At times, the promotional products industry can lag behind when it comes to technology, but it’s never too late to catch up. If you haven’t been implementing SEO best practices for your website, Idea Custom Solutions is here to help.

What is SEO?
First, let’s learn what SEO actually is. The acronym stands for search engine optimization. Essentially, utilizing SEO means that your website, social media, Google and any other online business accounts you have are optimized to be more easily found online. Sites with great SEO tend to show up on the first results pages during online searches.

No, SEO isn’t Dead.
You may have heard from many marketers that SEO is officially dead, content is king and no one optimizes for search engines anymore. But that’s just not true. Business 2 Community notes that as long as search engines exist, so will SEO — otherwise, how will anyone find your company online?

Make it Work for You.
Here’s what to do to make sure your company’s SEO is getting the best results. First, amp up your on-page SEO. This means you’ll need to select keywords that describe what your business can do for others. Come up with a list: “marketing,” “promotional products,” and “branding” are good starts. Make sure those keywords are included in the content on your website.

You’ll want to make sure the SEO for your website itself is up-to-date as well. That means optimizing URLs, creating title tags and meta descriptions (the text that shows up on the search page when someone googles your business) and including image alt text (the text that replaces an image if there are slow connections, errors occur or if viewers use screen readers).

Don’t forget about links, either. There are two ways to tackle this: internal and external.

• Internal links are the links on your own page that link to content within your page. So maybe in your most recent blog post, you discuss the value of light-up pens. You’ll want to link to the product page for those light-up pens within your own site. Determining the internal linking structure that works the best for your site can be quite complicated, but here’s an excellent guide.
• External links are links to your site from other websites. Ideally, you’ll want your website to be the authority of your particular part of the business. That way other sites will link to you without being asked. But if you aren’t there yet, try writing guest posts for other, more popular sites. You can link to your website within the text and you’ll be seen as an expert on the topics. You can also create digital education materials, an Amazon ebook about selling in the promotional products industry for example, that will link back to your site. And, if you use a lot of photography on your website, upload those images to Creative Commons with an attribution requirement to link back to your site whenever the image is used.

SEO can be a bit of a bear — and a bit of a bore — but it’s more important than you think for your website.

At least graphic design can be simple, as well as fast and cost-effective when you partner with Idea Custom Solutions for vector artwork, embroidery digitizing, image editing, virtual samples, marketing materials and more!