The search engines have evolved significantly over the past 20 years, which means as they evolve so must your search engine marketing strategy. One of the biggest changes was when the search engines began tailoring searches to be most relevant based on the relationship between what the intent of the customer searching was and the proximity of the business to that customer.
This is a very dynamic relationship and has many variables but ultimately this led to what you may know as Local SEO (or local search).
Even more detailed was when the search engines split to cater to desktop users and mobile users differently. This reinforced the need for print companies to optimize for location ( Local SEO ).
So by now you've realized the answer to the question "Should You as a Print Company do Local SEO?" is Yes!
How Does Local SEO Affect Your Print Company?
This is a great question and one that has an ever changing answer when you get down in to the details. But essentially the products and services that Google (we'll refer to all search engine references from this point on as Google) sees as being most relevant to customers as a local result vs a national result will be determined by the behavior of the customer who searches for the product or service.
Here's an example:
Let's say 1,000 people search for custom vinyl banners
Then Google shows them...
- Paid Search Text Ads
- Local Maps Listings
- Shopping Ads
- Organic (non-paid) Search Results that have a mix of local companies and national companies
And 400 of them click on Local Maps Listings, 350 of them click on Local Organic Result and the remaining 250 are evenly split between the other result types.
If this pattern is what happens over time then Google will begin to show more often and more prominently the Maps Listing and Local Organic listings with less and less of the other result types.
But if more people clicked on other result types then Google would alter what it shows according to the same logic in the example above.
If everything was clicked on evenly then the results would continue to show mixed types since there is no clear statistical preference.
What Does This Mean for Your Print Company?
Basically it means you need to pay attention to what Google shows as results for the products and services you want to show up for. We recommend checking every quarter or 6 months to see how the results look. And if those results start to lean a certain way then you should follow suit and optimize your site for it.
Side Note: Luckily we do this work at Pryntbase for the entire industry so members don't have to do the research, we do it for the entire industry.
Knowing this information also helps you prioritize what you optimize and how you optimize it.
If your goal is to get more local sales of a specific product or service and Google doesn't show that it is searched for locally most of the time then you can choose other ways of advertising that product (such as ads) instead of spending a bunch of time on Local SEO that won't make a huge impact on your business.
So make sure you do the research and make efficient use of your time when marketing your company online as it relates to Local SEO for your print company.
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