Most people understand that industrial SEO is critical to getting your company to the top of search engine results. However, the concept of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be perplexing and even frustrating for many manufacturers and industrial businesses.
In addition, most of the SEO advice you’ll find online directs writers and content marketers toward one-size-fits-all best practices. Of course, these generic solutions don’t offer as much benefit to B2B and industrial marketers.
See, businesses in the industrial and manufacturing space provide specific technical offerings to niche technical audiences. In addition, their campaigns are executed over the course of longer sales cycles.
You must also contend with the fact that industrial SEO differs from traditional SEO in a number of other ways. For example, most local business SEO practitioners focus on ranking for high-volume search queries. However, the volume of queries pertaining to your business is typically lower in industrial SEO.
Nonetheless, SEO remains the most essential marketing strategy for any industrial company. So if you’re looking to maintain long-term competitiveness in today’s environment, getting your industrial SEO right is crucial.
When done properly, Industrial SEO can be the most effective method of connecting organic leads to relevant information provided by your industrial business.
In this guide, we’re going to cover the basics as well as more advanced concepts of industrial SEO. So, if you own a company in the manufacturing or industrial sectors, this SEO guide is for you. We’ll be providing you with highly-actionable advice and tips to get you ahead in your digital marketing strategy.
Let’s get started on how to use industrial SEO to shortlist your company and increase revenue.
The Importance of Industrial SEO
When searching for industrial services online, users rarely look past the first page of results to find what they’re looking for. In fact, a recent study showed that page-one results enjoy 95% of all search traffic. Not only that but the percentage of clicks also decreases with each subsequent results page.
In other words, if you’re still stuck on page 2 or beyond, your chances of getting found online are slim to none. Being near the top of the first page for keywords relating to your goods and services is therefore crucial.
Industrial and manufacturing professionals frequently conduct online searches to learn about new machinery or find the industrial products they need. This is true whether you’re a procurement specialist, a product engineer, or an operations manager.
This means they’ll visit manufacturing websites that are search engine optimized and appear on the first page of search results.
Why Industrial SEO Is a Major Challenge
Many manufacturing companies lack all of the elements required for effective SEO. To be fair, there are many reasons for this. There is a lot to manage, from a well-designed website to optimized on-site content.
More often than not, however, search engine optimization is typically a digital strategy that most industrial and manufacturing businesses overlook. You see, a lot of businesses still think that way because most of their revenue comes from commercial enterprises.
Therefore, spending money on conventional marketing through trade journals and trade shows is sufficient. They ignore the abundance of data that points to a shift toward a preference for digital in all types of enterprises.
Despite this, it is still true that manufacturing is significantly influenced by commercial enterprises. However, there is also a rise in the demand for highly customized, personalized goods, which is where manufacturing comes into play.
Because of rising demand for personalized goods and a growing preference for digital information, industrial and manufacturing companies must now invest in SEO. By optimizing your website for search engines, you ensure that your business is visible to those looking for your products and services.
Furthermore, by making your company visible on search engines, you increase your chances of converting searchers into paying customers. Let’s take a look at some of the major benefits that industrial SEO can provide to your business.
How Can Industrial SEO Help Your Business?
An SEO campaign is only one of several digital marketing strategies available, but it is usually the best option. Here’s why it works so well.
Higher Quality and More Relevant Leads
Your Facebook advertisements or mass email campaigns may be bringing in more visitors to your website. However, there is no guarantee that these people require or want your services.
Using an SEO strategy, you can attract customers who are looking for what you have to offer. You’re more likely to generate leads because these people are already looking to buy an industrial product.
Long-Term Return on Investment
Assume you create a digital ad campaign on Facebook. You notice an increase in website traffic and a few new leads. Following that, there is an increase in sales. Regrettably, your gains will be fleeting. Unless you continue to fund Facebook ads, your sales will not increase.
In contrast, industrial SEO provides a long-term return on investment. Of course, for the best results, some aspects of SEO must be maintained on a regular basis. Others, on the other hand, can be more project-oriented and thus less expensive.
For example, an SEO-friendly blog post about industrial sheet metal parts could be written and uploaded to your website. It has the potential to become a popular search engine result for the topic and appear on the search engine results page.
As long as the industrial sheet metal parts continued to rank highly in the SERP at this point, you would have increased traffic to your website from interested customers. This could theoretically last for years, which is a much longer period of time than a Facebook ad that lasts just a week.
Higher Revenue Growth
What are more relevant leads, long-term ROI, and increased brand awareness all about? They all contribute to increasing your revenue stream.
When it comes to your digital marketing strategy, SEO has many facets. It puts equal emphasis on your website’s technical components to ensure its efficient operation and the content that visitors will read.
The foundation of your business strategy is SEO, which keeps in mind both the user and the search engine platform.
Increased Brand Awareness
Visitors are still paying attention to your website even if they simply scroll by without clicking. Your brand will be exposed to more consumers the more frequently it appears in search engine results. Before they can remember you, you will need to repeat it about seven times.
Even if they do not use your services, you will be on their mind if someone they know does. An SEO strategy raises your manufacturing company’s visibility among buyers, competitors, and suppliers.
Important Elements of an SEO Strategy
#1) Begin With Your Target Audience
The benefits of SEO for manufacturing businesses will only materialize when your target audience is catered to. It’s crucial to keep in mind that the buyers you want to draw are different from the people on whom most industries concentrate their SEO efforts.
Although they might use search engines to find pertinent topics, their actions might differ. This is where audience analysis can help.
Analyzing your audience allows you to create a customized profile of hypothetical, ideal consumers that goes beyond demographic analysis. It also allows you to understand your audience’s pain points, which can then be used to guide your SEO strategy.
#2) Keyword Research
Even if you have a fully functional, aesthetically pleasing website, if your content does not speak the language of your target audience, the chances of organic search driving traffic to your website are slim.
All effective SEO strategies take into account the keywords used by a specific group of people to find your products and services in their online searches.
You can sign up for SEO platforms like SEMrush, Moz, and Ahrefs as a brand. These platforms can give you information about Google search volume metrics and competitive standards for any search query.
Another free tool you can use to get countless estimates of search volume is Google Keyword Planner.
#3) Optimisation of Content
It is now time to organically incorporate those keywords into the content so that they feel natural and aligned with the content. This is referred to as on-page SEO.
As a brand, you must consider the user’s point of view and create content with foresight. Consider whether this content organically answers the user’s search queries.
If it does, there is a good chance that your content will be found and attract a lot of traffic. Avoid presenting more than one service offering on a single page for businesses in the manufacturing and industrial sectors.
Furthermore, a page this complicated might not receive a good ranking from the Google algorithm.
#4) Longtail Keyword-Targeted Content
Overall, short-tail keywords are highly competitive and have high search volumes. It can be challenging to ascertain the user intent with short-tail keywords, which is another problem.
Long Tail keywords should be targeted regardless of the type of content you create for your industrial company’s website.
Long Tail keywords are highly specific keyword phrases that generate less traffic but are simpler to rank for. People who arrive at your site via a longtail keyword are more likely to convert.
For an industrial company, long tail keywords could include “large-scale manufacturing machinery in [your city].” This suggests that a searcher is interested in machinery in your region, which makes them much more likely to be a potential client than someone looking for general information.
#5) Publish and Send Google Fresh Content
Your work isn’t completely finished when you have reviewed, polished, and published your content to your website. There are a few more steps to take to guarantee that the content is seen.
If you have followed the instructions and created content that will benefit your best clients and prospects, email it to them using your marketing list.
You should include an executive summary in the email body so that recipients can benefit from the information without having to click through, but you should also include a link to the full article.
Post links to new, useful content on your social media platforms, and be sure to quickly follow up with comments, likes, and team shares to help it spread.
Finally, submit the new URL to Google Search Console as soon as possible so that it can be crawled. Google will find your website if it is crawled on a regular basis, but you can speed up the process, which could otherwise take a few weeks, by submitting directly to Google.
#6) The Structure of Your Website
Your SEO strategy may fail if it lacks a solid technical foundation. This is true even if you have created high-quality content. That is just the nature of dealing with technical SEO.
The website must provide users with a fast, secure, and user-friendly web experience. Technical SEO is influenced by page load speed, site link structure, HTTPS protocol, mobile-friendly design, and other factors.
Google gives each of these factors a specific weight when determining a website’s ranking. Consider the following examples:
- Page speed: Is your website lagging because it has too many large photos or videos? Is there any extraneous code on your website? These and other factors may cause your website to load slowly, causing visitors to abandon your content before engaging with it.
Examine your Google PageSpeed Insights report or request a free website grade.
- SSL (Secure Socket Layer) Certificates: When ranking a page, Google takes into account whether or not it has an SSL certificate. A secure website also gives your visitors the impression that your business cares about security and adheres to industry best practices.
#7) Properly-Written Metadata
The text that appears in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) is the metadata of a website. On Google, all organic listings include a meta title, meta description, and the URL of the page.
Metadata is a piece of code contained within the header of a webpage that helps search engines understand what the page is about. Google is constantly attempting to direct its users to the most relevant page available, and metadata allows search engines to determine if your website contains the information they seek.
The ranking of the website on the SERP is influenced by these factors. As a result, having clear, concise metadata with a good scattering of keywords can increase the rate at which people click on your search results.
The URL for the page must be easy to read and concise without being a long string of letters and numbers. A website’s content management system or a third-party plug-in can easily control metadata.
- Meta Title: Google considers the appropriate title tag when determining search engine rankings. Your meta title appears at the top of search engine results pages.
SEO benefits from having concentrated keywords at the beginning of the Meta title. It shouldn’t go over the predetermined limit of 160 characters.
- Meta Description: Short summaries of web pages are intended to be provided by meta descriptions. They can be a single sentence or a short paragraph that appears beneath the clickable link in Google search results.
Despite not being used to determine search results, meta descriptions are essential for encouraging users to click through from search engine result pages. They serve as ad copy, encouraging people to click on your site link and persuade them that your page is the most relevant to their search query.
#8) Building Backlinks
Inbound links from external websites, also known as backlinks, are given high weightage by search engines. A search engine considers any website with an external link to be a direct endorsement of the contents of that website.
This directly signals content validation, indicating that your website should be ranked higher in search results.
However, creating backlinks in a B2B space can be difficult. Still, brands can try putting their website links in online supplier directories, trade magazines, event participation and sponsorship, and customer and vendor partnerships.
#9) Analytics and Measurement
To evaluate the effectiveness of SEO, a measurement strategy is required. Install a Google tag manager on your website to monitor organic traffic and other metrics.
With Google Analytics, you’ll have all the information and insights you need to fine-tune your SEO strategy. Furthermore, using tag manager and analytics, you can track the opt-in forms on your website and monitor the type of leads generated.
#10) Easy-To-Use Navigation
SEO also takes into account how visitors can engage with your website. To ensure that your customers can find what they’re looking for on your site, you must first check that the navigation is easy to use.
They might leave your website to find another business if it takes them a long time to find your pricing.
Drop-down navigation is something you might want to think about if you have a lot of pages. These give users the option to click a tab to view additional options related to the title.
The top of web pages typically has a navigation bar. If you run an industrial business, your navigation bar might have tabs for “Learn More,” “Services We Offer,” and “About Us.” Users will be able to easily find what they’re looking for with the help of these tabs.
#11) Local or National SEO
After you’ve gotten your house in order, you should consider who you want to target with your content. A general breakdown is as follows: a local or national audience. The line should be reflected in the content on your website.
- Local SEO: If you work for a manufacturing facility (such as a steel company) that can only deliver items to specific locations or has predefined boundaries specifying which leads you may convert to clients, a local approach is recommended. Create a Google My Business account and use keywords that are specific to the areas you can serve.
You can also look into various local SEO solutions to manage directory entries in bulk. You can update your information in one place and have it sent to multiple directory listings, such as Google My Business, Yelp, and Facebook, by using Moz Local.
- National SEO: For the majority of manufacturers and industrial enterprises that may distribute their products statewide or have multiple distribution locations to target a larger audience group, a broader content and keyword approach is recommended.
#12) Measure Success to Drive Growth
Like any other marketing strategy, SEO for manufacturing companies is ineffective without ongoing evaluation of your results. Without specific indicators, it is difficult to determine whether your optimized blogging is actually assisting in the growth of your company.
Unlike other businesses that base SEO effectiveness on visitor generation, the manufacturing industry should use superior KPIs. The total number of new leads and prospects generated is one of them.
As a result, before starting any blog, I need to know how many tips this post/keyword will help me produce. Using Google Analytics and HubSpot’s capabilities, you can create a direct link between the two variables.
#13) Remove 404 Pages
When visitors try to access a page on your website that does not exist, a 404 error message is displayed. Your website’s users may encounter 404 errors if you remove any pages or products from it. It’s important to keep in mind that it affects more than just the final user experience.
Your website may not be functioning properly if Google crawls a significant portion of your 404 pages, which could harm your search engine rankings.
Setting up a 301 redirect is the best way to handle it. It basically sends visitors and search engines to another website. Furthermore, by redirecting their authority to the new page, it transfers any traction you may have gained from the 404 pages to the new page.
Working with an Industrial SEO Team
You might feel prepared to incorporate SEO procedures into your website on your own now that you have more knowledge about SEO. But for the best outcomes, we advise working with a skilled group that provides a range of services.
An industrial SEO team can also provide you with the benefit of its contacts. If you’re trying to break into new markets, especially in the industrial sector, it may be difficult to attract the attention of well-known websites and publications on your own.
In contrast, many SEO teams have long-standing relationships with specific publishers or journalists. They have the resources to fight for you and get you in the door at the very least.
