The manufacturing industry is extremely important to economies worldwide, and benefits consumers every day. However, it’s becoming an increasingly competitive one – meaning that it’s more important than ever to have a solid marketing strategy in place. Whether your manufacturing company creates equipment, tools, parts, or finished products, you need to have a strong online presence to reach your target audience. One of the most effective ways to ensure longevity and growth is with search engine optimization, or SEO.
Why use manufacturing SEO?
Today, most people use search engines to find what they need online. They type specific words into search engines like Google, then choose from the results delivered onto their laptops, desktops, or mobile devices. Many of these users search for manufacturing services every day – but if your company’s website isn’t on the page of results, it’s unlikely that they’ll find you.
An SEO strategy helps improve your rankings, attract qualified traffic to your site, and generate new leads. By focusing on making it easier for people to find you, you’ll allow potential customers to find you when they need your services – instead of interrupting their daily activities with intrusive advertisements. SEO is a multi-step process, and requires that you (or your Internet market agency) continuously improve your site and online presence.
How to optimize for manufacturing SEO
There are many factors that go into optimizing a site and improving its rankings in search engines.
Mobile-friendly design
By all accounts, mobile has moved to the forefront in the search arena. With so many individuals using their tablets and smart phones to conduct searches, your site must be ready for viewing on any device. Now that Google is switching to a mobile-first index, this will also affect your search engine rankings. If your site isn’t accessible to users on smartphones and other devices, your online visibility could suffer. This means that if you haven’t yet switched to responsive design, now is the time to do so.
SEO-friendly site structure
Although including certain words and phrases helps search engines determine what your site is about, their crawlers need to be able to navigate it to find that information. If your site has issues that prevent these crawlers from finding your content, your site will not be able to rank. For instance, if you’ve ever moved or changed a page without updating all of the links that pointed to it, you may have broken links on your site. This prevents crawlers from accessing all of your pages, and can harm your SEO strategy’s results. Many development companies (including WebFX) offer free analysis of websites to indicate potential issues like this. An experienced SEO professional can fix these problems, and prevent them from happening in the future.
Keyword-optimized content
Every website is constructed of pages. Some only have a handful explaining their basic services, while others have hundreds (or even thousands). Regardless of how many pages your site has, each one should be optimized for at least one keyword. This tells search engines what that page is about, and allows them to rank it in results when users search for that keyword. You can include these keywords in your main site copy, as well as your page titles, headings, meta descriptions, and image alt tags. However, you should only use them where they naturally make sense. Otherwise, search engines will see this as “keyword stuffing,” which can result in penalties that harm your rankings. You can determine the best keywords for your business by conducting keyword research, and you may need to add new pages to your site in order to target the most valuable ones.
Original content
Your site needs to have plenty of informative content for your visitors, and it all needs to be original. Some site owners make the mistake of copy-and-pasting information from other sources, but even if you’ve gained permission from the original writer, this could result in a duplicate content penalty from search engines. Take the time to write unique, helpful content for each page on your site – and if you don’t have an in-house copy team, hire a freelancer or agency to create it for you. Making this initial investment is a much better alternative than risking a penalty, and will generate much better long-term results.
Regular updates
Google is constantly crawling the web for new content, and the more frequently you add pages, the more often they’ll visit yours. The best way to do this is by adding a blog to your site. Blogs not only give you the chance to increase the amount of information on your site, but they also help build your brand and authority. Additionally, they give Google a reason to index your site more frequently.
Do you need help using SEO to market your manufacturing company?
As you improve your site’s SEO, you’ll see a noticeable difference in your search rankings. Over time, this will deliver more visitors to your site – and as a result, more customers and revenue. If you’re ready to create an SEO strategy for your manufacturing company, we’d love to help. At IndustrialFX, we have years of experience creating effective strategies for our clients (many of whom work within the manufacturing industry), and we’ll do the same for you. Contact us today for more information and a free quote!