Focus on SEO in 2021
SEO stands for search engine optimization, which may not mean much to you if you haven’t been involved in that world. But it is important, and here’s what it is and why it’s important to your business. At its core, SEO is a set of practices that help your website get found on popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing.
Although SEO sounds extremely technical, it largely focuses on the motives behind people’s online behavior. It helps you identify searchers’ intentions to create relevant and helpful content around what people are already searching for online regarding your industry, product type, and expertise. A main function of SEO on the content side is that it helps to satisfy searcher’s needs by giving them results in line with exactly what they are seeking or expecting to find.
SEO practices also help search engines to understand the content and organization of your website so it can be properly indexed for search under relevant queries. Ultimately, SEO is a tool that connects searchers to relevant answers and businesses to a relevant audience.
Organic search is the most often the primary source of web traffic and is also the type of website traffic that is affected by SEO. Organic refers to the fact that this type of traffic does not come from paid ads, instead stemming only from people clicking on a naturally occurring search result for your website.
Rank refers to how high up your webpage or piece of online content shows up in the search results. The top 10 search results are typically on the first search engine results page (SERP), while the top five typically show above the fold (before users have to start scrolling down).
This all depends on what else is on the page — if there are many paid search ads or extra sections like related questions, information cards, or featured snippets that answer the searcher’s query pushed to the top, organic search may be suppressed further down on the page.
While SEO is complex and ever-changing, we have provided a quick guide that will serve as a starter resource to help you understand SEO enough to hit the ground running in 2021.
Here are four reasons why SEO is important for promotional products distributors to implement on their websites.
Four Reasons Why SEO is Important for Promotional Products Distributors
Gaining Website Visitors
More than 70% of search engine users are most likely to click on one of the top five results on SERPs. This means that if you’re not using SEO best practices, you’re losing out on significant web traffic.
As we’ve discussed in-depth previously, as a promotional products distributor, your website is your brick and mortar storefront. Without SEO, you’re not leveraging the full marketing power of your website, so you might be missing sales opportunities. This may be particularly detrimental to your sales potential during COVID-19, which has caused a drastic virtual shift in buying behaviors and canceled promotional products events like trade shows.
Creating Better User Experiences
If done right, SEO will connect you to not only more people but the right people. It will help you to leverage your expertise to create website content that attracts already-interested potential customers.
You’ll get better-qualified website leads and users will get more relevant results to what they’re searching for online regarding your offerings, keeping both sides of the equation happy.
Establishing Trust
Another important element of SEO is building your domain and page authorities. Authority is a one to 100 scale of how trustworthy of a source your site is considered to be within your particular industry or topic. Domain refers to your entire website’s authority score, while page authorities differ between specific pages or pieces of content on your site.
Receiving backlinks to your website from already trusted sources is a great way to establish authority. Positive user interactions like comments and sharing of your posts on social media also help your website’s credibility.
Establishing your brand as an authority is probably the longest-term type of SEO effort. Just like establishing yourself as a trusted expert on a particular topic in real life takes time, consistency, and patience, so does demonstrating web authority.
Keeping Up With Competitors
Other promotional products distributors selling similar products are likely using SEO to bring search traffic into their websites. If you’re not using SEO practices, you’re positioning yourself below the competition on SERPs.
This is almost like handing free sales to your competitors who are ranking in the top search results. After optimizing your site, over time you’ll see an increase in traffic, which should ultimately lead to an increase in sales.
Focus Less on Administration and More on SEO
iPROMOTEu offers our services to affiliated promotional products distributors to help them on the back end of their businesses. Our multiple e-Commerce platform offerings can help you to create a clean and easy-to-use website that works seamlessly with other tools like our inventory management system, Xebra. Our back-office support, order financing, and preferred vendor program can help you to focus on marketing and sales rather than administrative tasks, letting you allocate more time to SEO and other important functions in 2021. We even offer a virtual assistant program to help you with online projects.
Connect with iPROMOTEu today to learn more or become an Affiliate.