2021 SEO Tips For Industrial Distributors

Shalane Layugan March 19, 2021

Search engine optimization (SEO) has been around for quite some time, but it has become increasingly important for industrial distributors to adopt as more B2B customers purchase products online.

Google plans to update its algorithm this year to include a factor called Page Experience. At a minimum, the content on an industrial distributor’s website should be valuable to your readers and easy to navigate. But your loading speed, mobile-friendliness, and visual stability contribute to your page experience too. Now is the time to take essential steps on your website’s health if you want to keep your page rankings high.

SEO Tips To Maintain Your Industrial Distribution Company’s Search Rankings

Let’s take a closer look at how you can maintain your website’s page rankings.

Quality Website Content

Although page experience will affect ranking, Google’s blog states, “Great experience doesn’t override having great page content.” Your content marketing strategy should include making sure your digital content is fresh and updated. Combine similar website pages and merge weaker pages to a single page to help with rankings. The pages must be complementary and address a single topic to form a page with higher authority.

According to studies:

47% of consumers expect a webpage to load in 2 seconds or less
A 1-second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions
If an eCommerce website is making $100,000 per day, a 1-second page delay could potentially cost you $2.5 million in lost sales every year

Your B2B users want to find answers to their questions quickly, and they want to find the products they need fast. Create industry-focused and product-detailed pages and include them in your navigation to enhance the functionality of your website. Use images that clearly depict the markets you serve and don’t forget to add alt-tags.

See Examples: Industrial Distributor Website Examples That Increase Sales

Supplementing your digital strategies with an eCommerce solution also contributes to SEO and page experience. Recent industrial research revealed that 31% of manufacturers who invested in eCommerce have benefited from reaching new markets and 34% improve customer experience. Keep your online product catalog up to date with product data and verified formats engineers need.

Learn How: Create Quality Content That Engages B2B Buyers

Videos And Image Optimization

According to Content Marketing Institute, more than half the engineers and technical professionals surveyed for a 2020 report indicated that they spend at least one hour per week watching videos for work. Videos are a great marketing tool to engage buyers on your website, but depending on what you’re using to embed videos and how many other elements there are on your page, they may affect page loading speed. If a user comes across your website and a page takes too long to display all of its content, they’ll likely click away and move to a competitor’s site. Pages with long load times and high bounce rates may negatively impact your SEO and your conversion rate for quality leads.

There are many ways to embed videos on a web page, but self-hosted videos take the most time to load. Choose the right video format and consider custom video hosting to ensure your page doesn’t hurt page loading speed. Don’t forget to customize the file name, and label the media file so that it’s relevant to the content on the corresponding page.

Learn More: How To Create A Company Profile Video

Similarly, large images, high-resolution images, and uncompressed images can negatively affect your website’s loading speed. Set logic functions to serve the appropriately sized images depending on the user device. Mobile experience matters. If a B2B buyer is in-between meetings, they are likely to browse on a tablet or cell phone.

Link Building

Spending time getting backlinks can help increase your SEO traffic. This means leveraging other websites of high-authority and getting your website linked on theirs. Guest blog on an industry-leading resource like Thomas Insights and promote it in a newsletter advertisement to drive traffic to your website. (Our industrial marketers can do the writing for you.) Toagosei America drove more than a thousand direct website visits from high-quality leads.

“We knew we wanted to make more buyers and decision-makers aware of what we have to offer. Thomas Industry Update ended up being a great way to help us generate that awareness and we earned new contacts for our sales team to call on.”

— Mark T., Toagosei America

Reports show that if proper SEO is in place, visitors coming to an industrial website from Thomas are twice as engaged versus coming organically from search engines. That’s because the Thomas audience is high-qualified.

Many suppliers include a "distributor locator" on their site. Ask your suppliers to link to you on their website. Create company profiles for online business directories like Google My Business, LinkedIn Company Directory, Apple Maps, and Facebook. These individual citations might be minor in backlink value, but in large quantities they add up to your SEO traffic.

Keep your information updated and double-check your NAP consistency on the directories — Company name, address, and phone number. A company profile on Thomasnet.com is a particularly important business directory targeted specifically to B2B buyers, engineers, and procurement professionals searching for industrial services. Sign up for a free company profile to increase your visibility and RFQs from qualified buyers.

“We are extremely pleased with the activity generated by Thomasnet.com,” said Norman Rodriques, President of Springfield Spring Corporation. “New RFQs come in so often we have trouble keeping up. Even more astonishing is the quality of the leads and the number of new customers we have converted.”

See The Full List Of Business Directories: How To Optimize Your Digital Marketing To Get Business From Local Buyers

Tools To Monitor Your Site

Google's May algorithm update to incorporate Core Web Vitals in the Page Experience Ranking Signals is just around the corner. There are tools like FullStory and Google resources to see the engagement levels of your site and help you make decisions on what to improve. But for insight specific to the manufacturing industry and to better understand what content is performing the best so that you can focus on providing the most optimal website experience for your prospects, contact us for a free digital health check. We’ll review the most impactful items you need to engage B2B buyers and what you can do to keep your website ranking high. And our team is on deck to help you prepare for and manage the changes at scale.