX or other VoIP service might be suitable for your business. Make informed decisions about risk management prior to implementation.

SEO Fu: The Kung Fu of Search Engine Optimization

In revamping the overall image and branding for our Raleigh SEO and Internet marketing company, I wanted our first SEO blog post to be something that got at the very heart of how our services are different. The lion has always been our mascot for good reason, and so I debated on metaphors relating to that. I also considered discussion about things like sophisticated SEO services, advanced tools, personal service, commentary on recent developments in the industry, and so on. The final answer came to me all on its own, and it's none of those things. This writing speaks mostly from the perspective of advice for those who are new to SEO, and includes essential take-aways for clients as well.

Like most writing that comes from the heart, this entire article simply popped into my head quite unexpectedly this weekend. I had been trying to think about what I wanted to write about, and then simply put the whole thing out of my mind for a while. I was standing there waiting patiently to pick up some food to bring home, when, quite suddenly, there it was – SEO and Kung Fu all wrapped together very neatly inside my mind. It probably surprised me as much as it does you, but I think some of the analogies really get at the heart of some things that both SEO clients and practitioners alike should consider in discussion about what type of SEO strategy is appropriate for a given business.

Hidden Depth in SEO Methods

Now, I'm sure you're wondering what on earth SEO and Kung Fu have in common. To begin, I have found over the years that true Kung Fu has immense depth and subtlety to it that most students of the arts seek, but that few find. On the surface, what the eyes see may appear at first to look much like any other martial art. This is not unlike a client trying to compare one SEO company with another. Kung fu is easy to visually observe, of course, and upon closer examination even an untrained eye will soon see the difference between smooth coordinated motion as all individual parts move not as individual parts, but rather as part of a greater whole, as contrasted with the choppy disconnected movements that lack integrated power. It is also thus with our SEO, but the only thing meaningful a client can see are search engine ranking changes which occur not right before the eye, but rather gradually over time. When the SEO is done right, though, there are significant changes occurring beneath the surface that may not, at first, be discernable to most, as we begin making critical shifts in the internal posture and alignment of your online presence. A single inch to the left or right can mean a 30% difference in effective power. This is true with our SEO as well, and business owners would assuredly want a 30% better return on investment.

SEO Beginnings

When you first begin your SEO training, there will be a natural temptation to focus on the minor mechanics, as if they are where the power is found. Your eyes might be drawn to the hand, even though power begins at the feet. This is also true with our SEO, where we must also ensure we have built a strong foundation, that each individual piece is correct, built correctly on top of what's below it, that all pieces are in the correct position and alignment, and that the timing of our movements is like one smooth fluid motion where all pieces work in harmony, rather than thinking of them as individual pieces moving separately. When first beginning, you should take the time to patiently learn how to handle all of the individual pieces of on-site website optimization. Learn not only about H1 tags, titles, meta description, categories, keyword ratios, minification, image optimization, and so forth, both in regard to each piece on its own, but also dig deeper about how to put the pieces together properly for well-coordinated synergistic effect.

In fact, trying to simply focus on perfecting each individual piece, and not exploring the depth and nuances to the art of putting them together - and it is very much an art – could well lead an SEO novice into over-optimization, which can get a website penalized. Where did the SEO student go wrong in such a situation? Their mind was not in the right place.

As an SEO practioner, you are engaging in a dance, and your partners are the search engines. You must learn to move in harmony with them; they do not respond well to such obvious deliberate attempts to control them as a too-perfectly-optimized website. No – we must first earn the trust of our partner through correct action and the demonstration of both our competence and integrity, and our partner will see this and begin to dance together in harmony with us. This philosophy is at the very heart of either building a solid SEO foundation that will be strong over time, or a house of cards that will eventually fall. Google only gets smarter, and yet many people still try to employ SEO tricks that can only possibly have short-term results at best. As a business owner, it's critical to future of your business to avoid a spammy backlink profile for your business!

Integrity and Balance

My comments about demonstrating our integrity and right-mindedness also apply to off-site SEO such as content marketing, brand optimization, etc. It's very easy to focus on a simple mechanic of link building, for example - which you should not do for its own sake, by the way, since it's against Google's TOS - and think that ordering a few thousand of them will do the trick, when in reality this would be much like yanking crudely on the partner you're supposed to be dancing with while demanding in a loud voice, “Come here!” They won't like it, your dance will be clumsy and awkward, you will lose their trust, and your partner might dismiss you, wanting nothing further to do with you.

A Light Touch

In Kung Fu, we perform training to learn to sense and respond naturally to very small changes in your partner's position or momentum. For this to work, a light touch is needed. You must be relaxed and fluid, unfixed in your intent, so that you can sense and respond in the moment. This is easy to say but difficult to learn, and the same thing is true with our SEO. If your position and intent are fixed and rigid, determined on what you are going to do, you will no longer be open to sensing the subtle ranking signals from search engines that you might otherwise have detected. Perhaps you pushed too much, or your movement was off-center, or you were so intent on pushing that you failed to detect that your opponent was laying a trap for you, using your own momentum to let you put yourself off-balance. (I only use the term opponent to indicate the partner with whom there must be able to give and take, not to suggest any adversarial relationship, since such thinking will only get you into trouble.) In the world of SEO, things change daily. Having strategy is essential, but you should always be ready to shift and adjust.

Stillness in SEO

Hurrying with your SEO is very likely to get you nowhere fast. In Kung Fu, Sifu will say that to move forward, we must think back – and it's very much true. As odd as this may sound, sometimes we go faster by slowing down, and to understand movement, we must first understand stillness. It is also this way with our SEO practice. Rather than getting caught up in the movement of performing one series of actions after another, it is vital to maintain and move from a place of internal stillness from which you can observe the movement around you as the search engines give you clues. There is a term used within SEO circles called “the dance,” which refers to a process in which search engine rankings may begin to respond to changes they've detected, and it isn't at all unusual for rankings to actually drop initially when this process commences. As normal as this is, it almost always still causes alarm. Internal stillness is required so that you don't get caught up in the moment and take a rash action, when what you really needed to do was to be patient and stay the course. In fact, once this begins, if you continue trying to mess with things, you might really confuse the search engines, or potentially even make them think that you're up to no good depending on what you do.

SEO Strategy

Just as no two situations in Kung Fu will call for the exact same strategy, the same thing is very true of our SEO. Naturally, you cannot simply seek to keep applying the same formula and expect it to work on everything equally – and yet SEO is often sold this way. Each situation calls for its own strategy. For best results, it is important to be able to step back and consider the whole picture of your client's online presence and the changing market conditions around them before ever beginning any application of SEO methods. You must be open to doing what is needed – not just doing what you expected to have to do. This will ensure that you are not investing resources into efforts that will only have temporary or minimal business impact. One example of this is to study the Google trend data for a search phrase for their locale, and then discuss this with the business owner. The resulting strategy might be to go after some part of that business realizing up-front that it is on a steady decline, and thus limit the amount of effort expended on it, while also expending effort on a different keyword which is increasing in popularity over time, but which may be more competitive. Perhaps in such a case you will strike some balance of efforts between the two for both short-term and long-term financial benefit. You must also consider the goals, nature, and characteristics of both the business and their typical customers, so the most effective methods can be used to connect the dots for search engines in a way that is healthy, legitimate and beneficial.

SEO Fu

It is my hope with this article to explain that while you may get lucky, consistently good SEO requires that we step back, consider the big picture, find our place of stillness, temporarily suspend our formulaic expectations, and allow ourselves to exist in the moment of an ever-changing competitive landscape with our opponents seeking to best us for the top positions. We must sense the subtle movements of the search engines, remaining fluid and ready to act in partnership with them when presented with the right opportunity. Recognize that any backlinking formula is like kata. It is a vehicle for facilitating understanding, but should never be a prescription for blind action.


Realize this does not mean that we act mindlessly – quite the opposite! Our full attention is on our SEO, but neither are we distracted by our SEO itself. Through practice, the mechanics of our SEO such as on- and off-page optimization become second nature to us. At this point we can allow our mind to consider the overall strategy, implementing what we know needs to be done while remaining entirely flexible to adjust our movements at any time. This brings me to three specific points.

1. POSTURE. Maintaining an upright posture and stabile foundation are as key to success in long-term SEO as they are in Kung Fu. You should no more build your SEO on spammy links and thin-content than you should try to perform Kung Fu with errant legs and feet. Seek to have integrity in your structure, and challenge yourself to physically sit or stand up straight. Be ready without being tense, and be attentive without being fixated.


2. ALIGNMENT. All parts should focus on the one single end result. Very often, people new to SEO will see it as adding a little bit of this, then a little bit of that, and then perhaps adding a bit of the other. Unfortunately without well-considered overall intent, this would be like the hand and the foot working against each other. No part is moving in isolation; all parts move together.


3. TIMING. All things must come together at the right time, and yet this moment can change. Move too slow, and the opportunity will pass by. Move too quickly, and your recklessness may throw you off balance and result in your being compromised.
   

Is this all a bit philosophical? Quite so – but this depth of philosophy is the difference between mediocre SEO, and good SEO. Google makes search engine algorithm updates, on average, on a daily basis. While there are certainly best practices – and they do evolve over time – if you're looking for a blueprint you can just nail out, you're going to be disappointed. Strategies, yes – but blueprints, no. It also doesn't make logical sense to expect mediocre content to beat out quality content marketing, and yet this is exactly what a lot of people try to do – thinking that if mediocre content isn't working, then they must just need more of it! This is not the way. If you find yourself thinking such things, you may want to ask yourself how a quality dance partner for Google would handle such a situation. What are you doing that's truly worthy of attention? If you have no ready answers, then you may have found at least part of your problem.

Google Ranking Magic

To complicate things for those trying to learn the art and science of SEO, I must hear about some new miracle ranking formula or free traffic source at least once a week, like the latest “ninja trick” of the SEO world. I've already heard about two new miracle products this week, and the week is young. While certainly there are things to be learned and tools that can make our life easier, it's also quite easy find yourself chasing your tail because your mind wasn't in the right place to start with. SEO is a dance that we perform together with Google, and there are a great many perfectly legitimate ways of improving website rankings and earning legitimate backlinks without necessarily building them for their own sake, which, again, is against Google's TOS and will get you in trouble.

Just like in Kung Fu, a true deep understanding of the basics is far more powerful than a couple of fancy secret moves, and yet when we first begin, these basics seem so simple on the surface, as if the real secrets haven't been shared with us, when the truth is that we simply allowed our mind to skip along the surface to the next cool move without seeking to explore the depth of what was already in our hands. It is only over time that we come to appreciate the power these seemingly simple things have when we begin to truly understand them. This depth of understanding comes only over time, with right-mindedness. Begin with basic moves that show Google you're a worthwhile partner before concerning yourself with trying to master strategies with deeper levels of nuance.

SEO Consulting

SEO Clients should know there are essentially two types of SEO, and to ensure satisfaction with the results, it's critical that the SEO methodology employed be matched with the client's expectations. The first approach – the one that makes the most sense if you want to achieve results – is predicated on the assumption that the SEO consultant has a high degree of expertise and can, in fact, deliver success. In a consulting engagement, there will be a high degree of flexibility in the approach. There is only one, and only one, deliverable, and that's improved website ranking. Specific individual components and work activities should be understood up front to be dynamic and may change over the course of the engagement. In an SEO consulting engagement, the client is paying first and foremost for sophisticated skill and knowledge, and secondarily for the actual execution of any resulting work activities. The degree of interaction with you may vary by client; offer different levels of discussion to your client up front so your clients will have clear expectations about how much time you're going to spend talking with them. Some clients will be happy to simply see results, while others may want more time to understand what you're doing. Some may even be interested in having you train their staff. All of these approaches are fine, but you should be clear about your different offerings and their associated costs.


The second – and cheaper – type of engagement results either because a client doesn't think they can afford SEO consulting, or because they didn't know that such advanced services were available. In this scenario, you're really just delivering groceries. Everybody agrees up front that you are going to provide a very specific set of deliverables on some predetermined schedule. It's a script that they are paying you to follow. While such a script may improve their rankings, it's focused entirely on the idea that the client is paying for time spent – not for results. Sometimes this will work out great for the client and they'll get excellent results. Other times they may not get the kind of ranking results they wanted, but they still got exactly what they paid for. This is how most SEO is bought and sold across the market in general, even though it isn't necessarily what most businesses would want if they understood the difference.


Clients should understand the rather significant difference between these two approaches and decide early on which approach best suits their business.


As an SEO practitioner, you should consider where you are in your SEO fu and determine what to offer your clients. When paired with a well-run business, your SEO has the potential to transform that business into a market superstar. Consider this in who you take on as clients. Does that business know how to cost-effectively grow, and are they prepared to actually be successful? Will they be a good client to work with? Do they truly want more traffic to their business? As a business owner, are you ready for more inbound leads?

Conclusion

As this writing has now gone on far longer than I ever even imagined or intended, it must come to a close for fear that I will otherwise have written a book. I found myself beginning another section just now but decided that it can wait for another day. While I could have chosen other metaphor to use in my discussion of SEO, I like this one in particular because the goal of SEO is to create a strong relationship between your online brand and search engines – and that's an excellent way to see it. It is neither a conquest nor a one-off activity, and it requires nurturing to stand the test of time. Success with SEO requires finesse, attentiveness, integrity, and patience.


If you run a North Carolina business and want to improve your online visibility, visit us online.

Raleigh SEO & Internet Marketing Blog

Hey everyone, just getting the blog here ready to start using it!  Coming shortly, we'll have news, information and helpful tips and suggestions for small businesses throughout North Carolina to help with the online marketing of their business, including a few things like:

• Search Engine Optimization
• Internet marketing
• Social media marketing
• Google AdWords
• and more :)