An SEO Playbook to Grow Your Promotional Products Business
Meet Ganja Print
With customers in all 50 states and in countries around the world, Ganja Print is a big name in the cannabis business. Patrick Woods, Ganja Print’s founder, has been running promotional products businesses since 2011. He has grown Ganja Print into a leader in custom-branded cannabis-related products for smoke shops and marijuana dispensaries.
With Fingerprint Marketing’s help, Ganja Print launched an SEO-based marketing campaign that resulted in 1st page rankings on Google with substantial return on investment—even when the company changed its name halfway through the campaign!
Contents
The Challenge
When Patrick reached out to Fingerprint Marketing, he was reasonably sure that people were searching for Ganja Print’s products. However, he was unsure how much of an opportunity SEO-based marketing might represent for his business. Furthermore, while the Ganja Print team had years of experience using traditional marketing campaigns to grow their promotional products brand, they did not have the skillset or the know-how when it came to executing on digital marketing campaigns.
Fingerprint Marketing’s SEO Playbook
Because GanjaPrint.com is built on WooCommerce, Fingerprint Marketing was able to use our tried-and-true WooCommerce SEO playbook to execute a first-rate campaign. In fact, we were able to execute on our powerful SEO strategies despite that fact that the company changed names halfway through! Let us explain: Ganja Print had previously been called 99centbics.com, but they decided to change their name because BICs would not let them sell any products besides BIC lighters on 99centbics.com. So even though the name change came as an unexpected surprise, it opened up great opportunities for their business. So, what did our WooCommerce Playbook encompass?
Keyword Research
Our keyword research uncovered that SEO-based marketing had incredible potential in Ganja Print’s target market. We identified dozens of keywords related to “custom” and “wholesale” cannabis paraphernalia. Lighters, lanyards, jars… you name it. They were racking up tens of thousands of searches every month. And each of these searches represented hundreds and thousands of dollars in revenue for brand merchandise produced and delivered in bulk.
Are you seeing what we were seeing? The search volume and revenue numbers combined meant that a successful campaign could definitely deliver enough return on investment to justify SEO marketing.
Relevance
According to our keyword research, Ganja Print’s website had specific pages that needed to be optimized to capture all the search traffic we had identified: Home page, 7 product pages, and 1 category page.
What does this mean? It means that we needed to get into the nitty-gritty, behind-the-scenes information of their website to be sure that it was telling search engines like Google that Ganja Print is a page they should rank right at the top for specific searches.
Here’s the information we targeted for our on-page optimization to establish Ganja Print’s SEO relevance:
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- URL
- Meta Title
- Meta Description
- H1
- H2s
Content
There are several different ways to signal search engines like Google that your website offers the most relevant information for searchers. And our playbook optimizes them all! So next we looked at content: we looked at the strength of Ganja Print’s competitors and used our research to determine how much content to write to pull ahead in the rankings.
Why? Because high-quality, relevant content signals Google that your page will address exactly what their searchers are wondering about — and that’s what they’ll prioritize (rank).
After our research, we wrote 2,000 words of content with structured data. Structured data is, essentially, easily digestible content — something that website readers love! Think tables and bullet points. That’s right! Writing new, high-quality content means higher rankings in Google searches.
Backlinks
The next element of our playbook involves using backlinks to drive rankings and traffic through the roof. Building backlinks encompasses making sure that specific websites link back to Ganja Print, signaling that their website’s value to Google — and helping qualified leads navigate directly to them. So, with Ganja Print, we built just enough backlinks to really make a difference in their rankings — and ROI.
Domain Migration
The final step we took for Ganja Print was to ensure that they did not lose the rankings they had garnered as 99centbics.com. With their original domain, we successfully achieved over 30 1st-page rankings. Without a thoughtful approach, we would have lost their rankings — and their ROI. So here’s what we did to ensure a smooth transition from 99centbics.com to ganjaprint.com without any business impact:
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- We set up 301 redirects
- We moved SEO-optimized content to the new site
We managed a phased roll-out approach by first redirecting the inner pages of 99centbics.com while leaving the Home page up an active.
This domain migration approach allowed us to rank both domains simultaneously for “custom bic lighters” — making for an IDEAL transition.
Results
Between November 2016 and February 2018, Ganja Print achieved Fifty-one keywords ranking on the 1st-page of Google. Of there, 30% ranked in the top 3 positions. You can check out the change they experienced in the screenshot below. But the long and the short of is this: Fingerprint Marketing’s SEO strategy garnered Ganja Print a substantial return on their marketing investment. By driving more traffic to their website, this promotional products business boosted sales and boosted revenue significantly in just over a year.
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