More businesses are turning to online tactics to get their businesses found by more customers — but once you create a strong online presence, how do you continue building the traffic?
We always suggest beginning with your goals first. What are your marketing goals trying to accomplish? Setting goals ensures you’re maximizing your effectiveness and ensures you can tie them to measurable results. Once you've established clear goals, communicate them with your team, designer, or industrial agency.
For environmental systems manufacturers, today's global pandemic situation presents valuable business opportunities for growth. Here are tips to take your website traffic to the next level and increase your reach to more buyers.
Having good, quality content on your website increases the “stickiness” of the site. If you have valuable information that people actually take the time to read, they’ll stay on the site longer and ideally click through to other pages on your website.
How users engage with the content on your website factors into your search rankings. The longer they stay on a page, the better for you. Even if you manage to get your website to appear higher in search results, if people click through to the website and immediately leave, this can bring down your rankings. But by delivering the information that users are looking for, meeting their business needs, and creating a wealth of relevant content around that, you’re encouraging them to stay for a while as they browse what you have to offer.
Your goal is to provide a substantial amount of information in a format that is approachable and easily digestible. Don’t get carried away with hyper-technical terminology and never-ending paragraphs. No matter how valuable the information is, if it looks intimidating, you’ll be scaring away more people than you attract.
Research has shown that comparison blog posts perform well organically. Air Innovations published a Negative vs. Positive Pressure Rooms 101 blog that gained traction and authority after receiving a backlink from a subsequent Thomasnet.com article related to the same topic.
Any informational content published by high authority websites that mention your products or capabilities is valuable for SEO. Your own informational content should aim to redirect potential customers to more “valuable” pages/points of conversion. When done right, it should satisfy the demand from website visitors looking for more information and those at the end of the funnel ready to complete an RFQ or make a purchase.
For both content writers and SEO professionals, the need for a descriptive headline is well-known. But for those unfamiliar with the term, H1 tag/title is the headline of the text. Using these Header tags makes certain information (like the title, or subheadings) stand out more on the page. Of course, your page can have multiple headers to differentiate various bits of information, but the H1 tag is most heavily weighted in search because it tells readers and search engines what the overall page is about.
A good title will draw in readers, and it will help search engines understand what type of content you’re posting about. So, for each blog post and website page, carefully consider the most appropriate H1 title to get your message across to humans and algorithms alike.
More: 12 Ways To Improve Your Manufacturing Blog
Most people like to visualize the concepts we’re reading and learning about – that’s why graphics and videos are so popular! And in lengthy blog posts or detailed web pages, having some images available to break up the text and clarify certain concepts can be very helpful. Even for self-explanatory pieces that don’t require many illustrations, a picture or video can serve as a further complement to the information being presented. In some cases, the picture may even drive people to click through to read an article more than the title. (By the way — Thomas offers free video content creation services!)
In our previous Air Innovations example, the Negative vs. Positive Pressure Rooms 101 blog incorporates a user-friendly layout of content, videos, and an infographic. Including images in blog posts can do much more than improve user experience (UX). Images can also help with SEO. When naming an image file, choose something that is descriptive of the picture. Those keywords will be factored in by search engines. You also have the opportunity to caption pictures, which is another chance to include a keyword-rich description (just make sure the caption is appealing to your audience — don’t go overboard with keyword stuffing).
And, as if file names and photo captions weren’t enough, you also have the option of adding alt text to images. Don’t overlook this! If the image can’t be displayed properly in the browser, the alt text will appear instead.
There are many things you should take into account when selecting images, and many of them center on the user experience (which can then impact SEO). Large images that take too long to load should be avoided. Odd alignments that make text difficult to read should also be adjusted. And, of course, pictures should directly relate to the content at hand. Again, even if a click-bait image gets readers to your page, if they immediately leave once they see what the post is about, it will only hurt your SEO and UX.
We work with Thomas to improve the sales lead generating performance of our website in the Southern Wisconsin and Northern Illinois markets through their SEO program. Today we are beginning the third expansion of our dry ice plant and are already planning a fourth expansion.
—CryoCarb
Always remember, the best SEO strategy will have UX in mind throughout its implementation. The whole reason you want to improve your rankings is so that you can be found by the right audience online. And good content and SEO strategy work hand in hand to build traffic and bring quality visitors to your website.
After Air Innovations partnered with industrial SEO experts at Thomas, their content performance and thought leadership presence increased dramatically. Clicks to Air Innovations’ Negative vs. Positive Pressure Rooms 101 blog saw an estimated year-over-year increase of 2,060%. To learn more about increasing website traffic and converting site visitors for your environmental systems company, contact Team Thomas. Thomas is offering a free digital health check to see exactly where and how you can improve your presence online.
For more SEO insight, check out the resources below: