In your efforts to attract more leads to your manufacturing business, it’s not enough to build an informative website and wait for people to stumble upon it. Without even basic SEO optimization, your manufacturing business website could end up hiding on page 10 or 20 of your audience’s search engine results. SEO can be complicated and everchanging. Hiring an online marketing professional to get you started with a solid SEO set up—such as submitting your sitemap to search engines, and tailoring an SEO strategy for you—is a worthwhile investment that can save you a lot of time, and help attract more leads to your page sooner. That said, there are a few things that you can do to help boost your manufacturing business website’s organic SEO.
Identify Your Keywords
This article by Hubspot walks you through 10 excellent ways to find the best search terms––and hence, keywords––for your business.
Infuse Your Content with Those Keywords
Use your keywords and key phrases throughout your content, but make sure you don’t compromise readability. You don’t want to overdo it, but use your keywords where it would seem natural to do so. Try to focus on using one keyword or key phrase per page of content first. Eventually, you can beef up your content with up to three carefully chosen keywords, but this is where hiring an online marketing professional can help.
Capture Leads with Gated Content
Gated content can be a newsletter subscription, an eBook, valuable product information and tips, or just about anything your target audience would consider useful and of value to them—so much so that they are willing to give you their name and email address in exchange for access to it.
Your gated content can be offered via a timed pop-up window when people visit your site and should also be featured in a box somewhere above the fold of your website (for those of us who automatically close pop-ups before considering the offer). It’s an excellent lead generating tactic that should be used along with an email marketing strategy. Learn more about how to use gated content.
Add Keyword Infused Alt Tags to Images
Include keywords in the alternative-titles and captions of your images. This is the text displayed in the event that your image doesn’t load. It also provides a way for visually impaired users to process images, so use accurate descriptions.
Compress Imagery for Page Speed
Imagery with a large file size can slow down your website’s page loading speed and hurt your SEO rank. You can compress your images using photo editing tools such as Photoshop, or services such as TinyPNG if you’re not already familiar with using Photoshop.
Test your website’s page speed using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.
Test Your Site for Broken Links and 404’s
Check for broken links in your content and promptly redirect them. Make a habit of checking your website for crawl errors using tools such as Google Search Console or SEMrush Site Audit Tool every month.
Use Well-Placed CTAs to Link to Other Pages on Your Website When Relevant
Every page of content on your manufacturing business website should include an actionable link that leads your audience to another page or another step to take. This progression should be natural and create a flow. A page without clear calls-to-action is like a conversation that abruptly ends. Use well placed CTAs to guide your audience through your website and through the steps you wish them to take.
Consistently Add or Refresh Your Content
Google’s priority is to offer its search engine users the most useful, high quality and highly relevant search results. And by consistently adding fresh content to your website, you are telling Google that your website is still active and relevant.
The easiest way to do this is by featuring a blog on your website and adding fresh keyword infused content every week or, at the very least, every month. That said, business owners rarely have time to sit down and compose blog posts, let alone think up topics on the fly. An online marketing professional can help you get set-up with a content plan, or even do the blogging for you.
Embrace Social
Make your content shareable. You might not think your audience would have a reason to share your product content on Twitter or Facebook, but consider that your distributors or retailers might want to feature your content on their social media pages and promote your products to their audience.
Now is also a good time to establish your manufacturing business’s presence on social media and even consider using it as a customer support tool. Here are 10 ways manufacturing companies can rock their social media.
Google Algorithms Constantly Change, but a Few Factors Remain Consistent
Valuable content, readability, relevancy, and high usability. As long as you’re consistently producing high-quality content for your customers, and your website is easy to use, you should steadily build up SEO.
Get the Right Help for Your Website and Online Marketing Strategy
If you’re in the process of building your website, or would like help improving your current manufacturing business website, reach out to our team at McAllister Marketing for a no-obligation consultation. Our team is comprised of web developers, designers, online marketing strategists, bloggers and SEO specialists working together to help our clients attract, convert and retain more customers and grow their businesses. You’ll appreciate our ROI focused approach and how easy we are to work with.
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