7 Ways to Support Effective SEO for Manufacturers

SEO for manufacturers is now becoming more essential as your business competes with an increasingly crowded, digital B2B marketing place. Your next sales lead could come from a single search for solutions on Google. More than 92% of online searches are now conducted through Google, according to HubSpot.

Do you know if your website is showing up on the first page of a Google search? This is what marketers refer to as a website’s organic visibility. This is important because your chances of prospects finding your company online go down dramatically if your company shows up on the second or third page of a Google search, or if your company shows up even lower in search rankings.

SEO (search engine optimization) can be complicated, especially in the complex marketing and buying cycle for B2B industrial customers. Fortunately, there are manufacturing digital marketing services that include SEO and tactics to help your company become more strategically visible in your crowded digital marketplace.

Here are some best practices that can help you create a successful SEO approach to help more prospective customers find your website and engage in your marketing and sales funnel.

Use these ideas as you take your first steps toward increasing your website’s organic visibility.

1: Effective SEO for Manufacturers Begins With a B2B Mindset

If you search “better SEO for manufacturers” you’ll get thousands of search results with articles and offers, promising to increase your visibility through SEO. However, many of these tactics and processes are aimed at direct-to-consumer (B2C) marketing. It takes different B2B marketing tactics to attract and engage business buyers in the manufacturing and industrial marketplace.

This begins by putting yourself in the shoes of your ideal B2B customer prospect. What types of products and services are they looking for to solve their problems or help them get something done? Think about this search intent when researching keywords that should be on your website.

Start by developing a persona, which is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. In addition to demographics, include psychographics to describe what motivates your idea buyer, based on their characteristics. For example, if your buyer is looking for an industrial air filtration solution, their motivations may include the safety of their factory workers and increasing efficiency by keeping their workers healthy. This is how you can better align SEO with your specific B2B needs.

2: Start Your Industry Keyword Research

Thanks to new tools like Google Ads Keyword Planner and Semrush, you can expedite the keyword research that is essential to effective SEO. As you begin your research, try to find keywords that are more likely to address the needs of your customer personas. Think about the phrases that are most relevant to your personas’ motivations and keywords they’re most likely to use when searching for your solutions.

Keep in mind that you’re competing with other companies in your industry for many of the same keywords. Long-tail keywords are more specific keyword phrases that may not have as much search competition. For example, instead of just using “dust filtration systems” you may want to consider a long-tail keyword like “dust filtration for stone cutting.” This can attract more of the personas you want to engage, and who are likely to be further along in the B2B buying process.

3: Optimize Your Website for Better SEO

SEO for manufacturing is more than having a keyword in your website page title. It is critical to understand how search engines see your website and adjust in real time to account for changes in search algorithms and online rankings.

SEO for industrials is part science and part art, which is why many companies use manufacturing digital marketing services to help them optimize their websites for better organic visibility. When it comes to SEO, some key areas to pay attention to are:

• Keyword focus for all pages
• Eliminating technical waste in website code
• Building depth of content in key areas
• Growing off-site authority

Don’t forget to incorporate your SEO keywords into your website’s URL and make sure your website categories align accordingly with your keyword research, so potential buyers can quickly find what they are looking for.

4: SEO for Manufacturers Requires Keyword-Driven Content

SEO is key to making sure your website has content that potential buyers will find when they do a Google search for solutions, products, and services. However, sprinkling in a few keywords in a blog without helpful context will not help your search results. Your content must be helpful or educational enough to address your customer persona’s challenges. Otherwise, they may leave your website soon after they find your content through a keyword search.

Make sure you’re hitting all the pain points that show your company understands your customer persona’s challenges. Focus your content around keywords that speak to these challenges to build your credibility. This is how you use content to prove your company’s value early in the sales funnel.

5: Add Metadata to Your Industrial Website

Metadata is the set of keyword phrases that make up your website’s title tags and descriptions that prospects will see when searching for your company’s products and services. When writing your meta descriptions, use the same approach as you do when creating your website content. It should focus on your SEO keywords, but it should also speak to the needs of your ideal buyer persona.

Make sure your metadata accurately describes the content your audience will find on the website page. For example, if you sell welding safety equipment and your metadata keywords include “welding safety tips,” your content should offer real best practices or examples of ways to increase welding safety.

You can also add backlinks to your website to link to other manufacturers, distributors, and related suppliers you work with to connect your buyers with products and services that complement your offerings. Not only does this build your credibility by helping your customers find what they are searching for, it causes Google’s search engine algorithms to identify your website as reputable and more worthy of a higher ranking in search results.

6: Start Tracking and Analyzing Your SEO Results

Thanks to Google Analytics and other website analytics tools, you can start tracking how well your SEO efforts are working. You can also use these analytics to look at how your website compares to your competitors in search results.

Use this data to find out which pages on your website are getting the most traffic and where your customers are leaving your website. You’ll learn which industry keywords are driving the most visitors to your site and you can modify your keyword approach based on the data. Then you can identify weak spots on your website and make additional optimizations for better organic visibility and conversions.

7: Fix Broken and Outdated Links to Improve SEO

When it comes to SEO, one of the most overlooked best practices is finding and fixing broken and outdated links on your website. While this back-end technical work can take time, it can prevent potential buyers from leaving your site because they failed to find what they were looking for because of a broken link.

Fixing backlinks takes some technical expertise, but it’s worth the investment if you want to increase your SEO performance and improve your potential buyer’s experience on your website. Most importantly, Google looks at broken links when determining the quality of your website and its credibility.

Need SEO Help to Increase Your Company’s Organic Visibility?

SEO for manufacturers is complicated. But it doesn’t have to be difficult. Because we have over 15 years of experience in the technical side of SEO, our manufacturing digital marketing services can help you better optimize your SEO and your website’s overall performance, starting with our free assessment.