The surest way for manufacturers and industrial companies to grow their share of voice and market is by improving their search engine (SEO) rankings and visibility. Manufacturers pursue this because they know that Google page one is a pathway to business prosperity.

SEO or “search engine optimization” is a set of techniques manufacturing and industrial company marketers and their agencies deploy to improve their natural or organic website rankings on Google, Bing and other international search engines. More on these techniques here. This should equip you with a Keyword Mapping Strategy, Keyword Guide, Content Plan, Editorial Calendar, Link Building Plan, Site Tuning Plan and initial Benchmarks.

Once you start deploying these SEO techniques either yourself or with assistance from a partner SEO agency, keep a few things in mind. Remember that securing Google page one rankings is a marathon and not a sprint. Keep an eye out on Search Algorithm updates that can affect your rankings – sometimes very dramatically. Monitor competitors because they aren’t asleep. Watch keyword trends because like the rest of English language, they too evolve over time. Be mindful of seasonality and cycles because every industry and sector has its own.

Your efforts should start improving your brand’s search visibility. This begs the question: how do you know if your website visibility in improving or not?

How To Measure Improvements in Brand Visibility

At Elliance, we use five measures to know if a manufacturing brand visibility is improving or not:

1. Review Google Search Console Data: We track and create a trend line of number of times the brand name surfaces and is clicked on search engine results pages. For all our SEO clients, this grows upwards year-over-year.
2. Monitor Rankings in Keyword Tracking Tool: We upload our Keyword Guide and all the keywords we are optimizing to secure Google page one rankings into our Keyword Tracking tool. We monitor this weekly to measure the average rankings, weekly gains and losses.
3. Monitor Organic Search Volume: We measure the organic traffic as a percentage of overall website traffic and trend it over time. It grows upward year-over-year for all our clients.
4. Monitor Non-Branded vs. Branded Organic Traffic Ratio: This should rise over time. For most of our clients this ratio begins with 20/80 or 30/70 and rises all the way up to 60/40 or 70/30. Occasionally, this rises up to 80/20 and 90/10.
5. Measure Increases in Organic Leads, RFQ’s, e-Commerce Transactions, Downloads, Webinar Signups, etc.: This is ultimately where the rubber meets the road. These metrics should trend upwards as you invest in SEO.

Contact us if you are seeking a smart manufacturing marketing agency which can help you join the elite group of manufacturers and industrial companies growing their company’s share of mind, voice and market using our SEO services.