Your Print Website Won’t Survive Without This One Thing

Rachel Nies / March 12th, 2019

As the Marketing Director here at Marketing Ideas For Printers (MI4P), there’s one question I get asked a lot:

How do I get more traffic to my website?

It’s a valid question. With numbers like 1,630,322,579 websites created in 2018 alone, it makes sense that printers would be asking how to make their website unique.

Sometimes that question is followed up with an additional question similar to, “Rachel, could you take a look at my website and see what could be improved upon?”

Recently, a prospect asked me that very thing, and I agreed to offer any insight I may have on their website. While the geeks at MI4P can look at a website and tell you how everything’s working from a technical perspective, I tend to look at websites from a human perspective (like your prospects and customers!)

What I found when reviewing their website was a key component was missing. A key piece so critical that I had to write about it here to make you all aware of it.

The Good

First, let’s start with the good things I found.

This printer’s website was well-designed, informative, and for the most part, easy to navigate. You could tell that whoever had invested the time to create and maintain this website had done a good job. It listed the products they printed, it told a little bit about the company, and it had an overall professional look and feel to it.

The Bad

Now, for the bad news.

I found a list of products they printed, but I couldn’t actually order anything. There were no product samples, no pricing information, and nothing was clickable. In a sense, the whole website acted as a landing page of sorts. With so few webpages for search engines to index, it made sense that this particular website had a hard time showing up in any search engine results.

What’s more, because there was nothing I could do on the website, I bounced right off of it. The higher the bounce rate, the less chance a website has of ranking well because the search engine assumes you didn’t find what you were looking for.

The Ugly – The Missing Piece Every Website Needs

Ok, now for the critical component – the ONE thing every print website should have.

Are you ready for it?

Every website needs to have a reason to come back to it.

Once I clicked through ALL of the pages on their website (and there wasn’t a lot of them), I quickly realized that this website would not be a source of future information for me because it was a static site that never changed, and I’d just seen everything.

The Truth About Print Websites

The reality is, there are a lot of companies that could provide a website for your print company.

Most of them have options to provide you with the necessities of what you need like estimating, a file-sending tool, and some sort of e-commerce suite.

Those things will help reduce and eliminate some of the “bad” I mentioned above like not being able to order printing, having product samples, etc.

But if you want to make your website great, you need one thing:

Frequently updated, valuable content that answers the questions of your audience and gives them a reason to come back for more.

Why Content Makes a Difference

To show you how content is a crucial ingredient for the success of your print website, here are five things content does for you:

1. It increases the number of pages on your website.

More pages = more chances to be crawled in a search query = higher ranking.

2. It provides value to the two most important things in your online life:

1) Your customers. When you offer regularly updated tips, tricks, and how-tos, you prove you’re the right printer for them and give them a reason to continually seek you out for your expertise.

2) Search Engines (Google, Bing, etc.). The goal is to write for humans and not for the search engines, but your frequently updated, relevant content helps to make your website shine a little brighter across all search engines.

3. It decreases your bounce rate.

The more your visitors are interested in your content and finding something new on your website, the longer they stick around on your website. This tells the search engines that they got it right – this is what the visitor was looking for.

4. It builds trust with your audience and highlights your expertise.

If you’re a content-producing mastermind for tips and information on everything from print to design to tech tips to marketing, you’re the type of printer online visitors want.

Remember, when people meet someone in person, they rely on all their senses to determine if the person knows their stuff, operates with integrity, and has their best interest in mind. Your visitors online don’t get that luxury unless you show who you are and what you know through your online content.

5. It helps you stand out among the competition.

It’s still amazing to me how many printers have websites that are simple landing pages that display the company’s contact information. These printers tend to think online ordering means you sent the file via email.

But look at this from the viewpoint of your prospective customers. Which printer do you think they’ll do business with – the one with the static website or the one that answers their questions through valuable content and allows them to order online, design online, and more.

Even if your prospects can order printing online through your website, but they don’t, just the fact that they can will help build their confidence in you, even if they end up bringing in their order in person.

Prove You Exist with Content

Lastly, let me leave you with this.

As Gary Vaynerchuk says, “If you’re not putting out relevant content, you don’t exist.” 

Don’t go through all of the hard work of putting together a website and forget the most essential piece. And remember, if you need help with content made for printers, you know right where to get it.