Simple SEO for Your Print Shop Website

Too many small print shop owners miss the point about search engine optimization (SEO) for their websites. It may be because they have forgotten their real target audience or the purpose of SEO. Whatever the reason, it's relatively easy to fix. Here's how…

The first step is to understand your print shop's target audience. For smaller print shops, the target audience is generally constrained by geography: those people wanting print services within a radius of 10, 25 or some number of miles. If your shop is in Daytona, you probably aren't trying to attract customers from Detroit, Denver or Des Moines. So…develop a list of cities and towns where your audience lives and works.

The second step is to consider how your target audience expresses what they want. Many customers, these days, aren't very familiar with printing or the printing process. They won't understand or use terms like "offset", "NCOA", "#10 window" or "duplex". Instead, they look for letterhead, postcards, brochures, etc. and expect you to handle all the details to give them what they want. So…develop a list of the more general terms for your products and services customers want. 

Now, take your two lists, put combinations of your places and products into your favorite search engine and see how your website ranks. For example, if you search for "printing Daytona", how does your website rank? How do "printer port orange" or "letterhead new Smyrna" rank (Port Orange and New Smyrna border Daytona Beach)? Do this "product + location" search enough and you will see exactly how manage your SEO.

Make sure your business location appears on every page and can be indexed. Use simple keywords plus locations in your website text. If you remember you aren't doing SEO for 4over or Vistaprint, your job will be much easier and effective.

Printers: Stop the Insanity!

STOP THE INSANITY! Motivational speaker, Susan Powter, with her trademark buzz-cut screamed that across the TV airwaves in the mid-90s to educate people on weight loss.

Too many print shop owners, today, display all the classic symptoms of insanity: doing the same thing over-and-over and expecting a different outcome. They repeatedly try selling exactly the same products and services all their competitors sell to all the same customers. Rather than the success they hope for, they most often find other printers get the jobs at a low, low prices

The laws of supply and demand tell us that when demand is stagnant but the supply increases that prices will fall. There has never been so much competition (supply) in the print industry as there is today and the demand for printed material is certainly not growing rapidly. This creates the perfect condition for prices to be pushed lower-and lower until something changes (fewer suppliers or more demand).

The way to escape printers' insanity is very clear: offer products and services different from those everyone else offers. This is much easier to do when you see your product as communications solutions rather pounds of paper. As a communications solutions provider, you look for ways to add more value, such as efficiency and effectiveness, to a print job. Look for ways to get more response or better response while minimizing non-productive communications. Such efforts often require little more than some thought and creativity. 

To stop the insanity…find the best ways to add some extra value for each of your customers.

Print Shops Take Advantage of the Holidays

The Holiday (formerly known as Christmas) Season results in the purchase of some 1.6 billion Holiday cards. A large percentage these are purchased by businesses. Digital print shop owners are increasingly recognizing that this behavior offers a great marketing opportunity. That opportunity is for digital printers to show customers special products, services and skills and save time and money at a time when they are likely to be most receptive.

What Businesses Want

For many businesses, the Holidays are a time for reinforcing customer relationships with printed Holiday messages of thanks and seasonal greetings. However, unlike other direct mail, Holiday messages need to feel special and personal to be effective. Impersonal, bulk-mailed Holiday cards can generate negative impressions and Holiday emails can be taken as an insult.

Customized, personalized Holiday card-envelope sets, on the other hand, can be quite expensive and very time consuming to send out. This dilemma enables digital print shop owners to shine.

Holiday Postcards

With Holiday postcards, print shop owners can offer business customers a very easy and effective solution:

• Unique postcard designs and custom messages
• Branding (e.g. logos, tag lines, etc.)
• Personalized messages (e.g. including recipient and/or recipient company names)
• Pre-addressed & no envelope required
• Additional personalization and customization options

Businesses get personalization and customization not available with card-envelope sets. Moreover, the cost of Holiday postcards is about half that of non-personalized card-envelope sets that have to be addressed, inserted and sealed.

The Marketing Opportunity

Just the act of showing or sending Holiday postcards to business customers sets the digital print shop far apart from virtually all competitors. The Holiday postcard tells customers the digital print shop offers advanced solutions and services including personalization (variable data printing), direct mail services, data and mailing list support (cle

an up, merge, de-dupe, mail processing, etc.), custom and graphic design, marketing support, etc. Who else offers such services?

It’s Easy

What makes this so easy, convenient and cost-effective is that you can outsource the personalization (VDP print file creation), data, mailing list and address processing work to us. Send us your artwork and mailing list and we send you files for you to print personalized and pre-addressed Holiday postcards for your business customers

Learn all about Holiday postcards, print shop marketing, Greener Printing and more…

Confusing Customers

Do you confuse your customers? You might be. Better check.

Following are selected items from a very long list of products and services from a typical print shop website:

Color Copies
Digital Black and White Copies
Digital Color Printing
Digital Copies and Photo Black and White
Digital Output
Offset printing
Full-Color Printing
Color Copying
Color Duplicating
Color Output

Imagine you’re a customer looking to get some stuff printed and you see this. You’re not a printing expert, so what do you make of these things? What might be going through the customer’s mind?

Questions? Confusion? Felling insulted? What do you think?

“What’s the difference between digital color printing, digital output, full color printing and color output? Am I [the uneducated print customer] supposed to understand these things? Do I have to go research the differences? What do I ask for? What if I can’t answer the questions correctly?”

“What’s offset printing? Do I need that? Does it cost more? Is it better than digital? What’s the difference between printing, copying and duplicating? Is there something less than full color?”

“I just want some stuff in color. Maybe I should go to someone who regularly deals with dummies like me rather than these professional printing people. I don’t want to look like an idiot.”

“What’s the easiest way to get my printing job done without having to be an expert?”

What if you greatly simplified this list to something such as:

All types of color printing and copying…or… A full range of color printing and copying

Does that address the customer's needs? Will that make it easier for him/her to call you for help placing an order?

The point here is to question whether you might be making things more confusing for customers than need be.

Don't forget to check out the PrintShopMarketing.com website for more tips and ideas. Or, see our EZ-VDP.com for ideas about new print-related products and services.