If your manufacturing company’s website isn’t contributing enough to your marketing and sales plan, you can likely drive more traffic (and leads) by making a few changes to your approach. Following these SEO best practices make sure your website is helping you target the right audiences organically to help reduce your reliance on paid advertising.
A healthy SEO approach will ensure your website pages achieve higher rankings in search engine results, increasing visibility and organic traffic. It also presents unique opportunities for manufacturing websites, like helping reach industry-specific audiences and explaining complicated or specialty products. Make sure you develop a complete plan – an effective SEO strategy encompasses keyword research, on-page SEO, technical SEO, local SEO, and backlink building.
SEO best practices for manufacturing companies
SEO for manufacturing companies begins with keyword research and optimization, identifying terms your audience uses when seeking your products. On-page SEO involves optimizing your website structure and content, while technical SEO ensures your site is accessible and crawlable for search engines. For manufacturers serving specific regions, local SEO should also be a priority. If possible, acquiring high-quality backlinks from reputable sites enhances your domain authority, aiding higher rankings.
SEO best practices for a B2B manufacturing website include the following:
1. Keyword Research
This involves finding out what terms your potential customers are typing into search engines when they're looking for the products you offer. There are some great tools out there, like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, or Ahrefs, which can help you identify these keywords. Use the results to inform your SEO strategy, especially for a B2B manufacturing website. It's not only about driving traffic but also about attracting the right kind of traffic that is more likely to convert.
2. On-Page SEO
Include your targeted keywords in strategic places on your web pages, like the title tags, meta descriptions, headers, and body content. However, avoid keyword stuffing as it can lead to penalties from search engines. Keep your content conversational and helpful to the audience it’s intended for.
3. Technical SEO
Ensure your website is easily crawlable and indexable by search engines. This includes using a clean site structure, creating an XML sitemap, and ensuring your website is mobile-friendly and has fast load speeds.
4. Content Marketing
Regularly publishing high-quality, relevant content can boost your search engine rankings and attract more potential leads. This can be anything from blog posts and infographics to case studies and how-to guides - the key is to provide value to your audience.
5. Backlink Building
Work on gaining backlinks from other reputable websites. This could involve guest blogging, creating shareable content, or partnering with industry influencers or manufacturers that offer products that compliment yours.
6. Local SEO
If you have a local aspect to your business, optimize your website for local search. This involves creating a Google My Business account and ensuring your NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) information is consistent across all online platforms, to start.
7. Schema Markup
Use schema markup to provide search engines with more information about your website and content. This can enhance your visibility in search results, especially if your products are complex and aren’t easily found through intuitive searching.
8. User Experience
Ensure your website is user-friendly with natural navigation, clear calls-to-action, and high-quality, relevant content. A positive user experience can lead to higher engagement rates, which is a positive signal to search engines.If you have a longer sales cycle, this can also help encourage return visits to your website, and more engagement with your business.
9. Regular Audits and Updates
SEO is not a one-time thing. Regularly audit your website's SEO and make updates as needed. This includes updating your keyword strategy, fixing broken links, and keeping up with changes in search engine algorithms.
It may take some time to see results, but if you haven’t done this exercise in a while (or ever), you may see some noticeable gains in traffic sooner rather than later. Combining some or all of these practices should also help give your website a boost in a shorter period of time.
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Industry-specific insights for manufacturing SEO
Your SEO strategy should align with any higher-level marketing strategies specific to your industry. Understanding how to target industrial buyers and decision-makers will help guide much of your strategy, so identify as many details as you can about your audience or audiences. Optimize product pages for easier conversions based on the audience’s needs, and consider the types of products they may want in the future based on their current interests.
Measuring and analyzing SEO success for manufacturers
Key metrics and KPIs for manufacturing SEO include organic traffic, rankings for target keywords, and conversion rates. Tools like Google Analytics and Search Console can help track these metrics. Regularly monitoring the competitive landscape and SERP rankings provides valuable insights, and measuring the ROI of your SEO efforts ensures you're achieving your business goals. If you are sharing your results with stakeholders outside of marketing, make sure to use metrics that they understand, and that are relevant to those larger goals of the company.
By implementing some or all of these SEO best practices and continuously measuring success, manufacturers can reap long-term benefits. With a bit of patience, you'll start to see more visibility, increases in website traffic, and ultimately, more leads for your business. Workshop Digital creates custom SEO plans for manufacturers like you – if you want to know how we help businesses find new leads through SEO, contact us today for a no-obligation conversation.
