promotional products industry

Ranking Woes: Does the Promotional Products Industry Have an SEO Problem?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

According to research from 2017, the promotional products industry is worth $20.81 billion. If your promotional products company can take advantage of SEO, it’ll be a lot easier to find yourself in the receiving end of that figure.

With that said, a lot of companies in the promotional products industry find SEO difficult. Many think that because the industry is “boring” it’s hard to build links. Some think that it’s impossible to build product pages that’ll outrank the competition.

Whatever SEO challenge your promotional products company is facing, this blog post can help you. Use the tips below, and your website will experience a flood of traffic, thanks to your improved SEO strategy.

Let’s begin!

The Two Kinds of Content for an E-commerce Website

Usually, when talking about content, we’d refer to just blog content. But because we’re effectively talking about an e-commerce store, this time “product page” content is included too. Both are equally important if you want to achieve high rankings.

Blog content should seek to educate your readers on a particular topic.

You might have a blog post that details the benefits of promotional products. You may even want to include a case study that provides a real-world example of why investing in promotional products is a good idea. If you need some inspiration, take a look at the content of your competitors.

Aside from blog content, you need to know how to write content for product pages too.

There are three things you need to focus on here:

  • The product title tag
  • The product description
  • Image tags

The product title tag essentially refers to the name of the product, for the page in question. You need to make sure that it accurately describes the product.

The product description is just that, a description of the item you’re trying to promote. It helps if you can make this over 500 words. If you want to see an example of a website that does this well, check out DynamicGift.

The image tags are simply “tags” that help describe an image. You might notice them if you hover your mouse over an image. You need to make sure the image tags accurately reflect the image that’s shown. This helps Google understand what a particular webpage is about.

Building Links to Your Promotional Products Website

Link building is perhaps one of the hardest parts of SEO. But if you can master it, you’ll find it much easier to achieve good rankings in a short period.

There are two approaches you can use when building links. The first is to create something that’s worth linking to.

For instance, you might have a piece of content on your website that’s so good people can’t help but link to it. An example of this might include a study of some sort that details developments in the promotional products industry.

The second approach is to actively reach out to people and ask them to link to your website.

Suppose you create an incredible piece of content. You can reach out to people that have blogs dedicated to the promotional products industry and let them know about your content. When you do this, they may then link to your content on their blog.

The content of your outreach emails will determine your success with this approach. The good thing is there are plenty of email templates you can use to help improve your odds of success.

Outsource If You Don’t Have the Time

Even if you’re aware of the benefits that SEO can bring, you may still struggle to find the time needed to work on the SEO side of your business. Because of this, you should think about outsourcing your work.

Now, this doesn’t mean you should hire an SEO agency. As long as you know the fundamentals of SEO, you can just tell people what to do and experience similar results.

For example, you may know the kinds of keywords you need to target, but you might not have the time to write content that targets these keywords. With outsourcing, you can hire a writer to get this done for you.

Or, you may know how to build links to your content, but you might not have the time to do all the outreach. In this situation, you can create a step by step plan that details how to ask for links then hand this plan over to someone.

Of course, you’ll need to pay close attention to these people to make sure they’re doing their job correctly. But if you focus on hiring people with the right experience, you should be able to keep headaches to a minimum.

Diversifying Your Traffic

If your online marketing strategy is reliant solely on SEO, you’re putting your business at a disadvantage. There are plenty of other sources of traffic, and while SEO might have its benefits, it also has its downsides too.

One of the biggest problems with SEO is that it takes time. If your business needs to see results right now, SEO isn’t the best approach. It’s also worth noting that your website is at the mercy of Google. A change in their algorithm can lead to you losing your hard-earned rankings in an instant.

An alternative to SEO is pay per click advertising (PPC). With PPC, you can drive people to your website almost instantly. With that said, PPC can be expensive, and if you go into things hastily, you risk losing a lot of money.

If PPC is something you’re interested in, be sure to start small. By spending small amounts, you’ll be able to figure out what does and doesn’t work. Then once you begin to see a return on investment, you can gradually increase your spending.

Can the Promotional Products Industry See Results with SEO?

With the right approach, companies in the promotional products industry can absolutely see results with SEO. But like all industries, there’s going to be some competition, so results will not come quickly.

This post has explored some of the SEO challenges a promotional products company may face and how you can overcome these problems. Understanding how content can impact SEO results is crucial. It’s also vital that promotional product companies understand how to attract links.

If your promotional products company is struggling to see results with SEO, hope is not lost. You can use other sources of traffic like PPC. But if you’re going to use PPC, it’s essential you practice some caution as not doing so can lead to significant losses in short periods of time.

Did you know that you can boost your rankings by updating old content? Check out this blog post to learn more about this interesting SEO strategy.