Printing your way to SEO success

I run a small digital marketing agency in the UK, and we have a strong focus on search in all its paid, organic and local formats. Over the years, we’ve come across all manner of clients. All shapes and sizes. Local businesses. National businesses. E-commerce businesses. Online and offline (or “bricks and clicks,” as we like to call it).

With so many clients over more than 15 years, we noticed that the majority of businesses are laser-focused on search and digital, while others have concentrated predominantly on offline marketing activities. These are two sides of the same coin, and as I discussed in my SEO Beyond the Browser column, both can contribute to a successful marketing campaign.

This month, I want to follow on from my previous post and take a look at printed media in particular and how the use of smart print can bring additional success to your SEO, Local SEO and digital marketing campaigns.

Merging print & digital

My agency, Bowler Hat, partners with a local printing company called Print Print. Together, we look at ways in which we can create smart campaigns that merge print and digital. This is something of a USP for both of us in our respective segments; our partnership means we can both offer a service that goes beyond the narrow approach of competitors in both of our marketplaces.

We take the approach of looking at how we can improve the physical and digital awareness of the client’s business and how the two intersect. We want to use print to:

1. drive customers to the digital presence,

2. connect the dots between the physical and digital presence,

3. get users conducting brand searches and interacting with a site to enable us to personalize marketing,

4. convince people to sign up to email lists and

5. build remarketing lists.

The options and implications are many. Just last month, the Moz Whiteboard Friday talked of how simply influencing branded searches can provide SEO benefits, so anything you can do here from a branding perspective will help round out your offline and online marketing strategy.

The video is an interesting watch, and if you have never come across concepts such as co-occurrence of keywords and entity relationships, then I recommend you check out that video. Some of it is theoretical, but it is often backed up by patents, and there is a good dose of common sense here — which is never a bad thing in the often wacky world of SEO.

[Read the full article on Search Engine Land.]