Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of practices that help your business rank higher online so you can better reach potential customers. SEO is a big deal for any business because online searches are still a top way people discover new businesses.
If your manufacturing business isn’t focused on SEO, your competitors are. You don’t want to miss an opportunity at a sale because a potential customer simply did not find you online.
So what’s an industrial manufacturing business to do?
Here are our top 10 tips for B2B manufacturing companies to boost their SEO and position their businesses above the competition.
10 SEO Tips for Manufacturing Companies
1. Create Content that Actually Helps Your Audience
There’s a hot acronym in the SEO world: EEAT. It stands for Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trust.
While SEO lingo is always evolving, here’s what EEAT means for manufacturing companies looking to produce more effective content:
- Focus on content quality, not quantity.
- Educate your audiences first, sell second.
- Showcase your expertise and depth of knowledge.
- Understand your target audiences and how to cater your content to their concerns and needs.
EEAT signals that search engines reward content created for humans, by humans – a double win for driving conversions and top search engine results page (SERP) ranking.
2. Leverage SEO Automation Tools & AI
Doing keyword research helps determine which keywords are best to target and to gain an understanding of how your audience uses search engines. Keyword research tools like those from Moz and SEMrush speed up this process by identifying which keywords in your industry to prioritize based on volume, quality and difficulty.
Generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude can be useful assistants for creating content outlines or brainstorming ideas. But don’t forget that many AI tools are prone to hallucinations and shouldn’t be relied upon to produce accurate, original content about your industry.
3. Optimize Your Website
Optimizing your website to be fast-loading and high-performing is an ongoing process. Site auditing tools like these can provide specific recommendations:
When all relevance signals of a webpage are equal, the strength of your site optimization can be the tie-breaker that positions you above your competition.
4. Identify Your Industrial Manufacturing Competitors MVPs
For most websites, there are three to four pages that drive the majority of organic traffic. We call these the organic MVPs (most valuable pages).
If you can identify your competitors' organic MVPs, you can strategize a rebuttal, whether that means building out additional pages or reworking content you already have.
5. Optimize Video Content
You’ve probably searched for something on Google and noticed a video near the top of the results page. That’s because videos often get special treatment in search results.
Google recommends these practices to help your videos get discovered:
- Create a page for each video
- Use proper HTML tags (i.e. <video>)
- Create a video sitemap
- Provide a high-quality video thumbnail
- Use structured data describing your video
6. Utilize a Keyword Map
One of the most common SEO mistakes we see industrial manufacturing companies make is targeting the same keywords on every page of their websites.
Instead, create keyword clusters – a group of topically related keywords – and map clusters to individual pages. The idea is to optimize pages around a group or cluster of similar keywords that can rank for a larger number of queries and indicate the depth that a topic is covered on a page.
This allows each page to build strong equity rather than have different pages of your website competing against each other.
7. Don’t Be Afraid to Link to Other Websites
Including links in your content to other authoritative manufacturing websites in your industry is a surprisingly positive signal to search engines and a healthy function of the web.
A lot of site owners tend to think their website needs to do everything for everyone. But if a related site, like an industry journal (not a direct competitor), is the authority on a certain industrial topic, you don’t need to recreate that content.
Linking to that content from your site actually demonstrates your understanding of the web ecosystem, positions your site as a hub of informative content and can boost both websites when done correctly.
8. Craft Title Tags for Keywords and Clicks
It’s long been debated if click-through rate (CTR) is a SERP ranking factor. Regardless of whether CTR influences your rank, the end goal is the same: drive more traffic to your website.
With that in mind, it’s important to write title tags and meta descriptions for your pages that both entice a site visitor and include keywords to boost your SERP position.
9. Use Structured Data
Structured data sounds intimidating, but really it just means organized data – things like properly formatted FAQs, reviews, job postings and products. Using structured data (schema markup) on the backend of your manufacturing website makes you eligible for special SERP features that help your content stand out on the results page.
10. Create a Comparison Page
Half the struggle of SEO is getting Google to understand who you are and what you do. Comparison pages can help with this by showing search engines and potential customers exactly how you stack up with established competitors. Comparison pages have lots of benefits at every stage of the funnel, such as:
- Getting your business in front of buyers who are already close to making a purchase decision.
- Capturing branded searches for your competitors.
- And giving you some control over the online discussion of your company and your competition.
Your Industrial Manufacturing SEO Partner
Ready to leverage best SEO practices to stand out from the competition? You’re in the right place.
At Marketing Essentials, we bring more than 15 years of experience crafting custom marketing strategies for manufacturing companies to achieve their business goals. With Marketing Essentials as your SEO partner, you can drive more qualified leads and grow relationships with your existing customers.
Curious? Request a free 30-minute consultation.
