Seasonal Trends
Visibility Vs Authority
Link Acquisition
Content Performance
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10 minutes
Reading time
20 pages
Length
Within the report, we look at the wins and losses of each online printing company in different areas of their site. This gives an overall view of where each brand sits in their digital market and the wider printing industry, who their biggest competitors are and who is coming up the ranks.
We look at technical aspects of the site such as SEO Visibility and Link Authority to see year on year performance. We also delve into your company’s social standing, highlighting Brand Reach and owned social scores. Overall, with this report Salience provides a snapshot of the online printing industry’s digital performance for the year, considering current standings, movements, and opportunities for digital growth.
We can only feature the top 50 brands in our final report, but we consider the whole sector when doing our research. If you aren’t one of the brands featured, get in touch and we’ll provide your data. We’ll also talk you through it if you’d like. You may also appear in our Stationery & Office Supplies Report.
Once you’ve looked at the report you’ll have an overall idea of how the online printing market is doing and which brands are performing well. This post aims to look a little deeper, identifying exactly why these brands have ended up at the top of their game and how they did it.
Have the report to hand while reading it so you can refer to it during key points.
Visibility is extremely important, but improving it year on year can be tricky. Which printing services sites managed to do it?
In our printing market analysis, Vistaprint remains the market leader despite losing 8% of their visibility this year.
PS Print has also kept their place in 2nd position after a small 4% loss.
The rest of the top five have made great gains:
Other big wins in the top 10 include Optimal Print who has gained 48% visibility and Digital Printing who has had a really successful year with a huge 89% visibility improvement.
There have also been some losses for Moo (-12%), 123 Print (-6%) and Banana Print (-2%).
An overview of the top 10 sites in terms of their organic visibility looks like this:
Delving further into the findings, the five biggest visibility winners year-on-year are notably all brands found in the top 10 list.
The brands that follow are the five who lost out the most in terms of their their year-on-year visibility. Notably, these include Vistaprint who despite suffering an 8% visibility decline remain in the top spot of the biggest online printing company in terms of their reach, as you’ve seen. The other brands aren’t so fortunate.
There are two keyword lists in the report; one with high competition keywords and one with keywords that offer the best opportunities.
Vistaprint is ranking in position 1 for most of the high competition ‘business card’ keyword terms.
The term ‘create business cards’ has a featured snippet which is showcasing Canva’s business card service. Though Canva is not a traditional printing company, there’s a lot to be taken from their page copy which has landed them this feature.
The copy describes how you can use their service, the aspects that go into creating a business card and FAQs with lots of calls to action throughout and handy illustrations.
Treating page copy like a guide or short article instead of traditional SEO copy has been proven to improve page rankings within a few weeks.
Read more: Google Algorithm Update Reinforces The Importance Of Content To Rankings
The word ‘cheap’ appears four times in the keyword sets.
Don’t shy away from using ‘cheap’ in your title tags, meta descriptions and copy – no one is searching for ‘affordable’ or ‘value’, so it’s useless optimising your pages for those words.
Well done to Banana Print who has optimised well for this and are ranking within the top five for all of the ‘cheap’ related keywords.
Since 2012, the Venice update changed the way Google looks at local markets. Taking a user’s location into consideration, the search engine now populates results that appear most relevant to their location and query.
This is great for small businesses but means the competition can be harder than it was before.
This is a Venice related market, so a blended organic and paid strategy is required when it comes to search.
Set up rank tracking to see where you rank well for each location in the UK. Sites that rank well organically can be excluded from your search campaign.
Building a strong link profile can improve your SEO as well as gaining you coverage as a brand.
Moo is top of the links charts with the highest average number of links gained per month of the highest quality.
They have a fantastic blog which provides advice and information on branding, designing and using their products. This is gaining great links with one article with sci-fi author Max Gladstone receiving a link from Entrepreneur.com.
However, their blog exists on a subdomain rather than in a subfolder. They could improve the value of the link equity gained if they moved this over to a subfolder such as moo.com/blog.
Moz founder Rand Fishkin claims that moving a subdomain to a subfolder almost always increases search traffic.
PS Print is in second place with the second highest average number of referrals and quality of links.
A lot of their links are going to products, but they do have a blog which is also gaining a lot of links. Their blog is split up into different sections which has advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, if you’re interested solely in design, you can find everything you want under this heading. But, if you want a more overall view of printing, it’s quite difficult to navigate.
The PS Print blog also exists on a subdomain so will have the same loss of link equity as with Moo.
Lead generation markets like online printing thrive on testimonials and customer reviews. Social media platforms, therefore, are a printing industry trend being the perfect place to display such content and expand your audience.
Vistaprint is smashing the social charts with a huge number of brand searches per month and an impressive owned social score. Here are some things we loved about Vistaprint’s social channels:
Moo is second in the social charts. They also have an impressive social score but quite a low number of brand searches in comparison. Their social feeds feature product images with client testimonials, regular promotions and videos showcasing their work. However, there isn’t much in the way of helpful content or articles.
One of the best ways to gain new followers and reach new audiences is by creating social content that encourages users to share.
People love seeing their picture being reposted by a brand, so bringing in client images not only gives you great social content with a small amount of effort on your part but also opens your brand to new viewers and shows you as a respectable company with a personality.
No, this report is free. Just like all the other reports we produce. These reports help us to build relationships with brands in specific industries. Feel free to download your free copy with the form above.
Not all brands meet our thresholds when we put these Tech & E-Services reports together. If your brand is missing from this report, get in touch asap and we can include your brand in a personal report.
Speak to us if you have any further queries about our data or download the report for further insights.
