Building an SEO Strategy in Imaging: Top Dealers Compared

Relationships are at the heart of the office technology sector, but where do these relationships start? In such a competitive market, acquiring more net new business isn’t easy, particularly as businesses and buyers increasingly do rely on their own independent research than they do on the views of dealers.

In an industry where price pressure is a constant concern, dealers need to do everything they can drive inbound inquiries from the best possible clients.

These days Google very much emphasizes the concept of micro-moments in the buying journey.

To expand market share, dealers must be visible and present online when buyers want to…

Know something – what are the latest innovations and use cases for imaging tech?
Go somewhere – where can clients see this technology in person?
Do something – what tasks can they accomplish?
Buy something – how can they buy their next device?

If your brand can anticipate the questions that clients are asking, and be their go-to resource for answers online, you have a real potential to grow your business. Ultimately, this is what search engine optimisation is about.

Although plenty of SEO specialists and agencies seem to try their best to make SEO sound mysterious, it really comes down to taking measured steps to attract more of the right traffic. That’s largely done by focusing on two areas – your site, and how your site is seen by the wider world and (importantly) search engines.

On-site SEO for Imaging Dealers

As with other competitive sectors with a wide variety of brand and product options, it’s vital that your site be fast, focused on the customer and easily understood by search engines to be properly indexed. If search engines can’t understand your site, you can’t be the answer it provides to potential customers.

An enormous amount of people will be entering your site through the homepage; this means it’s particularly crucial to make sure it displays correctly and loads quickly on all devices and potentially slow connections. As the showcase to the rest of your website, an under-performing homepage is driving away sales from buyers who are conducting their evaluation process without ever speaking to your sales team.

Directly linking to your most popular or important products from the homepage is key for guiding customers, but it also tells search engines that the pages you link to are important and deserve to be ranked. There’s a million and one things that we could say about technical on-site SEO but above all else, dealers should strive for clarity, speed and quality.

Off-site SEO for Imaging Dealers

How do search engines decide who gets the number 1 ranking? When products, brands and on-site content are similar, the differentiator is how authoritative a site is.

A high-authority site is one that has other relevant, topical and well-respected sites linking to it. Quality over quantity matters here though as we can see from the comparison below, market leaders have more links – and more SEO success.

Marco is a major player and has an approximate organic web audience of 16,000 people per month in the U.S. alone, and 62,000 sites linking in to the website. Strikingly, the lower the revenue level, the lower the number of links and traffic is, as we can see from the other examples.

Not every site will have the range of products of a company like Marco, but whatever your business and whatever your focus, you need to make sure that you are as visible as possible.

Off-site SEO is a big part of that, and encompasses PR, content marketing and sheer persuasion to earn coverage and links that measurably improve SEO.

Wrapping up
No industry is immune to the benefits of a logical and structured SEO plan. It’s understandable that many in the dealer community might have some skepticism about the discipline, based on how few search marketers truly understand the sector.

However, nobody should be in any doubt that ultra-informed buyers are silently making decisions about vendors all the time. To capture their attention and intercept their interest takes a serious approach to search engine marketing.

About the Author
Martin Calvert is Marketing Director at Blueclaw , an award-winning, SEO-focused digital marketing agency. Utilizing his extensive experience as a agency strategist, B2B marketer, Martin writes widely about practical approaches in digital marketing.