SEO for Manufacturers: Tips + Best Practices to Drive Revenue

Manufacturing companies are always looking for new ways to generate leads. Read on and we’ll share some actionable lead generation tips.

SEO for Manufacturers: Tips + Best Practices to Drive Revenue

Developing an online presence can be difficult, especially for manufacturing companies used to in-person sales. However, with the correct marketing strategy and a thorough understanding of SEO for manufacturers, you can bring in plenty of online business.

What is SEO?

All of the above mistakes affect digital marketing’s most crucial aspect: search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is essentially improving your website to help it appear in the top ten results of a Google, Bing, or Yahoo search.

Search engines analyze dozens of aspects of every website to decide which ones are the most reliable, organized, trustworthy, and applicable to a given search. SEO is the art of looking for any possible way to better your website and content to gain higher rankings.

Why Is SEO Important for Manufacturers?

SEO is crucial to any business with an online presence. You can drive people to your website through social media, ads, word of mouth, or directing current clients to shop online. However, if you don’t rank high on a Google search, you will receive low organic traffic.

Organic traffic is the number of people visiting your website that are genuinely interested in your product and are probably looking to buy. This traffic type doesn’t come from ads or social media but from people purposefully looking for your products. If your website doesn’t come up in the first couple of search engine results pages – most importantly, the first page – those interested customers are lost to competition.

The below image shows the drop-off in terms of organic click through rate from Position 1 -20.

New Generation of Buyers

Digital marketing and SEO are imperative to a successful business today because the buyer demographic is changing. The younger buyers grew up with technology and are much more likely to base their opinions and purchases on what they found in online investigations versus visiting various stores in person.

As such, you need effective manufacturing marketing, which includes SEO, to bring in the new generation of buyers.

Market Your Brand

With sales and marketing moving online, you need to find a way to market your brand. If more people are doing online research before buying or visiting stores and warehouses, you need to make sure your web page and brand catch their attention.

The best way to do this is by ranking high on searches, which requires time, effort, and possibly money invested in SEO.

Best Tactics to Improve Your Traffic and Conversions

There’s no denying the importance of digital marketing and lead generation through SEO. However, starting online marketing for your manufacturing business can be a headache if you don’t know where or how to start.

So, what should your manufacturing SEO strategy be?

With the following seven tactics, SEO for manufacturers will be simple!

1. Focus on Your Customer

Just like friendly customer service is crucial to in-person sales, knowing your customer and providing what they need is the key to successful online marketing. Before doing any other SEO steps or making ads, understand your customer and their needs.

If you don’t yet know who your online customers are, tracking your website visitors’ demographics and habits using Google Analytics will help you understand them better.

Also, think about what makes your target audience look for your products. What type of job do they have? Do they need any other materials for a successful day at work?

Understanding your customers’ needs helps with two key areas: it can produce an abundance of keywords (we’ll look at that next), and you can provide them with what they need before they have even realized they need it.

2. Choose Keywords Wisely

The manufacturing industry has plenty of keywords that you can implement into your website to rank high on several searches. The trick is to find and choose those keywords wisely.

One part of keyword research is understanding what your customer wants and needs. However, you might not think of all the keywords on your own. There are numerous keywords and phrases (called long-tail keywords) that are easy to rank on, but you have to look for them.

Take some time to search for keywords that apply to your business. To start, look for words that have a lower search number but high value for quick conversions. Once you have a more substantial online presence, you can attack some of the more popular keywords.

If you aren’t sure how to find keywords, try a resource like Ahrefs that will show you how you – and your competition – are ranking for certain words.

3. Check Links

Link building is a key ranking factor that search engines use to understand your website’s organization as they look for a hierarchy of pages. Without them, a web page may seem confusing or untrustworthy and rank lower.

Backlinks, or links to external websites, are just as important as internal connections because they give your information more authority and credibility.

If you don’t have many links on your website, it’s time to go in and add some! If you already have a decent network, take the time to check them for any 404 errors and outdated external sites.

4. Prioritize Mobile Friendliness

Mobile traffic has increased by 222% in the past seven years. Today, it accounts for over half of the internet traffic. Even though we use our phones for most of our browsing and researching, when it comes time to create a website design, the focus is usually on the usability for desktop users.

If your website is not mobile-friendly, that can give you a high bounce rate, low traffic, and few conversions. Keep this in mind. Every second that it takes for your page to load on a mobile device, you’ll lose a higher percentage of potential customers. If your site takes just 5 seconds to load, 38% will close the page and go elsewhere.

There are a couple of things you can do to make the user experience more pleasant. Increase the page loading speed by compressing your picture sizes, change the website theme to something that loads quicker, and get rid of ads or pop-ups that block what the user is reading.

5. Track SEO

Speaking of tracking, this is arguably the most vital aspect of digital marketing. Before making any changes, set up Google Analytics and Google Search Console and monitor your site for at least a month. Take notes of the organic versus paid traffic, peak traffic times, and user demographics. Establish what you want to consider a conversion (purchase, sign-up, contact, etc.) and monitor the conversion rates.

After a few months, you should have a good idea of how your website is behaving. Compare your highest-performing pages to those lagging behind and take some time to make changes to the design and content.

It will take some time, months, or even years to see significant changes in your ranking and traffic, but you monitor your website for any developments. Like a 404 error page, any small thing can drop your rankings, which is why tracking your SEO progress is essential to your success.

6. Evaluate Crucial Pages

Just because a particular page is performing well doesn’t mean you don’t have to change anything. In fact, the contrary is true. Focus on maintaining high-quality pages and improving them in any way possible. If they are blogs, make sure to update the content fairly often, since people want recent and up-to-date information.

Likewise, if your important sites, like landing pages or purchase pages, are underperforming, something needs to change. Check for ineffective pop-ups, long loading times, incorrect information, and outdated designs.

7. Create Quality Content

Selling your brand online is very different from in-person sales. It would be best if you had a content strategy to implement your keywords, prove your expertise in a specific field, establish trust from your customers, and create more traffic and sales.

Once you have done your keyword research, make a plan to publish quality content that includes those keywords. These blogs could be anything from answering frequently asked customer questions or explaining why a specific product is more effective.

Another content area to improve is the meta descriptions of your webpages. If you have never written one or if they are out-of-date, take some time to write snippets that will grab a potential customer’s attention and invite them to your website. Meta-descriptions are one or two sentence snippets that summarize your web page—and they’ll be the first thing your audience sees about your site when they search for you on Google.

The more blogs you have (as long as they are well-organized), the more Google will recognize your site’s content and improve the ranking. Also, by including keywords, you are more likely to rank higher for multiple searches. Remember, though, an improvement in ranking may take several months.

Take Your Manufacturing Company to the Next Level

Now that you understand how digital marketing and SEO can improve your search query rankings and online business, it’s time for you to start making changes on your website. Remember to track all your adjustments and be patient!