What do we talk about when we talk about “wide format”? We’ve had a version of this conversation before, but this time I want to come at it from a different angle (and I promise no Venn diagrams!): what do we search for when we search for “wide format”?  

There was a time, and it wasn’t that long ago, when a print shop would say that “adding wide-format services” was a substantial opportunity. That’s still true, but there is a sense that “wide format” is losing its cachet as a specific term. Shops that are seeing success in selling wide-format services aren’t necessarily marketing themselves as “wide-format printers.” Rather, the emphasis now is on specific applications. The trick becomes: how to best communicate that to potential customers?

In the Winter 2019 issue of LeadingPRINT, APTech’s quarterly magazine, there was a feature written by Joe Gass, president and CEO of Heritage Printing, who had built his company’s wide-format business in large part by effectively leveraging search engine optimization (SEO). Without going into SEO in great detail, a significant portion of it entails choosing the right keywords to add to a website to ensure that that site appears toward the top of the first page of Google’s search results. (After all, the loneliest place in the world is page 2 or beyond.) It’s telling the keywords that Gass chose to include. He writes: