Key Takeaways:
• Website Speed and Health: Ensuring your website loads quickly, especially on mobile devices, is crucial for SEO. Slow loading times can significantly impact user engagement and rankings.
• Targeted Keywords: Focus on niche keywords that align closely with your specific offerings and audience. Broad keywords may attract traffic but not necessarily the right kind of leads.
• Analytics and Consistency: Regularly analyze your website’s performance using tools like Google Search Console. Consistent, long-term efforts in SEO, including content creation and social media engagement, are essential for sustained success.
Search engine optimization (SEO) can sometimes feel like you’re playing a game where you don’t know the rules. Not only that, those unwritten rules are also constantly changing.
Consider that in 2024 Google had four core updates – March, August, November and December – with the December update aimed at refining ranking factors to focus more on high-quality content, significantly impacting many websites.
“You’re not going to outsmart Google,” says Brian Shepanek, lead developer at Underground Printing (asi/348084). “If you spend all your time trying to focus on what that change was and how to adjust, you’re always being reactionary. As you do your research, you start to realize that what you need to focus on is just fundamentals and user experience.”
Gloria Lafont, president and owner of Action Marketing Co., which specializes in branding and SEO services for promo distributors, agrees. “You have to create content that’s relevant to the searches and to the people who are searching,” she explains. “The content has to satisfy Google, and it has to satisfy the person who’s actually looking so that they will contact you and you’ll generate leads.”
Google values sites that demonstrate Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. In other words, when it comes to SEO, you are what you “EEAT.” Here are some best practices to help suppliers, distributors and decorators improve their SEO strategy – ideally building not only engagement but also converting those eyeballs into leads and eventual sales.
Give Your Website a Physical
Brayden Jessen, owner of Zome Design (asi/366115) in Spokane, WA, was distressed to discover recently that the website of a screen-printing shop down the road was ranking above his own.
“They have a one-page website where you click their navigation and it just scrolls you,” he says. “And I’ve got this huge website with all this content. I’m like, man, what’s going on? Why are they ranking higher than me?”
Digging deeper, he discovered that the competitor’s site loaded at “lightning speed.” So, Jessen did some more research and decided to move his site to a different hosting service. When his company made the switch, the hosting service’s engineers did a one-time audit on the Zome site, helping to tweak it with various plug-ins. “I kid you not, our rankings have gone up,” Jessen says.
Loading time is particularly crucial on mobile. In fact, 53% of mobile site visitors will leave a page if it takes more than three seconds to load, according to Google Consumer Insights. However, the average web page load time is 2.5 seconds on desktop and 8.6 seconds on mobile, based on an analysis by web tool review site Tooltester. Mobile sites take on average 70.9% longer to load than on desktop, according to Tooltester. As you roll out your SEO strategy, it’s worth taking a look at the speed and health of your website – and how it stacks up to competitors’.
The Key to Keywords? Know Your Niche
While it’s tempting to think that your content can gain traction by leaning on an overarching keyword like “promotional products,” that’s not the reality, and promo pros should be strategic about the keywords – and audience – they’re targeting. “I think you have to accept pretty quickly that you’re not going to rank No. 1 on Google for ‘printed T-shirt’ or ‘branded pen,’” says Brooklyn McCue, director of e-commerce at Liquid Screen Design (asi/254663). “What we try to do is find very niche keywords to target that will attract someone who’s looking for exactly what you can provide.”
It helps to have a lock on what differentiates you. Being mission-driven has been a boon to Ethix Merch (asi/189731), a distributor that focuses on ethically sourced and sustainably made promo. Lindsey Cole, marketing and communication director at Ethix and a member of ASI’s Promo for the Planet editorial advisory board, notes that her company has found success with the keyword phrase “union-made T-shirts.” Even though content featuring it may see only around 50 visitors a month, it’s more worthy than higher value, less mission-focused keywords. “Those site visitors are going to be way closer to the kind of client we want,” she says.
Don’t Forget About Analytics
As you’re posting content to your site and sharing it on social media, it’s important to pause and take stock of what’s working – and what isn’t. There’s a slew of paid tools out there, like Semrush, that can assist with keyword research, position tracking and other digital marketing necessities.
But, if your marketing budget is limited, don’t overlook free tools like Google Search Console. Brian Shepanek, of Underground Printing (asi/348084), notes that his team uses the service daily. “You can track your impressions; you can track your clicks, your click-through rates and see that over time,” he says. “You get a 16-month back window, so you can also determine some seasonality and see trends.”
By contrast, Ethix had a blog post on why it chooses not to source from certain apparel suppliers. But what was happening, Cole says, was users were clicking on the site because they wanted to buy items from those suppliers, not because they wanted to know more about Ethix Merch’s brand ethos.
It’s also worth evaluating whether your keywords and content are generating the kinds of sales you’re targeting. “Just because a keyword is high volume and gets a ton of searches, if it doesn’t align with your business focus, you’re kind of shooting yourself in the foot,” Shepanek says. An example? Underground Printing ranked very high for phrases like “T-shirt maker” and “T-shirt designer,” and was getting a lot of organic traffic because of it. However, Shepanek adds, most of the customers gained from those terms were for smaller-run, one-off orders – the opposite of the longer-term customer relationships Underground Printing was looking to build.
Zome faced a similar quandary. Jessen created a whole page devoted to “custom leather patches” during the height of that decoration trend, complete with how-to videos to show his company’s authority on the subject. The problem, however, was that the page attracted requests from customers wanting to buy patches, rather than decorated products. “We don’t make much money on a $3 to $4 patch,” Jessen says. “What I should have done was made the page more about the end-product, with a keyword like ‘patch hat.’”
In addition to narrowing down your niche market, also consider targeting local business, rather than trying to service the whole country. Optimize your local search by creating your Google Business Profile with accurate hours, services and relevant visuals, and using location-specific keywords like city and region names on website page titles and headers, advises Windy Pierre, a digital marketing expert and founder of eCommerceManage.co. “This often yields a 10% boost in organic clicks from nearby audiences,” he adds.
Become an Authority on Social Media & Beyond
While it’s important to create content on your site – in the form of blog posts, short-form video, product descriptions and more – it’s also a good idea to build up your subject matter authority with a robust presence on social media and elsewhere on the web.
“While social media itself doesn’t directly influence search rankings, it plays an essential role in driving traffic, building brand awareness and creating the kind of engagement that supports SEO,” says Julianna Morgan, director of integrated marketing at Counselor Top 40 supplier PCNA (asi/66887). “Social platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram are excellent channels for sharing SEO-optimized content, such as blog posts, op-eds, case studies or videos. Each post share creates more opportunities for that content to reach a wider audience, increasing the likelihood of earning backlinks from other sites.”
And don’t underestimate the importance of user-generated content, like images of satisfied customers wearing or using branded gear, to help boost your trustworthiness. Make it easy for clients by installing a photo backdrop in your showroom and encouraging them to take a selfie when they pick up an order, or add a QR code to packing slips directing people right to your Google review page. “Reviews are everything,” Jessen says. “We get a lot of people who say they called us because we had more five-star Google reviews than anyone else.”
No matter where you start with SEO though, it’s important to remember that it’s a marathon, not a sprint, and consistency pays off. “This is a very long game,” Cole says. “Nothing’s going to be overnight. Maybe someone doesn’t convert after reading your blog post, but they come back two months later and look at something else. You don’t know where exactly it all leads.”
