Getting your print company’s website organically ranked by search engines is one of the toughest digital marketing challenges you face. You have hundreds or thousands of competing businesses trying to beat you in the race to be found in Google searches for keywords like “printer” or “printing company” or some variation of a printing product.
Some of your competitors are huge and some have been playing and winning the SEO game for 20+ years. It’s difficult to compete with them, but it’s very possible. So how do you win? There are two primary contributors to your site’s SEO ranking: Relevance and Authority. Work on those and your rankings will follow.
“Relevance” results from creating content on your site’s web page that matches the keywords your target audience is searching for. “Authority” comes from your link-building efforts.
Link building involves getting a lot of inbound links (also called backlinks) from other high-authority websites to a particular page on your site. Google considers high-authority backlinks as votes of trust for your site. Higher traffic sites have higher authority. Sites like NYTimes, CNN, and Wall Street Journal are high authority, but also win with backlinks from your customers, suppliers, local newspaper, chamber of commerce, or business trade association.
The more quality backlinks you get, the higher your organic search ranking rises. So how do you get quality links? You need to produce quality content that quality sites want to link to. Create relevant, useful, educational, shareable content. This content can be in the form of written blog posts (300-700 words) or long-form articles (1,500-3,000 words). Longer, deeper, fact-based articles, listicles, how-to guides, and ebooks (2,000-plus words) get more backlinks than shorter, lighter blog posts.
But content isn’t limited to written text. Videos, infographics, webinars, and audiograms are sharable, linkable, and searchable by Google.
Once you created the content, send it to influential bloggers, news sites, influencer sites, and other sites in which that article’s topic may be interesting to their visitors. Offer to guest post on another’s blog. Also, look for your competitors’ backlinks and try to get links from those sites. You should also actively submit your website to web directories.
A solid digital marketing expert will help you produce relevant content and get you high-authority backlinks. It doesn’t happen overnight, but the process works for the patient and determined.
Listen to #ThePrintReport Podcast with David Murphy
David Murphy is the founder and CEO of Nvent Marketing, a marketing agency specializing in digital marketing for the print industry. David has 30+ years of experience in the graphics and document print production industry. He has served as a board member and advisor to print organizations and associations including Sustainable Green Printing Partnership (SGP), Print Industries of America (PIA), Association for Print Technologies (APTECH), and Electronic Document Scholarship Foundation (EDSF). David was also awarded the Idealliance Soderstrom Society Award for Print Industry Leadership. David can be reached at dm@nventmarketing.com.
2 Responses
RE SEO and content- arguably the biggest challenge of SEO is the content creation required to attract backlinks and site visits. Content costs money AND time. Have you devloped a ratio for a SMB PSPs on how much business in dollars is required to cover the costs of content creation?
Robert,
You are all correct. The real answer is “it depends” but no one wants to hear that. So I will be bold and relatively clear in my response: For about $50k per year, one could hire an early-career content writer with limited expertise in graphics and SEO. That worker could potentially produce two solid, well-researched long-form articles per week (100 per year). A lot of content for sure, but then there is the backlink outreach that takes another discipline. Then there is the technical SEO work (tags/titles/speed/optimization), which is another skill set. Then there is keyword research on competitors and the industry, plus some graphics and design work. Could one get all these skills combined into two solid FTEs (totaling $100k/yr)? It’s tight, but possible.
The alternative is to hire an agency that has all of these disciplines staffed and ready. Cost may be comparable. The agency would probably be a little less.
So for $100k invested in SEO/content (not PPC), the funnel math is around how many visitors convert to prospects and then to customers. Is $400-500k in new revenue possible after a year or so? Yes.