Do Sign Shops Need an SEO? Making sure your sign company is actively pursuing SEO (Search Engine Optomization) for your Web site is as important as keeping your customers happy. To put SEO (or Google Ranking) into perspective in the sign industry, take the two fictional sign shops of John’s Sign Xpress and Vince’s Sign Corporation. Both do excellent, high-quality work and have invested thousands of dollars into high-tech sign-making equipment for their respective businesses. John’s Sign Xpress is in its second year of business and currently consists of owner John and four other employees. John is making a concentrated effort on expanding his customer base. Meanwhile Vince’s Sign Corporation has been in business for over fifteen years, employs over twenty-five people, and already has a substantial customer base. Both companies offer wholesale CNC services and count on national business as a large part of their revenue. Vince has a professional Web site but hasn’t updated it in years and is not concerned about Google Ranking. But one of the key business strategies John is concentrating on is expanding his Web presence. He allotted part of his advertising budget into building a professional Web site where he could showcase his services and work. Research by John led him to the conclusion that, to increase the number of visitors to his Web site (thus increasing business, hopefully), he will have to concentrate on optimizing the content he has online to people searching for wholesale CNC work. John started signing up for as many free sign shop and service directories as he could, placing a link to his Web site on as many as possible. He also started a link exchange page
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Sign Builder Illustrated // November 2013
on his Web site and listed vendors and friends’ companies that were industry related. He strategically added keywords such as “wholesale CNC signs” on his site and even started a monthly blog showing pictures of the beautiful signs he made. Slowly but surely, his Web site was gaining in rank and the number of visitors to it were increasing. After time, John’s work paid off, and his Web site gained a higher SEO score than Vince’s Sign Corporation. As a result, people searching the term “wholesale CNC sign” had a far greater likelihood of landing on John’s Web site first and missing Vince’s completely. The moral of this story: While Vince’s Sign Corporation will probably not go out of business for not concentrating so much on SEO, the chances of John’s Sign Xpress becoming a serious contender in the wholesale industry over time are high. After all, as John’s Google Ranking campaign continues and say the visitors to his Web site surpass 5,000 people monthly (provided he still provides the quality level of work he always has), the chances of his amount of business increasing rise exponentially—SEO is the true Force Multiplier for a business. —Brad Burnett Brad Burnett is marketing director at Coastal Enterprises (www.precisionboard.com) in Orange, California.
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