Today, the mantra “work smarter, not harder” resonates more than ever. With the manufacturing market brimming with a plethora of options for customers, B2B manufacturing companies face mounting challenges in cutting through the clutter to connect with their audience. This highlights the crucial role of strategy in digital marketing, where the more strategic your efforts are, the less time you’ll waste. Time is one of the most vital resources a business has; learning how to allocate your time effectively can give you the leverage to outperform your competitors. While shortcuts might seem tempting, channeling efforts into effective strategies can yield long-term benefits that promote sustainable growth for your business.
Our last blog explored the nuances of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) in manufacturing, focusing on its two fundamental components: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising. While PPC advertising offers immediate results, we underscored that SEO is an equally powerful and more sustainable strategy of digital marketing for manufacturers. In this installment of our SEM series, we will take a closer look at SEO for manufacturers and guide you through key implementation strategies.
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies for manufacturers help improve a website’s visibility in various search engines, such as Google and Microsoft Bing. When employed properly, SEO organically expands your audience base by attracting new customers, clients, or readers.
Why is SEO Important?
The simple answer? The higher your website ranks in search results, the more traffic it will attract.
As of 2022, over 8.5 billion Google searches are conducted each day. For each query, the search engine parses through thousands of potential results to provide the searcher with the most relevant information. Users instinctively pay more attention to the first few results. According to Semrush, “The top three organic results get more than 50% of all the clicks.” Making conscientious, SEO-friendly choices in the development of your website can significantly impact your customer growth and brand awareness.
In today’s competitive digital landscape, it is crucial that your website be both easily discoverable and provide visitors with an enjoyable browsing experience. Gaining and maintaining the competitive upper hand is no easy feat when you are vying for the same customers as many other manufacturers. Therefore, SEO ensures that you are taking the most time-efficient, comprehensive approach to attracting new visitors to your website.
SEO in manufacturing provides several advantages for businesses, including:
- Increased Visibility and Traffic: SEO improves the visibility of your website and increases organic traffic by helping it rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
- Enhanced User Experience: With SEO strategies, various elements of your website, such as content, design, and functionality, can be optimized for a more user-friendly and accessible experience. This improved user experience leads to higher engagement and lower bounce rates.
- Credibility: Users tend to trust websites that are organically ranked higher in search results, compared to sponsored or paid advertisements. Improving your SERP ranking instills trust among your audience and reinforces your credibility.
- Sustainability: Traffic generated by paid advertising is dependent on how long you pay for the service, whereas SEO is a long-term strategy for improving and maintaining your search rankings over time.
Monitoring and Analytics: SEO tools and analytics provide valuable insights into customer behavior, preferences, and trends that can help you better understand your audience and tailor your marketing efforts to suit their needs.
How Does SEO Work?
SEO for manufacturers involves these four strategies for improving your website’s overall performance:
- Keywords Research – Identify the keywords and phrases your target audience frequently searches for using tools like Semrush, Google Search Console, or Soovle.
- On-Page Optimization – After identifying keywords, optimize the elements located directly on your website. This includes adding the relevant words or phrases to title tags and meta descriptions to improve visibility and using header tags (h1, h2, h3, etc.) appropriately to ensure search engines understand your content’s structure and order. Furthermore, the content on your website should be relevant and of high quality with keywords naturally incorporated. These keywords should also be integrated into your URLs to help search engines understand the content of your pages. Lastly, adding links to other pages within your website, which is known as internal linking, increases the navigability of your site when search engines are sorting through potential results for searchers.
- Off-Page Optimization – Once you’ve optimized your website, let’s explore the SEO strategies for improving elements outside of your website. Your site is more likely to rank higher if search engines believe it to be trustworthy and authoritative. Acquiring backlinks from reputable websites greatly helps with establishing your site’s credibility. Along with standard social media marketing, performing local SEO can be helpful, particularly for businesses with physical locations. Local SEO involves creating and optimizing Google My Business listings, obtaining local citations, and receiving customer reviews.
- Technical SEO – You might think the first three strategies covered all you need to know, but the technical aspect of SEO is just as critical. This relates to the functional and technical aspects of your website, such as site speed, mobile-friendliness, crawlability, and indexability. Naturally, faster-loading websites tend to rank higher in SERPs. Many searches are conducted through mobile devices, making it all the more important for your site to be mobile-friendly. Crawlability refers to how well search engine bots can “crawl” through your website for new or updated pages. The bots then index each web page within a comprehensive database of webpages. Read more about crawling and indexing best practices as outlined by Google Search Central.
How Do You Maintain Your Site’s SEO?
The hard work isn’t over just yet! Maintaining a website’s SEO involves ongoing efforts to remain optimized for search engines and sustain a high ranking. Several actions can be taken to assist with this:
- Regularly update and refresh content to ensure continued relevance and engagement for both users and search engines.
- Monitor keyword performance and adjust content as needed to maintain visibility for target keywords and improve your click-through rate (CTR) using tools such as Google Search Console.
- Remain up-to-date with industry changes to search engine algorithms and best practices to modify your SEO strategy accordingly.
- Routinely review and optimize the technical aspects of your website, such as site speed, mobile-friendliness, and security.
- Strengthen backlink building and industry connections to advance your site’s credibility.
Takeaways
I know what you’re thinking. This sounds like a lot of work. Between keyword research, on-page and off-page optimization, and technical SEO enhancements, SEO is a strategy that requires dedicated time and resources. However, it’s also a strategy that, when properly used, helps businesses achieve sustainable, organic growth. In the digital landscape, SEO and success go hand-in-hand. By adopting a strategic approach to digital marketing, businesses can rise in search engine rankings, attract more traffic, and deliver a more enriching user experience.
Tune in for our next blog where we continue our exploration of SEO strategies for manufacturers and discuss how businesses can get started on their marketing endeavors. Eager to venture into the digital marketing world and leverage these SEO tactics? Begin your journey towards strengthening your online presence and contact us today for specialized manufacturing marketing services geared towards your business needs.
