SEO Strategies for Manufacturers and Industrial Companies

In the past 30 years, Elliance has deployed SEO strategies for more than 100 manufacturers and industrial companies in service of growing their leads, sales and capacity utilization.

Why have we insisted on recommending SEO to our clients? For two reasons.

First, because Google/Bing page 1 is destiny. Trusted page one organic rankings and high visibility for your social media content equate to owning the world’s hottest real estate. 93% of industrial buying begins with on online searches. 90% of users never go beyond page 1 of search results. Organic rankings (i.e. the top 10 natural search results) are clicked 9-folds more, trusted more, and convert three-folds better than paid ads. 

Second, being found on page one is the best means for finding, getting, keeping and growing customers and talent.

We recommend our clients begin the SEO journey by crafting an intentional plan powered by a Keyword Lexicon that contains clusters of keywords and phrases spanning products and services, brand ideals, and areas of thought leadership, innovation and intellectual capital. Categories in the lexicon include products and services keywords, brand positioning keywords, reputation keywords, decisioning keywords, and location keywords.

Here are the nine effective strategies:

1. Products and Services SEO Optimization
Optimize for keywords of your core products and services along with variations across the customer journey including words like “case studies”, “best”, “top”, “FAQs” and other use cases. Make sure you optimize keywords that novice and pro buyers, specifiers and influencers type in. Also ensure that you optimize for combination keywords with products and services for various markets you serve.

2. Catalog and e-Commerce SEO Optimization
Every product page is a potential entry door to your manufacturing company. Make them information rich and complete. Optimize for all categories and all products for novice and pro buyers, specifiers and influencers. Again, optimize for variations used across the customer journey. Ensure that you optimize for combination keywords with products serving various markets. Since there can be thousands of pages involved, use a combination of customized meta-data for key products and formula-based for the remaining ones. Do follow SEO best practices such as creating search-engine friendly URLs, availing social shares, etc.

3. Talent Recruitment SEO Optimization
Every job opening is a door into your website. Every one of your pages is an opportunity to elevate your company in Google search rankings. Look at the Careers and Job Listing pages through the lens of smart SEO practices like optimizing your code, “baking” keywords into your job listing pages, and spreading them with social media share buttons. Ensure your company’s values are not a secret. They should only be lived, but they should also be celebrated and expressed — The ways your values shape your operations, corporate giving, volunteering, board participation, and the work of your foundation ought to come alive in your website, your social media posts, your media relations and your blog. Optimize all of it for search and like-minded, right-fit talent will find you before they find your competitor.

4. Blog SEO Optimization
Create a readership that engages with your passion for delivering practical, valuable and advice-oriented content related to your products, services and industries served. Each blog post should be conceived to win a specific keyword or phrase.

Tell stories. Leverage news-jacking when appropriate. Act as a trusted product expert. Educate prospective buyers, specifiers and influencers. Quote other authoritative peers and partner brands who’ll lend you credibility. Write blog posts with commensurate fidelity, which is less than that of an academic program page or a news item. Tie it back to the products, services and industries you serve. Build topic authority by creating a series of small blog posts instead of packing everything into one long one. Make your posts sharable and share the blog post on your social channels.

5. YouTube SEO Optimization
YouTube is the number two search engine in the world after Google, consumed by boomers, Gen-Xers, Millennials, and Gen-Zers. YouTube videos are routinely ranked and appear on search engine result pages. Start by making your YouTube page beautiful and SEO-optimize the starting page. Next, develop a rational structure for your YouTube channel with meaningful playlists and featured videos. Then use your Keyword Lexicon to optimize each video for a keyword or phrase, and produce new videos to fill keyword gaps.

6. Knowledge Center SEO Optimization
Your knowledge center with its collection of product brochures, white papers, media collections, infographics and more is another critical library of assets begging to be optimized. First, build a dynamic knowledge center with an architecture that is SEO-optimized. Next, optimize each digital asset to maximize SEO gains.

7. News Releases SEO Optimization
The news releases section is often overlooked as a source of SEO rankings gains. Each old news release is an optimizable digital asset. Each new news release should be baked in with a hive of keywords picked from your SEO Keyword Lexicon.

8. Case Studies SEO Optimization
At the decision point in a customer journey, the case studies are what prospective buyers, specifiers and influencers use to make that final brand preference. Ensure that your case studies are perfectly optimized for Google/Bing page one rankings.

9. User Reviews
We live in the age of short-cuts, ratings and rankings. We collaborate with our manufacturing clients to ensure they manage and guard their online rankings, which are considered a ranking factor by search engines.

Contact us if you are seeking a high performance SEO agency or 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.