The Bare Necessities: SEO Musts for Industrial Manufacturers

Once upon a time, SEO didn’t matter for industrial manufacturers. Customers knew your phone number and they knew who to talk to. New clients came through word of mouth and referrals. These days, however, SEO plays a major role in revenue for industrial manufacturers. Why? Because the competition is more fierce. And because the way consumers purchase is changing. The internet matters for industrial manufacturers. Since the internet matters, SEO does, too.

If all talk of SEO is a little panic-inducing, this is a great place to start. We’re not focusing on the complexities of SEO. Instead, we’re tackling only the bare necessities. Here’s the SEO “musts” for industrial manufacturers like yourself. If you don’t know where to start when it comes to Search Engine Optimization, start here.

SEO Musts for Industrial Manufacturers

The Basics of SEO

Before we walk through the necessities, it’s important to have at least a vague understanding of the basics of SEO. SEO is the art (and science) of getting your website to show up in the top result – or one of the top results – on a search engine, usually Google. Your website will show up for a number of “keywords,” or the terms that a person enters in the search bar on Google. For example, if I search for “sanitary gaskets,” a whole slew of sites selling sanitary gaskets appears. If I’m an industrial manufacturer selling sanitary gaskets, I would want my website to show up in the list.

That’s the high-level look at SEO. The next piece to understand is how we go about getting improvements in SEO for companies like yours. As usual, it’s a multi-step process including:

• Keyword Analysis
• On-Site SEO
• Off-Site SEO

Keyword Analysis

This is the first step to any SEO strategy. Before we begin optimizing, we have to know what we’re optimizing for. We always begin our SEO work for a company by conducting an SEO audit. This audit tells us what we’re up against and helps us set a plan of attack for the future. In the audit, we uncover things like competitive analysis, crawl errors, domain authority and backlink quality. We also spend a good chunk of time figuring out the top keyword opportunities. This keyword analysis helps us to determine which keywords we’re going after and which keywords should be the focus on a per-page basis.

On-Site SEO

On-site SEO involves optimizing the content on your site for the keywords that were chosen in the keyword analysis. It also involves optimizing the meta data in the backend of the site. Meta data includes alt text, title tags and meta descriptions. These three should all be optimized on every single page of your site. On-site optimization also entails watching for crawl errors and fixing them when they do come up. Crawl errors are issues that make it harder for Google’s bots to crawl the site. Crawl errors also include items that hurt user experience: 404 pages, pages with too-long URLs and pages with duplicate content, for example.

Here’s what a crawl analysis might look like for your site. The example below is a recent analysis of the redmoxy.com website. (Click to enlarge.)

Off-Site SEO

Finally, we come to off-site SEO. Once your website is good and optimized for the keywords you’d like to rank for in your industry, we turn our attention to off-site approaches. Namely, off-site optimization involves backlink building from high-quality websites. This matters because the more high-quality backlinks that your website has, the better your domain authority. The better your domain authority, the better your rankings, regardless of on-site SEO optimization. It’s a win-win, and any SEO strategy should include tactics for both on-site and off-site SEO.

SEO is always an on-going process. It’s not possible to optimize once and then continue to have high rankings. But, when it comes down to it, SEO will always include these three factors. Keyword analysis, on-site optimization and off-site optimization will always encompass the SEO musts for industrial manufacturers. With that in mind, the mystery of SEO is revealed. SEO itself is not overly complex, and that makes tackling the bare necessities a little easier, doesn’t it?

To learn more about SEO at RedMoxy and our complete suite of print and digital marketing services, click here.