SEO for Manufacturing: Your 2024 Guide From Manufacturing SEO Pros

Welcome to your 2024 guide on SEO for manufacturing companies. Learn everything about manufacturing search engine optimization (SEO), from its definition to its implementation, now:

What is manufacturing SEO?

 

Manufacturing SEO is the process of improving a manufacturing company’s visibility in organic search results, like on Google or Bing. Common on-page, off-page, and technical SEO tactics include keyword research, content creation, and link acquisition.

Why is SEO for manufacturers important?

SEO for manufacturers is important because business buyers — and consumers — use search engines to research, troubleshoot, and solve problems, whether that’s finding a machine, part, or custom solution.

Without an optimized online presence, you’re giving away the following to competitors:

• Traffic
• Leads
• Revenue

That’s why it’s critical for manufacturing companies to invest in search engine optimization.

How to do SEO for manufacturers

Below, you’ll find tips for how to do SEO for manufacturers, specifically. If you’re looking for a more general guide on search engine optimization, check out our SEO Basics Guide, which is a great resource for beginners and SEO pros.

1. Leverage your manufacturing expertise

One of the best SEO tips for manufacturers is actually not related to SEO at all…it’s all about your expertise! Manufacturers can use their experience in their area of expertise to create authoritative content on their website, giving them a leg up in their SEO and sales efforts.

Let’s say you are a manufacturer of custom concrete molds.

Like lots of manufacturing, this is a niche area of expertise which gives you lots of leverage if you are willing to showcase this expertise on your website. Create pages on your site geared towards your most common buyers (bonus points if you target relevant manufacturing keywords).

Let’s say you sell a lot of custom concrete molds for patio companies. Create a page all about what makes your manufacturing process unique and how your molds are perfect for their use cases.

Urethane Industrial Products has a great example of an industries served and use cases page.

You can take this concept further and create videos, showcase unique products you’ve made, and more. All of this content (when well-optimized) can turn your manufacturing website into an SEO and sales powerhouse because it shows off your unique expertise to your target market.

2. Optimize your content for search intent

Getting this content on your site is a key starting point, but optimizing it is a key next step.

Imagine your website filled with high-value content for each of your target markets, in-depth pages about your company history and manufacturing process, and videos showcasing your expertise. All of that is a great start, but for manufacturing SEO you need to make sure your content is suitable for search engines.

How? Make sure it’s indexable. Make sure your pages are created in a way that search engines can easily crawl the content. Structure your site where you have different content sections…maybe an “industries served” section along with a videos section.

See if your content is indexed on Google with a site search. Visit Google, and use the following search: “site:your-domain-name” like “site:seo.com” — Google will then generate which URLs it’s indexed from those websites.

Alternatively, visit Google Search Console, where you can troubleshoot indexing errors.

3. Build a strong tech stack

Expert insights from

We understand manufacturers want to make the most of every advertising dollar. Leveraging marketing technology is key to stronger ROI and making each dollar stretch the furthest.

It’s also important to combine SEO and other digital strategies to reach users at every phase of the purchase funnel since it takes 9 to 11 touchpoints for a user to convert into a lead!

Adam Gante Lead Ongoing Strategy Consultant & Manufacturing Industry Expert

Most manufacturing companies measure their SEO performance based on leads, specifically qualified leads. That can get tough, though, if your marketing tech stack doesn’t sync your marketing and sales data.

If you want to measure what SEO for manufacturing companies does for your business, then you need a tech stack that eliminates the silos between marketing and sales. Align those two channels, and you’ll have insight into:

• How many qualified leads came from search
• How many closed or won deals came from search
• Which URLs qualified leads visited before converting
• And more

A platform like MarketingCloudFX is helpful here because it measures your SEO performance and syncs with your CRM, like Nutshell, HubSpot, and others. With that kind of alignment, you can finally put a number to SEO’s performance, which is critical.

4. Use responsive design

You might think that mobile traffic isn’t important, and that only traffic from desktop computers is important. But if so, you’d be wrong. Very wrong! Google uses mobile-first indexing, meaning it ranks sites based on their mobile versions.

That’s already one good reason to optimize for mobile for manufacturing search engine optimization. But on top of that, failing to make your site mobile-friendly will only lead to you losing a lot of traffic from people on mobile devices.

To optimize your site for mobile, you should use responsive design.

That’s a type of web design where your site rearranges page elements to fit the screen where they appear. So, your site will look a bit different on desktop than on mobile. Here’s an example of a desktop and mobile site:

By harnessing responsive design, you can better optimize your site for search results and drive more traffic. See if you have a responsive site using Chrome Dev Tools or Google’s Lighthouse tool.

5. Build a custom quote process

With custom quoting powering so much of the manufacturing process, you can improve the business impact of your SEO campaigns by building custom quotes into your website.

A proper manufacturing SEO campaign can drive a lot of traffic to your website but you need to be able to turn that traffic into new leads. A common mistake is to overly focus on generating traffic but having a poorly built website that doesn’t turn traffic into leads.

For manufacturers specifically, many visitors are often interested in getting a quote for a custom process.

While it is often impossible to provide a truly accurate quote without a series of detailed conversions, having a quote estimate calculator or even some pricing examples on your website makes a huge difference.

Your authoritative, expert-driven content can generate traffic and interest in your services but talking openly about pricing is what will prompt these visitors to take action.

Bettinardi, a maker of custom golf putters, has a quiz on their site that provides recommendations for products and specs based on a series of questions. This prompts users to take a specific action and gets them into a sales flow for custom-built putters.

6. Create a Google Business Profile

One thing many businesses want is to get local traffic. After all, for local service businesses that serve their area, many of their customers are probably local residents. If that’s you, local SEO is important. So, how do you gain presence in local search results?

There are multiple answers to that question, but one of the best methods is to create a Google Business Profile. By filling out some basic info about your company and then verifying your ownership of it, you can get your profile out there for people to discover.

The reason this matters is that when people search for local businesses, Google will usually display a local 3-pack at the top of search results, which consists of three matching business profiles.

With a Google Business Profile of your own, you can help your manufacturing center get included in that local 3-pack.

7. Earn valuable backlinks

Finally, you should look for a way to earn backlinks. Backlinks are where third-party websites link to your web content. This is helpful because it can lead new users to your site through the links — but there’s more to it than just that.

Backlinks are also great for improving your rankings. That’s because if a reputable website links to yours, Google assumes that your site is reputable as well. And since Google favors reputable sites in rankings, you’ll rank higher.

When it comes to earning backlinks in SEO for manufacturers, try scoping out reputable websites in your industry for broken or missing links. Then, contact the site owners to let them know about the linking errors, and when you do, also recommend that they replace those errors with fresh links to your content.

When trying to get new backlinks, keep in mind that quality comes before quantity. It’s better for you to have one high-quality backlink than 10 low-quality ones.

8. Supplement SEO with paid advertising

In the manufacturing industry, users spend more time in the early to middle stages of the marketing funnel. In addition to manufacturing SEO, we recommend testing LinkedIn ads to target users in this stage of the funnel, as LinkedIn offers the most robust targeting options for the manufacturing industry.

We’re also seeing manufacturers increase their ROI from trade shows by investing in geofencing campaigns. Geofencing advertising allows your business to stay top-of-mind for trade show attendees by showing these users ads for up to 30 days after the event.

These ads are a great way to remind someone to take action on a great conversation they had at a trade show.

Capture more leads from search with manufacturing SEO services

With more than 25 years of experience in the manufacturing sector, WebFX (the team behind SEO.com) is a trusted partner for manufacturers worldwide. Learn how our manufacturing SEO services can grow your leads and revenue by contacting us online today!