SEO for Manufacturers - Tips & Guidance From Our SEO Team

Frequently Asked Questions on Manufacturing SEO

What is SEO for Manufacturers?
As an acronym for search engine optimization, it is the practice of executing a variety of specific digital marketing activities to help your website gain a better presence in Google, Bing and Yahoo (some of the popular search engines). For manufacturing clients, the goal is to rank nationally or even internationally for products or services you produce and/or sell. A successful SEO campaign will bring customers to your website searching for your products or services and for them to contact you.

Is SEO the right fit for my business?
One of the best parts about SEO is that no matter what your niche is, it can offer great opportunities to draw people in that are looking for your products or services.

How do I know what keywords to target?
You’ll want to do some homework on this. The good news is that there are plenty of tools out there to help you assess opportunities. Here are three tools to look at:

1. Google Keyword Planner – Requires signing up for Google Ads but doesn’t mandate spending money or running ads to see general search volume for keywords. If you run a campaign, you’ll get more specific data.
2. SE Ranking – Signing up is a mandate to use this tool, however, they give you a 14 day trial to assess it. It’s worth the commitment as you can put in keyword phrases into their system and also get an idea of where you rank for that specific term (at a minimum).
3. Google Trends – Shows search trends over time and peak times of the year for search volume

Manufacturing Company Keyword Research Tips
In SEO, you’ll want to be very careful about the terms that you target. If you try to target rank for too broad of keyword phrases, you could either wind up failing to draw the right audience to your website or to rank in general because of the competition level of those terms. If you start to experiment with the SEO research websites listed above, here are a few things to search for and possibly target:

• [product or service] company
• [product or service] distributor
• [product or service] supplier
• [product or service] manufacturer
• [product or service] for [x] industry
• [product or service] for [x] products

The search terms can be singular or plural too. Adding the descriptive words to the products or services may result in keyword phrases that have lower search volume. However, the goal with any search campaign is gaining visitors that are relevant and are in a buying mode.

My competitors aren’t active in digital marketing – why should I start?
We’ve found that the manufacturing industry is a late adopter of digital marketing and the primary purpose of manufacturing company websites is to serve as a portfolio website that they can refer potential customers too.Your competitor’s lack of activity is an opportunity for you.

Another thing to consider is your competitors in the search engine landscape. The competitors that you closely watch may not be the ones that you have to battle for position on search engines. Try doing a few searches for products you make or services that you offer. Note who is ranking both organically (listings below the paid ads) and who is running ads on these terms via Google Ads.

Where do I start?
Researching SEO can be intimidating, especially if you are just starting out. You’ll quite often find a mix of recommendations that talk about recent changes to search engine algorithms and established best practices. It’s enough to make your head spin because there’s so much to take in.

For most companies in the manufacturing industry, the best place to start is your website and the content on the website. Search engines like content because it helps them understand if you are an authority on a topic or a series of topics. A topic can be considered one of your products or services.Here are a few areas of your website to consider adding content or new pages to:

• Add content to your homepage. Here are things to expand upon on this page:
  • What makes your company different – in manufacturing it’s usually the expertise, customer service, how quickly you can get them your product and or level of customization of the product that you offer.
  • The history of your company
  • Your team and leadership
  • Photos of your facility/team
• Add your phone number to the top right corner of your website header (across the site)
• Include a link to a contact us page in copy pages across the site. It’s also key to include it in the main navigation of your website (You’ll get bonus points if you have a form on there)
• Create an about us page and post pictures of your leadership at your organization. If one of your differentiation points is your expertise, this will be critical
• Create new pages for each type of product or service that you offer. Quite often we see companies list these things on one page. We recommend this because it’s easier for a search engine to find and rank a page if it has specific content on it. It’s also improves the probability that someone will contact you because their search has led them to a page with hyper-relevant content.

A lot of our site is product specifications and data. How do you go about adding more content to those pages?

We have a great in-house staff of copywriters who have experience working with manufacturing clients and crafting copy for sections like these. Our writers have backgrounds in marketing, journalism, communications, and other fields that give them a creative boost to ensure that your content can be optimized strategically.

What types of manufacturers can you help?

Over the years, we have worked with a wide range of manufacturing companies in various niches. From tank manufacturers to metal parts distributors, our experience has helped us learn the ins and outs of various businesses in the industry. We can help manufacturing types such as:

Ways We Help Manufacturers with SEO

Here are some of the tactics we consider and later implement when crafting custom strategies for manufacturers:

Evaluate Top Landing Pages

We will go into your Google Analytics profile and see which pages on your website get the most traffic, convert the best, and have the most room for opportunity. From there, we can revamp page copy, add additional keywords, and more.

Tend to Category and Services Pages

We often see that manufacturing websites have little to no page copy on their most important pages that help customers find what they need, whether it be they never had the time, had limitations in how their website was built, or they just weren’t sure what to write. Part of our SEO for manufacturing process includes making sure these pages are optimized properly.

Check Your Local Presence

Have you claimed and optimized your local listings on Google and Bing? Making sure that your business information is properly displayed not only on your website, but across citation websites, social media, and Google Business Profile as well, is an essential SEO tactic.

Assess Data Sheets and PDFs

As a business that needs to value technical aspects of your products, from their size to their range of abilities, you likely are linking to various PDFs that your company creates for your product line. But did you know there is no way to track PDF views in Google Analytics? Not to mention, PDFs don’t give customers the ability to contact you. Ensuring that we address these issues is a top priority of our manufacturing SEO strategies.

Take Time to Build Quality Links

Having a strong backlink profile is essential in the eyes of Google. Our strategists have experience crafting link building strategies to help give your site a boost from quality websites.

Refresh Your Metadata

If it has been a while since you have had your metadata updated on your website, giving them a makeover to include more keywords and more appealing copy can bring more users to your site.

Identify and Track Your Top Keywords

Do you currently know where your website ranks on search engines such as Google? The answer may not be what you think it is, since Google’s personalized search often interferes with most search queries. We will work with you to identify what terms you wish to rank for and utilize reliable software that helps us track your website’s progress in rankings.

Create Useful Content to Help the Sales Process

Your sales team is likely asked a lot of redundant questions, like ordering info, shipping queries, and everything in-between. One great way we can help alleviate that is by creating a frequently asked questions page that users can have as a tool to get the info they need quickly, and save you the hassle.

Design for Conversion

Our team has the ability to make strategic design and development changes to your website that will turn website visitors into customers. From adding pops of color to changing the location of your web forms to be “above the fold” of the page, there are numerous things we can implement to improve your pages.

Establish Proper Goal Tracking

Even if you already have Google Analytics connected to your website, you could be missing out on key data by not having proper goal tracking in place. Our team can enable goal tracking across web forms, phone numbers, and even purchases to help you better analyze your website and marketing efforts.

In our work with these businesses and many others, we have accrued the experience needed to effectively increase qualified leads and website traffic for companies within many unique manufacturing sectors.

Our Success Through SEO for Manufacturing Companies

Here are a few of our case studies with current and former clients that prove just how powerful manufacturing SEO can be.

TYKMA Electrox

We provided a custom SEO strategy with a heavy focus on targeted keyword research, alongside a website redesign for this client. Comparing September 2017 to February 1 through March 2 of 2014, we were able to:

1. Improve overall traffic by 402%
2. Boost organic traffic by 50%
3. Improve monthly leads by 314%

Shini USA

For Shini USA, from a mix of PPC, design for conversion, and SEO that included keyword analysis and content optimization, comparing year over year, they received:

1. 28% more monthly website visits (1,464 vs. 1,142)
2. 632% boost in SEO traffic (564 vs. 77)
3. 129% increase in monthly leads (39 vs. 17)

Valco Valley Tool/Die

When we started with Valco many years ago, they had just launched a new website and were experiencing major traffic losses. With our SEO help, a year later, their numbers were very different:

1. Increased visits per month by 114% (2,910 vs. 1,362)
2. Monthly online inquiries surged by 543% (135 vs. 21)
3. Overall conversion rate rose from 1.54% to 4.6%

Contact Our Manufacturing SEO Company Today

When it comes to manufacturing SEO services, no one does it better than Sixth City Marketing. With a deep understanding of the industry and what it takes to reach customers and give them exactly what they need, we promise to take your business to new online heights.

To learn more about our manufacturing SEO agency, our offices in Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, and Pittsburgh, and what we can accomplish for your company, be sure to contact us today.