Manufacturing SEO

With Manufacturer’s websites often having limited content available, generating the depth to a site for good search results can become difficult.

We often look to the product offerings of a client as a way to generate that depth and additional pages. Rather than just listing a product on one page, we look to list it on multiple pages i.e. by application, material, size, etc. Generating the data from a single data-source results in consistent information and makes it easy for the client to update.

More and more companies these days are utilizing YouTube as a free marketing tool. For those of you that don’t know, YouTube is a video sharing website on which users can upload and share videos to the general public for free. This massive media outlet serves as a great resource for companies to market their products and services while at the same time boosting their Search Engine Optimization score. This is especially true with Google’s search engine since they purchased YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion. Most companies think they don’t have the expertise to produce a video to put on the web but this simply isn’t true. All you need is a standard video camera and a computer to upload your video clip to and you are in business. Once the video is uploaded to YouTube you will be given some code that you can use to embed your video on your website or blog. The clip can also be attached to your email signatures or marketing emails to maximize exposure to your current and potential clients.

Many manufacturing companies think that their products or processes aren’t relevant or exciting enough to put up on the web but you would be surprised with the response it could generate. Even if the video doesn’t attract a lot of attention it is still increasing your SEO score, therefore making your website more visible to the general public. This free and simple task should be utilized by any company looking to generate more business through the web.

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised by this, but our ‘just completed’ 2009 study of  manufacturing websites showed that 65% did not include any of the most basic search optimization techniques.

We looked at

• Title Tags
• Descriptions
• Keywords
• Header/Formatting Tags
• Text Navigation

and were rather ‘liberal’ in marking them as being correctly implemented.  Amazingly, 96% were not using Description tags effectively.  We’ll dig into the numbers a little more and do a more formal writeup, breakdown and analysis in the near future.

I don’t know if Bing will become a verb, but it has the potential to take a decent chunk out of Google’s market share. Google still dominates the market, but there is a cycle to everything and they won’t have their historic 70% search market forever.

For those companies that have sites where they are maximized for organic search engine optimization, the market fragmentation really doesn’t matter that much. For those companies that have their pay per click campaigns on cruise control with Google, they may start to see some changes in the market over the next few years and may need to adjust accordingly.

Microsoft still dominates the corporate desktop/network market. What are the implications for search? B2B research and buying decisions will be made on business Windows based machines… will Bing lead in search done at the office where different sorts of search, research and buying are done? I think it’s a possibility.

Regardless, I’m keeping tabs on my client’s Analytic stats to see what category of search terms are more frequent for Bing.

The decision for a small manufacturer to commit to some level of financial investment in internet marketing is usually not an easy one. For those in the B2B realm where decision making is slower and sales are traditionally built on relationships and long term trust, the SEO/ROI calculation is not necessarily straight forward.

The fact that the internet should be part of their marketing strategy is usually hard to argue. An increasing percentage of buyers are looking to the web for assistance in purchasing decisions. Industry portals like Thomas Net are often an excellent source for a quick ‘hit list’ of potential vendors, however the search doesn’t end there. Drilling down to a more detailed research level means the potential customer will be searching for the company site. Searching to see if that supplier is a leader among his peers on the web can, to some degree, be measured by their web presence and search engine rankings.

• Can your product and business easily be found on the web by your potential customers?
• How do you compare with your competition in search engine rankings and traffic?
• Do you have a way to reach out and grab a perspective customer as they come to your site?

There is no better long term way to deal with the first two questions than Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and increasing the organic (free) quality traffic to your site. This is a long term commitment with long term growth prospects.

The next step is the hook to grab the customer as they come to your site. Online ‘live chat’ with technical sales, whitepaper downloads, etc are common and effective tactics used by other industries ahead on the SEO curve.

The internet marketing path is changing for manufacturers, but successful methods have already been tested and implemented by other industries. It’s time for manufacturers to get in the game.