Recently, we hosted a webinar SEO 101 for Manufacturers: Targeting The Right Google Traffic. We went back to the basics and discussed the important steps manufacturers should take to get the most out of their website, content marketing, and SEO efforts. Let's take a look at the questions our audience of manufacturers and industrial companies asked at the end of the webinar and how we answered them.
In marketing, the term “landing page” typically describes a standalone page on your website designed specifically for a targeted marketing campaign. Technically, any page can be a landing page, so the answer to this question can be both “yes” and “no.” Your landing page can improve search rankings if:
It's worth noting that the latter type of landing page is not necessarily bad for SEO either — it just simply serves a different, more targeted purpose in your marketing efforts. We frequently create eBook landing pages like these for our marketing customers with the goal to convert visitors into marketing-qualified leads. Rather than use those landing pages to drive traffic, we’ll create longer-form, more educational blogs like this one and then add a CTA on that blog page to the landing page we want to convert the visitor.
Alt text (short for “alternative text”) is a tag assigned to images to describe the image’s content. There’s no specific format required for image alt text, but it’s recommended that the alt tag be as descriptive as possible for two reasons:
Moz, an industry leader in SEO, offers excellent guidelines for writing image alt text: while keeping it descriptive, don’t get too fluffy with your keywords. Include keywords but keep it under 125 characters. For example, “20’ square & rectangular stainless tubing” follows alt text best practices because it contains keywords and is descriptive enough to help the image stand out from others.
Multimedia is an extremely important component for strong SEO. Google’s goal is to serve helpful, easy-to-consume content for its users, and a 1200-word essay without any images or videos doesn’t exactly meet that goal.
We run into this scenario with a lot of our manufacturing and distributor customers for several reasons:
If you’re in this situation, we recommend throwing together graphics or an infographic to illustrate your content and bring your page to life. It can be as simple as leveraging a Diagram in Google Slides or an illustration tool like Canva (Google Slides is free, and Canva offers a free model).
Check out the infographic designed using Canva:
As we mentioned in the webinar, a well-constructed sitemap allows Google to easily crawl through each page of your website and rank it accordingly. Think of one of those fancy champagne towers you see at weddings and parties:
Google’s bots should be able to easily “flow” from each parent page to the respective child pages below it. If a glass sits outside the tower, or the sitemap, it’s known as an orphan page and makes it more difficult for Google to find and categorize.
Orphan pages aren’t necessarily damaging to SEO, since they’re sometimes used as landing pages for targeted campaigns — but if you’re trying to use that page to improve search results, it should be easy to access from your homepage navigation.
We recommend outlining your sitemap in a Google Sheet first to get an overview of each page’s Title, Meta Description, and URL.
From there, you can also use the spreadsheet to optimize each page’s Title and Meta Description before you make all the changes to the live site.
Once you’ve finalized your sitemap, your first step should be to publish it as a page on your website. Many Content Management Systems (CMS) like WordPress will auto-generate the sitemap page for you so that new pages are automatically added.
It’s also a good best practice to submit your sitemap xml to Google. You can do this by verifying your website with Google Search Console and entering the sitemap in XML or text format. Follow Google’s Search Console help if you need more information.
Yes, title tags help Google quickly understand the type of content your page contains. This goes back to what we mentioned above in our Sitemap overview — the more quickly and easily Google can crawl and categorize each page on your website, the more easily it can rank your pages for its relevant keywords.
Of course, we’re not just writing content for Google’s bots — title tags (the blue titles in search results) also help your human visitors tell what’s on a page.
Videos boost SEO in a few ways:
To improve SEO, we recommend publishing the video on YouTube first and then adding the embed code directly into the page:
Since the video doesn’t technically “live” on your website (it lives on YouTube) embedding it will also avoid slowing down your site speed — another factor critical for search engine optimization.
Absolutely! While we recommend creating videos for more specific keywords and pages, a video on the homepage can engage your audience and encourage them to spend more time browsing your website. It can also tell a story about your brand and help them to convert. (Thomas can help you create videos content for free — find out more here.)
Recently, Thomas’ marketing team has been leveraging videos in the website’s design as a background. We’ve A/B tested these across several websites and have seen increases in conversions with the video variations.
Page speed has been immensely more important for SEO over the last few years. Think about it: if Google’s goal is to serve the best experience to its users, it’s not going to rank pages that make their user wait to load.
There’s no “industry standard” for page speed metrics, but our SEO team will monitor our customers’ websites and bring our development team in if we start to see the page speed score fall below 70. Google’s free tool, Page Speed Insights, not only assesses your site’s speed and provides a score for both the Mobile and Desktop View — it also outlines any issues that are causing the site to slow down.
Some common issues that we’ll find are slowing down websites include:
An SEO analyst and/or developer can help you out with most of these items except for the last one — if you’ve identified that your host is the issue, consider switching to a well-established hosting provider like WPEngine.
Read More: WordPress vs. Wix: What's The Best Platform For Manufacturers?
Remember, having a website is just the first step to increasing your manufacturing brand. If your goal is to bring in more traffic and get high-quality leads, you need to maintain your website with continuous content and SEO efforts. And we understand it can be a lot of extra work to manage, especially when you may already be short on time growing your manufacturing company. Below are some additional resources manufacturers have used to help with their SEO traffic — and if you need help along the way, contact our industrial marketing experts.