Manufacturing SEO: Take Advantage of One of The Best Digital Marketing Strategies for Manufacturers
Your manufacturing business’ website is useless if it is not getting traffic from your target market. This is why you need marketing strategies to bring the ideal visitors to your website consistently. One of the best ways to do this is through search engine optimization (SEO). And, it’s hard to argue against this strategy since search engines bring a majority of traffic to websites all over the world. Best of all, this strategy will not cost your business for every visitor it brings to your website.
So, what is manufacturing SEO? Why is it important for your manufacturing business to make use of it? How does it benefit your business? Read on to find out the answers to these questions and more.
What is Manufacturing SEO?
Manufacturing SEO (search engine optimization) refers to a collection of strategies that will improve a manufacturing business’ website rankings for the keywords and phrases it targets. The increase in ranking leads to more website traffic, increased conversion rate, and longer time spent browsing per visit.
Search engine optimization strategies can be divided into two main categories – on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO involves building a website’s authority through the use of links from other websites. Search engines will see the traffic through these links as an indication of your content being a good source of information. Because of this, search engine algorithms will add this into their consideration when ranking your page in their search results.
Off-page SEO can be done in two ways. First is by publishing unique and valuable content on your website to attract website owners, content writers, reporters, bloggers, and industry influencers to link to your content as a reference. The second is by posting links on third-party websites, such as social media platforms, infographic links, and other websites.
On-page SEO
On-page SEO involves the optimization of any elements on your business’ website. This includes keywords and phrases used for its content and technical website elements such as site architecture and URL structure. This area of SEO receives the most attention from businesses and marketing agencies.
Why SEO is Important for Manufacturing Compan
When you think of SEO, it is often thought of as a strategy for business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing. But, it is just as effective for business-to-business marketing (B2B). Moreover, with the importance of an online presence in business today, your website needs to attract the right kind of traffic to your website and SEO is one of the best marketing strategies to make this happen. Read on to find out why.
B2B customers are people too
Your market needs large amounts of information before making a buying decision
You need it to maintain a competitive advantage
But, what if your competitors are not utilizing SEO for their business, does this mean that you can get away with not doing it as well? Well, using SEO is a must in this situation. You will find it easier for your website to rank at the top of search results since you will be the only one targeting the keywords in your niche. This will give your brand the best chance of establishing itself as the authority in your market.
SEO brings people who need the services you offer to your website
How Your Manufacturing Business Can Benefit From SEO
Implementing a good manufacturing SEO strategy will benefit your business in the following ways.
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Get better search visibility
This is the ultimate benefit of applying SEO to your website – increased search visibility. With the majority of internet traffic coming from search engines, it is important to get your website ranked, at least, on the first page of its targeted keywords. This high search visibility will lead to more traffic to your website and increased brand awareness among your target market.
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Increase traffic to your website
Most internet users start browsing online through a search engine. Optimizing your website and content for search engines will increase the chances of ranking high in their search results and, as a result, bring more traffic to your website. Even those who are currently unaware of your business have a good chance of visiting your website as long as you are relevant to their search.
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Get more qualified leads
SEO is one of the best ways to generate qualified leads for your business. This is due to search engine traffic visiting your website already having the intent to look for information, inquire about your offer, make an appointment for a consultation, or commit to a buying decision. With SEO, your website has a good chance of ranking at the top of its targeted keywords. This naturally attracts more traffic that is more likely to become your leads or customers.
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Improve people’s awareness of your brand
It’s useless creating a brand for your business if people are not even aware of it. SEO can bring this awareness to your brand by simply increasing its visibility for the keywords your target market enter in search engines. And, since SEO includes the creation of valuable content for your target audience, their one visit has a good chance of resulting in them returning to your website or sharing your content with their contacts.
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Increase your rate of conversion
Some keywords and phrases have higher commercial intent than others. For example, the phrase “manufacturers for athletic apparel” has a greater chance of attracting those who are looking for a manufacturer than the phrase “different types of manufacturers”. Targeting key phrases similar to the first set of keywords’ intent will give your website traffic that has an immediate need for the services or products you offer. Since they need to resolve their need immediately, they don’t need much convincing to inquire about your manufacturing services.
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Create more effective content for every segment of your target market
You can create content based on any keyword relevant to your business. Because of this, you can target specific segments of your market. You can write web content targeting a location or customer type, or talking about a specific service you offer. You can also create content for a segment of your audience in a specific stage of the customer journey.
Taking advantage of this will result in your website attracting more organic traffic and different types of audiences. Moreover, with content specific to their search intent or current situation, your content is more effective in moving them along in their sales journey, converting them to leads, or retaining their loyalty towards your brand.
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Get better search visibility
User experience is a critical component evaluated by search engine algorithms. They want their users to experience websites with fast loading speeds, easy navigation, and readable and mobile-friendly pages. However, these will not only help your website when it comes to SEO. It will also give your business a higher chance of converting your traffic into leads or customers since they are more likely to read the content they clicked and browse other pages on your website.
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Serves as a long-term and sustainable lead generation strategy
After setting up your website for SEO, it only requires regular maintenance to make sure it is compliant with search engine guidelines. Unlike paid online advertising, you do not have to run campaigns that will cost you money for every click or impression. You could even dial down on your paid advertising when your organic lead generation is starting to outpace it.
What Your Website Needs to Implement an Effective Manufacturing SEO Strategy
The benefits mentioned can only be achieved with the proper implementation of search engine optimization. Here are the main elements that your website needs to implement effective manufacturing SEO:
1. Unique and valuable content
Your website must contain content that your target market wants to see. Content can only be effective in attracting traffic and converting them to leads if it is unique, relevant to the keywords they used, and applicable to their situation, problem, or needs.
2. Compelling copy
Your content should drive your audience to an action that will benefit your business. As a manufacturing business, this could be getting website visitors to sign-up, request a quote, or schedule an appointment. You can influence your audience to take any of these actions with persuasive words in your web copy and content.
3. User-friendly website
Search engines want their users to find valuable links on the search results they provide. This is why search engines determine if a website has a fast loading speed, mobile-friendly navigation and view, and flat and efficient website architecture.
4. Quality links to your website
Search engines look at the other websites that link to your website. If these are relevant to the keywords you use, they see it as something positive about the value of your content since it indicates that other websites see your content as a good reference for their content.
One of the best ways to attract other websites to link to your page is through original and unique content that other writers, organizations, and publishers will want to use as their reference. You can also reach out to them and ask them to link to your website or create content for their site and place links on it leading to yours.
Why You Need a Manufacturing SEO Agency
It’s tempting to have everything in-house when you find your business needs a professional or team for a particular function. But, when it comes to SEO, outsourcing is usually the best way to go about it. Here are the reasons why:
1. You don’t have to learn how to do SEO
Everyone can understand the basic idea of how SEO works. But, learning how to do it will require a significant amount of time. Unfortunately, knowing how to do it does not mean that you can do it well. This is where valuable experience creates the difference between a mediocre job and a job well done.
Working with manufacturing SEO experts will let you skip all of these. And, with professionals who do SEO for a living doing it for you, you can expect that they will do it right.
2. You don't have to monitor and maintain your website.
There is no end with the implementation of a manufacturing SEO strategy. It is a continuous process of tracking website performance, optimizing and maintaining the website, fixing problems, and updating to the latest best practices. If you are doing these yourself, you will have no time left to deal with other equally important aspects of your business. It is best to have an SEO agency do the monitoring and maintenance of your website for you.
3. Your website has the latest SEO trends applied.
Search engines regularly update their algorithms to ensure that they are providing the best search experience to their users. This results in frequent changes in the best practices for search engine optimization. In some cases, some older practices are penalized by new search algorithm updates.
Working with manufacturing SEO services will help you with having the latest SEO best practices applied to your site. You don’t have to keep track of the search engine algorithm updates and you will not have to study these updates to determine any changes you have to make on your website.
4. You have SEO experts doing the work for you.
Hiring an agency to optimize your website gives you access to the collective expertise of their team. This will ensure that your business is getting the best treatment in every aspect of SEO. With an SEO agency, you will get the best for keyword research, content creation, web development, and more for your business. They will also make sense of the abundant amount of manufacturing SEO stats from your analytics and perform the necessary action to adjust the strategy or capitalize on opportunities.
5. They have experience with different clients and industries
Manufacturing SEO companies have worked with different clients from a variety of backgrounds and industries. You will benefit from the mistakes, tests, and successes that they went through in providing search engine optimization services for them in the past. And, if they have been successful with providing SEO for manufacturing companies in the past, you can expect that they can do it again. They might even be able to do it better for your company since they have most likely learned a lot from that experience.
6. You save time and money.
You don’t have to learn about SEO. You don’t have to monitor your website and its analytics to ensure everything is going well. You have someone else doing the work for you. All of these will give you a significant time saving that you can have for running your business.
Moreover, by hiring manufacturing SEO experts, you are saving money in two ways. First, you will not have costly mistakes since you have an experienced professional doing the work for you. Second, you do not have to pay for the expensive SEO tools required to do the job right.
7. They can implement the changes you want.
Even if you do not have the expertise in SEO, you have an idea of how you want your website to look and perform. Getting the expertise of SEO professionals lets you access their skills and experience to make your vision in these areas a reality. They know how to translate your vision into reality in ways that only seasoned experts in the industry know how to make happen.
8. They can do SEO with better efficiency.
SEO involves web development, content and copywriting, market and keyword research, graphic design, and testing. Any individual will have a difficult time doing all of these whether they are a business owner, an employee, or a freelancer. This leads to outsourcing individual tasks to different parties, which results in an inefficient work process.
This is not the case for SEO agencies. They have team members with the specialties to optimize their clients’ websites. And, they already have a system established to make the process efficient from start to finish of the project.
9. You can avoid costly mistakes in SEO.
You might think that it’s an exaggeration to claim that there are costly mistakes when it comes to SEO. But, your website can get penalized by search engines if they detect anything that violates the rules they set to ensure optimal user experience. Moreover, since website development is a crucial part of SEO, inadequate skill and inexperience in optimizing website code can result in vulnerabilities in the security of your website.
What to Look for in a Manufacturing SEO Company
Of course, not all manufacturing SEO agencies can provide what you are looking for. You will need to find the one with the right qualifications and that offers the services you need. Here is a list of pointers to help you choose the right manufacturing SEO company:
They have a portfolio of their previous work.
A portfolio is the best way to see if an agency has the experience to provide the services you need. It can show you if the agency did good work for their previous clients. You can also see if you like how they design their clients’ websites.
The websites of their previous client show up in the search results
The websites of their past clients should show up on your search results when you enter their names in the search engines. You can also browse their content and check if the pages load fast (less than two seconds), if the content is readable, and if you can easily navigate through different pages.
They have worked with a manufacturing business
You want to work with an agency that has a history of providing SEO for manufacturing companies. They are already familiar with the industry, the business model, and the behavior of your target market. Plus, they can implement advanced manufacturing SEO techniques based on their experience from previous clients.
At the very least, you want a manufacturing SEO agency that has worked with B2B businesses before. Although you might serve both B2B and B2C customers, an agency without any experience working with B2B businesses will find it difficult to create the results you want. An agency that has experienced and delivered results for a B2B business can provide the perspective you need than one that previously only worked with B2C businesses.
They have experience in B2B SEO.
Compared to consumers, business customers spend more time gathering information before making a decision. It is for this behavior that your website must have content about your offer and the advantages of working with you. Without it, you are placing all your bets on them asking for an appointment so you can sell them the idea of working with you.
An experienced manufacturing SEO agency knows this. This is why they often recommend using professional and data-driven content for this type of business’ content marketing strategy. Moreover, the content emphasizes the customer’s industry and desired manufacturing process or product.
They have case studies on SEO.
An agency’s case studies can tell you how they approach a project. It shows their process for optimizing a website for search engines and the results they created for their clients. You can use a case study to determine if an agency does the best practices for SEO. An ideal process for search engine optimization should include a website audit, the use of data and analytics, making changes based on this data, and future optimizations to account for search engine algorithm updates. If possible, ask if they have a case study on SEO for manufacturers.
They provide an honest and realistic view of the results of SEO
Your business will benefit from SEO. It can increase brand awareness, lead generation, and conversions for your business. However, your competition can also make use of search engine optimization and target similar keywords that you are using for content. This can lead to your website competing for first-page search ranking against their website.
Given the situation mentioned, no manufacturing SEO company can assure you that they can get your pages to the top of your target keywords’ search results. If they are promising a certain outcome, you might want to think twice before hiring them since they are more likely just saying that to close the sale or practicing black hat SEO techniques.
They do not practice black hat SEO techniques.
Black hat SEO techniques are practices that go against search engine guidelines. Although these techniques will help your page achieve a high search ranking fast, search engines will eventually penalize your website. Receiving a penalty from search engines can result in your website dropping in its search results ranking, or, worse, being removed from any search engine results.
They provide good value with their SEO services.
Don’t focus on how much their services will cost. Instead, look at the value they provide in exchange for the amount they are charging. Since manufacturing SEO strategies requires several skill sets to implement, you want an agency that provides the best SEO package at a price point you can afford. If you are considering implementing other marketing strategies as well, you might prefer an agency that includes it in their offered services.
What to Look for in a Manufacturing SEO Company
Do you need help with SEO for your manufacturing business? Or, do you need to address a drop in website traffic or a change in your visitor’s behavior on your website? We have successfully implemented and updated SEO for industrial and manufacturing companies’ websites and continue to maintain their website for them.
Whatever your problem is, our marketing professional here at Big Market Solutions can help you. All it takes is to contact us and schedule your free consultation with us, and we can get started getting your business on track.
So, contact us today and schedule your free consultation with Big Market Solutions!