What Is Industrial SEO? The Complete Guide

The internet: it’s your best bet for leveraging more leads for your industrial business in 2022. And if you’re looking to generate more leads for your industrial organization via the web, an industrial SEO strategy can help.

SEO is arguably one of the most effective digital industrial marketing strategies there is, as it’s a way to connect organic leads to relevant information that your industrial organization has to offer.

In this guide, we’ll explain what SEO is and how industrial SEO can transform your industrial manufacturing business. Let’s get started with our SEO manufacturing tips!

What is Industrial SEO and How Does it Work?

Before we explain industrial SEO, let’s take a step back to understand SEO as a whole. SEO stands for search engine optimization and refers to the placement of your website on search engine results pages (SERPS).

When potential leads and buyers search for products or ideas in a search engine (90% of searches come in through Google), they’ll type in a few related keywords. Google will then show what it believes to be the top 10 most relevant results on the first page.

Take Google. If someone were to type in “manufacturing recycling businesses near me,” Google would use its database of billions of websites to display what it thinks are the 10 choices that will answer the search’s query. If your website or product lands on that first page of search results, you have the highest chance of being viewed. The higher up you are on that page, the better. Most Google searchers will click on the first page that looks good. The vast majority of them will never make it to the second page of results.

An SEO strategy for industrial companies will help your business climb to a higher spot on the SERP and maintain a high position.

How Will Industrial SEO Benefit Business?

An SEO campaign is just one of the digital marketing strategies you could choose, but it’s usually the best choice. Here’s why it’s so effective.

More Relevant Leads

You may be getting more website visitors with your Facebook ads or mass email campaigns. But there’s no guarantee that these people need or want your services. With an SEO strategy, you’ll attract people who are looking for what you have to offer. You’re likely to generate more leads because those people are looking to make an industrial purchase in the first place.

Long-Term ROI

Let’s say you create a digital ad campaign with Facebook. You start to notice more website traffic and a few more leads. Then, you have an uptick in sales. Unfortuately, your gains will only be short-term. Unless you keep funding Facebook ads, your sales won’t keep increasing.

SEO, on the other hand, offers a long-term ROI. While some elements of SEO need to be maintained regularly for the best results, others are more project-based and therefore more cost-effective. For instance, an SEO-friendly blog post could be written about industrial stamping and uploaded to your website. It could become a popular search engine result for the topic and land itself on the search engine results page.

At this point, you’d have increased traffic to your site from interested customers for as long as the industrial stamping post remained high in the SERP. In theory, this could be for years – a much longer time frame than a week-long Facebook advertisement.

Higher Brand Awareness

Even if people scroll past your website but don’t click on it, you’re still getting on their radar. The more times that people see your brand appear on their search engine results, the better. It will take them about seven repetitions to commit you to memory.

Even if they don’t end up using your services, you’ll be on the tip of their tongue when someone they know does need your expertise. An SEO strategy makes your manufacturing business more visible to buyers, competitors, and suppliers.

Increased Revenue

What do more relevant leads, long-term ROI, and higher brand awareness have in common? They all play a role in increasing your revenue stream.

SEO takes a multi-faceted approach to your digital marketing strategy. It focuses on both the technical aspects of your website to ensure its smooth operation and the content that users will read. With both the user and the search engine platform in mind, SEO is the key to your business strategy.

What Elements Go Into a Successful Industrial SEO Strategy?

Every successful SEO strategy for industrial companies will have a few key elements in common.

Keyword Research

Most SEO campaigns start with keyword research.

Even if you have a gorgeous and user-friendly website, you won’t drive leads or sales if you’re not reaching the right audience. To attract the types of customers who are looking for your products and services, your website will have to use the same terminology they do. This is where keyword research becomes necessary.

Certain SEO subscription platforms offer services for analyzing the most common and relevant keywords. They will then implement them on your site. For the best results, though, work with an SEO team. They’ll likely have developed their tricks for looking through common keywords and finding the most effective ones.

Optimized Content

Once you’ve identified the keywords which will be the most lucrative for your site, it’s time to begin the process of optimizing the content on your website to include those keywords.

Having high-quality content is so important for your website that the majority of marketers have identified on-page content development as the most critical SEO factor. This process is called “on-page SEO” because it focuses on the creation of unique and interesting content on all of your web pages that includes target keywords. It’s crucial to include information that readers want while integrating keywords naturally. Otherwise, visitors won’t stay long on a page that reads simply as a long advertisement.

Ask yourself if each page on your website matches the potential query that a searcher is looking for. If you have a long post on your site, make sure each page features only one blog post or content marketing topic.

Trying to fit multiple products or ideas into one page makes it confusing for search engines to identify the main point and index each page for rankings. It also makes visiting your website more challenging for consumers who have a particular answer in mind. Therefore, it’s wise to have separate landing pages for each product or service you offer. Search engines and customers will have an easier time with your website. Individual pages will also give you separate fields to input SEO information like headers and metadata.

Backlink Building

According to one of Google’s Q&A videos, having backlinks is one of the top factors in a high search engine ranking. Backlinks are inbound links to your site. For instance, say someone clicks a link on another website that takes them to a page on your site. That URL that draws in the visitor is called a backlink.

Google values backlinks because it signals to the search engine that your content is legitimate. It is valued so highly by another website that it chose to send its viewers outside of their website and into yours.

When it comes to backlinks, quality is often more important than quality. 5 backlinks from medium- or low-traffic sites can improve your rankings. But just 2 backlinks from reputable news sources or highly-ranked sites will get you even further. There are a few ways that you can get backlinks as an industrial company.

You can get press opportunities that announce new products or services. Local sites that review industrial suppliers may discuss you on their sites, giving you a great local SEO opportunity. You can also pay for appearances on websites, often referred to as features or guest posting. If you’ve been unable to crack a particular market, a paid feature can connect you to your target audience members via a source that they’re already comfortable using.

Mobile-Friendly Design

Your website isn’t just being viewed on a desktop anymore. More and more searches are being made on tablets and phones. Website viewers will expect your website to be fully functioning from their mobile devices, and Google will, too. Sites that aren’t mobile-friendly will be ranked lower in the search engine results since Google gives priority to sites that are responsive for any device.

Google has emphasized on numerous occasions its desire for the web to become more mobile.

If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, leads won’t be as friendly either. It’s unlikely you’ll have many mobile website visitors left if your pictures are jumbled and text is hard to read.

And when a search engine sees that your page has a high bounce rate, they’ll interpret it as the user not finding the information they need. Even if your page was the perfect match, both the visitor and the search engine will be none the wiser.

It’s wise to ensure that your site is mobile-friendly sooner rather than later. A report from CNBC reveals that by 2025, almost 75% of the world’s population will be using solely their smartphones to access the internet.

Technical Structure

The technical structure of your website is the backbone of your industrial SEO strategy. If your website doesn’t function properly, search engines won’t be able to assess, organize, and index your site. No amount of intriguing content will be able to fix this.

Page Load Speed

How long does it take for a page on your website to load? One second? Five? If you want to optimize your SEO, you’ll aim for a page loading time of three seconds or less.

Google in particular prefers websites that load more quickly. Its crawlers only have a certain amount of time and resources allocated to crawl your site before they move on to the next. And for the same reason that you want a mobile-friendly site, you’ll want your website’s pages to load quickly.

A UPS study shows that industrial product buyers gravitate toward sites that are convenient and easy for the buyer. If pages load slowly or load without high-quality graphics and video, using your website becomes a hassle. Users may go to other sites in favor of a more user-friendly buying experience. And your SEO will suffer as a result.

An SEO team can help you choose the right server for your website to ensure that each page always loads quickly. Often they may be able to adjust the backend of your website’s code to make it run more smoothly.

XML Sitemaps

For your website to be visible as a search result, Google’s bots need to crawl each web page and add it to their index of all other websites that appear on SERPs. If bots are unable to crawl your website, they can’t add you to the index. Your website will be invisible from search results.

To make the job of crawling easier, one of the SEO tips for industrial companies includes creating an XML sitemap.

XML sitemaps help search engines navigate the content on each page and explain the importance of that web page to the rest of the website as a whole. They have been called the “roadmap” of a website. XML sitemaps give search engines information including when the page was modified, how often it’s updated, and its hierarchical position among the rest of the pages on the website.

URL Canonicalization

Sometimes, your website will display duplicate links for a page. For instance, one of your product pages could appear twice to search engines as yourwebsite.com?item=222 and yourwebsite.com/item/222.

In this case, search engines may get confused. If they have to manually decide which link will be displayed on results pages, it may end up hurting your SEO or being the page you didn’t want. The link that Google will end up choosing to display on results pages is called the canonical URL.

Creating canonical links within your website helps optimize your website’s SEO because it gives instructions to search engines about which link to use if two are available. Doing this facilitates the job of crawling and indexing your site by reducing the number of decisions that bots have to make.

URL canonicalization is best done with the help of an SEO team. It will require them to create a canonical link element that they’ll input into each page’s code or insert into the HTTP document header.

Structured Data

Often considered one of the more advanced SEO practices, structured data can give your manufacturing business an edge in a more competitive market.

Structured data, particularly schema markup, give search engines context about the information on each page. This makes it easier for them to crawl and index the information on that page.

For instance, the number 303 could mean anything on your website. It could be your business phone number’s area code, the first three numbers of your office address, or the product number of an item’s listing. Structured data tells search engines exactly what this number means concerning the rest of the information on the page.

Measurement and Analytics

Once you have a manufacturing SEO strategy in place, you need to determine its effectiveness. Without the proper measuring tools, even the most well-strategized SEO campaign may be for nothing.

Setting Your Goals

Before you even begin implementing your strategy, keep in mind that one of the best SEO tips for industrial companies is to set goals.

Make sure your goals can answer the following questions.

• Can you identify the specific achievement you would like to reach?
• Why?
• Do you think this expectation is reasonable? (an SEO team can help you with this one)
• What’s the timeline for reaching your goal?
• How are you going to measure if you met your SEO goal?

Various goals will require different courses of action.

For instance, if you’re looking to get more email subscribers for your industrial services monthly newsletter, your SEO strategy may focus more one existing website visitors. One looking to focus on generating more website traffic will focus on becoming visible to broader audiences.

Engagement Metrics

You can choose to measure your industrial SEO efforts in several ways. Engagement metrics will give you insight into elements of the user experience and help you plan the next steps of your industrial digital marketing strategy.

Conversion Rate

Conversion rate measures the engagement by dividing the number of times your desired action was reached over the number of unique page visits. Essentially it tells you who signed up for that email list, watched the demo video, or followed any other call to action after visiting your site.

Time-on-Page

Time on the page tells you how long an individual spent on your page before leaving. This gives you an idea of whether visitors are consuming the information on a page.

If you have a blog post that’s 1000 words, and readers are only spending a few seconds on it, they’re probably not reading what you have on there. It would appear that the information isn’t useful to them.

A low time-on-page stat doesn’t always have bad implications, though. For instance, a client looking for a phone number would spend a short amount of time on your contact page. This is actually a good thing because it means they found the information they need quickly.

Scroll Depth

Like time on page, scroll depth tells you about how much visitors are taking in your content. It also gives you content into what information is being seen and what isn’t. If most visitors only make it halfway down the page, it would be wise for you to include what you want them to see most at the top of the page.

Pages-Per-Visit

Are visitors reacting positively to your website? Do they seek out more information? If your pages-per-visit metric is high, then the answer is probably “Yes” to both questions.

Pages-per-visit is exactly what it sounds sounds. It tells you the average number of pages that users go to when they’re on your site. For instance, say you want visitors to go from a useful blog post to requesting a price quote for a service. You’ll want to have a high pages-per-visit rating.

Hiring an Industrial SEO Team

With your newfound SEO knowledge, you may feel ready to implement SEO practices into your website on your own. However, for the best results, we recommend hiring a knowledgeable team that offers a variety of services.

Many SEO tactics involve coding experience and an understanding of how to work with the backend of a website. Creating canonical links and inserting structured data into a page is best left to someone who will be able to fix it should a problem arise.

Google changes its algorithm frequently, and SEO methods have to be updated accordingly. An SEO team keeps track of evolving search engine traits for you and makes sure that everything on your site is up-to-date. An SEO team has years of experience in website design and content creation. They’ll be able to generate content that delivers results on web pages that are intuitive and visually appealing.

An industrial SEO team also gives you the benefit of its connections. If you’re trying to expand into different markets, especially in the industrial business, it may be hard to get the attention of big-name websites and publications on your own. Many SEO teams, on the other hand, often have longstanding relationships with certain publishers or journalists. At the very least, they have the resources to fight for you and get you in the door.

Creating Your Industrial SEO Strategy

SEO is the backbone of any effective digital marketing strategy. If you’re ready to grow your audience and your leads, it’s time to get started creating your industrial SEO strategy.

Guided by our team of experts, you can transform your online presence. With our online design and SEO experience, we can create a website that is both attractive and functional.

Contact us to learn more about the next steps. Let’s build something great!