Industrial SEO Strategies: Effective Tips for 2024
4.50/5When it comes to SEO, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Especially if you want to improve the organic traffic and conversion rates of an industrial or manufacturing B2B website. That’s why we decided to create this article and guide you on specific industrial SEO best practices that have proven results.
Let’s get started!
What Is Industrial SEO?
The term industrial SEO refers to the set of actions designed to help improve your website’s ranking on Google and other search engines. This includes creating and optimizing content around specific keywords, writing effective meta descriptions, optimizing images, earning backlinks, improving your page speed, and more.
In short, industrial SEO is the application of SEO concepts and theories to a website specifically dedicated to the sale and promotion of industrial products.
Why Is Industrial SEO Important?
We live in a world where virtually every business and organization is fighting for the attention of the audience. Manufacturers are no different. In fact, they have an even harder time because they sell to a very specific niche of B2B customers.
One of the best ways to capture their attention, drive them to your site and engage them with enriching content is through SEO. This set of actions includes creating valuable content and optimizing it so that Google and other search engines can crawl, index, and rank the various pages that make up your website.
Ignoring this prevents your site from ranking in search engines and being visible to potential customers who use Google to find answers to their questions and pain points.
Industrial SEO Stats
The following statistics illustrate both the importance of SEO and its impact on your business:
- The top three organic search results on Google receive 68.7% of all clicks. (AIOSEO)
- Only 0.78% of users go to the second page of results. (AIOSEO)
- The first featured snippet on the search results page gets the most clicks, with a 42.9% click-through rate (CTR.) (AIOSEO)
- Organic traffic generates 69% of leads for industrial companies (Industrial Sage)
- 79% of industrial companies have an SEO strategy (Industrial Sage)
- 57% of B2B marketers say SEO brings in more leads than any other strategy (Gitnux)
- Companies have seen a 2.8% increase in revenue after investing in SEO (Gitnux)
- B2B buyers conduct an average of 12 searches before engaging with a brand (Google)
- 81% of B2B companies report spending at least $7,500 per month on SEO (Semrush)
So, what are you waiting for to develop and implement an SEO strategy? If you need help with this process, you can work with an SEO agency that has a proven track record of working with other clients in your industry.
Types of Industrial Businesses SEO Can Help
Basically, any industrial organization that has a website can benefit from an SEO strategy. However, the following have seen the best results:
- Aerospace and Defense
- Construction
- Machinery and Tooling
- Freight and Logistics
- Waste Management
- Food and Beverage
- Plastics
- Industrial Equipment
- Metal Fabrication
If you don’t see your specific niche in this list, don’t be discouraged. Following the steps below to properly design and implement an SEO strategy will help you rank in search engines, attract more organic traffic to your site, and convert that traffic into calls, meetings, and sales.
What Are the 4 Types of SEO?
Before we dive deep into the process of designing and implementing an industrial SEO strategy, it’s imperative that we quickly review the 4 main forms that SEO can take. Please note that we have specific articles for each, where you can learn more about what it means and how it’s implemented.
- On-Page SEO: This is the process of optimizing your website’s content for search engines and humans, including page titles, page headers, URLs, internal links, meta descriptions, images, and more.
- Off-Page SEO: Refers to the various actions you take outside of your own website to improve your search engine rankings. This helps put your brand in front of more people, brings more organic website traffic to your site, and helps increase your conversion and sales numbers.
- Technical SEO: This refers to the practice of optimizing the architecture and technical elements of your website to improve its visibility and ranking on Google and other search engines.
- Local SEO: The process of optimizing your website for local searches. It is a powerful marketing technique designed to help local businesses increase in-store traffic and sales.
These 4 elements are the foundation of any successful SEO strategy.
How to Implement SEO for Manufacturers – Quick Guide
With that in mind, let’s review the various steps and actions that will help you successfully optimize your website and increase your revenue.
Define SEO Topics that Are in Line with Your Sales And Marketing Goals
Since you are targeting a very specific niche, we highly recommend that you start by listing different topics that your target audience is interested in. Later, you will develop, optimize and publish content around them to nurture your leads and help them move forward in the sales process.
Some ideas for gathering information and building your list of topics include searching for
- Frequently asked questions for your sales teams.
- Common objections your sales team receives from prospects.
- Topics and concepts your audience is searching for online.
- People also ask snippet on Google.
- Parts of your sales pitch that resonate most with your leads.
- The most visited pages on your website.
Perform Keyword Research and Optimize Your Website
You want to rely on tools like Ahref or Semrush to perform keyword research. This process allows you to understand the specific terms your audience is using to search for your products, services and solutions.
Keep in mind that you want to avoid working with generic terms such as “air purifiers,” as these tend to be used by B2C customers looking for simple solutions for their homes. Our suggestion is to look at more specific long tail keywords, such as “industrial air filtration systems”, which may have a lower search volume but is targeted to people looking for something as specific as this.
Check out our blog post on 2024 SEO Insights: Crafting the Perfect Keyword Strategy for more information on how to choose the perfect option for your business.
Once you know what keywords to use, it’s important to start optimizing your existing website content. You can prioritize your most frequently visited pages and work from there.
Example B2B Industrial SEO Keywords to Target
Some examples of keywords you should try to adapt and use include:
- Aerospace engine manufacturers
- Car welding near me
- Custom metal fabrication
- Sheet metal fabrication near me
- Marine equipment supplier
- Food packaging solutions
- Rapid plastic prototyping
- Custom metal fabrication cost
- PCB fabrication manufacturer
- Types of welding
- CNC auto parts
- Machining car parts
Create Content for Your Ideal Customers and Users
At this point, you should have a clear understanding of the topics and keywords you need to use on each new piece of content you create. Before you start writing, it is highly recommended that you create a content calendar. This is where you will specify:
- Title
- Content type
- The author
- Keyword
- Keyword volume
- URL
- Content Length
- Due Date
- Status
This keeps everyone involved in the writing, editing, optimizing, and publishing process on the same page.
Once you start the creation process, you need to remember that your end reader is a human being. So write for them. Avoid jargon, answer their questions, provide insight and data, and make your content engaging. You want your content to keep them on your site and direct them to other content that provides additional value.
What Makes a Content Piece Great?
Great content has similar characteristics:
- It’s easy to read. You can achieve this by adding bullets, headings, illustrations, and useful multimedia resources.
- It’s not limited by the number of characters, but by the length of the topic.
- It’s unique and provides value to the end reader. Adding updated data points, insights, thoughts and opinions is perfect.
- Consists of three main parts: introduction, body, and conclusion.
- It usually has a CTA to entice the user to stay on your site.
Implement On-Page SEO Best Practices
Once you’ve written and edited your content piece, it’s time to optimize it for search engines. This process allows Google’s spiders to crawl and understand your content so they can index and rank it in their search results.
Our Ultimate 2024 Checklist for On-Page SEO Services + Examples will guide you through a successful implementation of On-Page SEO. But remember, to implement industrial SEO, you have to:
- Optimize your meta title. Keep it between 50 and 60 characters and make sure it is unique and contains your keyword.
- Write a meta description of 150-160 characters that provides a quick summary of what your content is all about.
- Implement header tags (H2, H3, H4…) to distribute and organize your content.
- Optimize your URL and make it an exact phrase (separated by hyphens) that quickly describes your content. Ideally, it should include your keyword.
- Add internal links to other relevant content.
- Optimize your images by adding a descriptive filename, ALT text, and compression.
- Optimize for mobile so that every detail is easy to read, regardless of screen size or resolution.
Example of SEO Best Practices in an Industrial Website
Let’s say your target audience is interested in eco-friendly packaging, and your keyword research shows that it’s actually a good idea to create content around that search query. So you decide to create a blog post and optimize it.
The title could be something like “Eco-friendly packaging – what does it all mean?” It includes the keyword and clearly states what the reader will learn.
Your meta description might look like this “Discover the importance of eco-friendly packaging and its benefits for the environment. Learn how making sustainable choices can have a positive impact on our planet.
As for headings, you can have the following sections:
- What is eco-friendly packaging?
- What is Conscious Consumption?
- The benefits of eco-friendly packaging
- Steps to get started with eco-friendly packaging
- Exploring green packaging alternatives for your business
- Eco-friendly packaging examples
The URL for the blog post should be www.yoursite.com/eco-friendly-packaging or www.yoursite.com/blog/eco-friendly-packaging.
Final details include:
- Include links to other pages on your website, such as your eco-friendly solutions.
- Optimizing images.
- Making sure it’s optimized and mobile responsive.
Make Technical SEO for Industrial Companies a Priority
In addition to creating and optimizing content, you need to optimize the technical aspects of your site. This will improve the user experience and help your site rank on search engine results pages.
Our Ultimate Guide to Technical SEO serves as the perfect checklist for all the things you or your website team need to do. But let’s take a quick look at how you can optimize your industrial services website with technical SEO.
- Design a logical and user-friendly site architecture.
- Submit your Sitemap to Google.
- Manage duplicate content and use canonical tags.
- Secure your site with HTTPS.
- Measure and improve site speed.
- Make sure your site is responsive and optimized for mobile devices.
- Use breadcrumbs.
- Optimize for Core Web Vitals speed metrics.
- Implement schema markup effectively.
- Fix broken pages.
As you can see, it’s all very technical. But details like making sure your page load time is under 3 seconds and adding the SSL certificate have a huge impact on both ends: your site visitors’ experience and the signals you send to search engines.
Design and Implement an Off-Page SEO Strategy
Your final action item happens outside of your website. Off-page SEO allows you to take advantage of other websites’ traffic and attract them to your site. It also sends a clear signal to Google that your content is relevant, authoritative, and worth citing.
We have published a Complete Guide to Off-Page SEO that explains how to implement each of the following actions and strategies:
- Understand your backlink profile and your competitors.
- Create a backlink strategy that focuses on highly authoritative sites in your industry.
- Earn brand mentions from influencers and thought leaders in your industry.
- Develop and implement a guest blogging strategy.
- Make the most of your social media channels.
- Execute an influencer marketing campaign.
You can pick and choose as many as you want, but before you decide on any, make sure you check out what your competitors are doing. This information will help you understand if an effort is worthwhile or not.
Monitor, Measure, and Analyze Results
Once you start implementing all of the above, you need to establish KPIs and a monitoring mechanism. It’s imperative that you understand which actions are driving results and which are not. Use this information to make decisions and adjustments.
Make sure the KPIs you choose help you understand:
- Traffic performance over time – You can measure this with Google Analytics.
- Landing page performance – Google Analytics gives you data on the top pages your users visit, where they engage, bounce rate, time spent per visit, and more.
- Content engagement – You can measure engagement (clicks, time per visit, pages per session, clicks, etc.) with Google Analytics.
- Conversions – The same tool allows you to set conversion goals (fill out a form, talk to sales, request a call, download a file, etc.) and measure success.
There are other metrics you can consider, but you don’t want to overwhelm yourself with tons of data. Stick to the most important ones.
6 Common Mistakes Industrial Sites Make
You want to make sure that you avoid making some common mistakes in the industry as you work your way through the various SEO actions.
Some of the most common ones are:
- Not adding lead magnets to your site. Ebooks, webinars, videos, case studies, guides, etc. They all help you attract and convert visitors into leads that you can then nurture and convert into customers.
- Failure to include relevant industry keywords on the site to match customer searches. This not only hurts SEO, but also makes it harder for potential customers to find your site.
Having different 404 pages or error pages. This hurts the user experience as they keep getting redirected to error pages. - Missing calls to action that drive conversions in different parts of your website. Prevents the user from understanding what to do next or how to move forward in the sales funnel.
- Having relevant pages (About Us, Contact Us, Product Pages, Services Pages, etc.) with not enough copy to entice the user to learn more or take action. Little to no content hurts your page ranking in search engines and makes it harder for visitors to find answers to their questions and solutions to their pain points.
- Working with a web design that is not responsive for mobile. With more than 50% of internet traffic coming from mobile devices, if your site is not responsive, you are hurting the user experience and reducing your chances of attracting new customers.
- Operating without an SSL certificate.
Conclusion
Mastering the art of SEO takes time, effort, and resources. Especially when you are learning all the concepts and trying to apply them to such a specific industry. But there’s no need to worry. Fortunately, there are many SEO professionals and SEO agencies that specialize in niche markets.
They have the knowledge, experience and tools to help you optimize your website and turn it into a lead generation tool. Remember, SEO efforts take up to 6 months to start delivering results. But it’s all worth it when you see your target audience reading and engaging with your content to the point where they’re convinced your products and services are the solution they’ve been looking for.
