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.

Some hosting services do not provide htaccess and 301 redirects, so what do you do when your pages move and you want Google to not drop that well earned search result ranking?

The next best choice is a simple meta refresh with a content time of 0. Here’s the wiki page describing the tag.

What used to be a way to keep page rank (how important Google thinks your site is) from draining to the sites that you link to, appears to no longer work the same way as when it was announced in 2005.

This has apparently been in effect for some time, but has only come to light in the last few months. While I can see the benefit of the ‘nofollow’ tag for limiting the benefit of spam posts to blogs, I can only guess that this will increase the amount of spam links to sites. It also has the effect of making ‘page rank sculpting’ a thing of the past. I suspect that this might be a good thing in that its tough to justify the cost and effort of that technique. In the end… content is king and that’s the best bang for the buck focus for websites.

My tin foil hat theory is that if spammers are posting links to sites, then those sites are paying advertisers and Google caters to paying advertisers.

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.

I had suggested to a current client that they may want to consider some SEO work for the company website. The owner did not see the benefit at this time and said, “Almost all of our business is referral.”

I have an awkward time arguing that point. There is a bit of the chicken and the egg aspect to converting web traffic to clients for a professional services firm.

In the case of this particular response from a client, there are a few aspects of his business that may very well be served by improved SEO and increased traffic. The site now generally serves as a marketing brochure. Looking at the existing traffic, it’s apparent that the users coming to the site know the company exists and are most likely using it as a way to find a phone number, email or mailing address.

The key point here is that the traffic coming in is not likely the sort of traffic that has a ‘problem’ that could be solved by becoming a client of this firm. That’s the sort of focused traffic that I’ll be looking to generate for them. Yes, almost all of their business is referral, but I want to change that.

Lets look at a basic start to calculating ROI for them:

• 500 visitors/month increase due to SEO;
• 2% call to action (phone,email,contact,rfi);
• results in 10 ‘leads’;
• 10% close rate on those leads, conversion to client;
• results in 1 additional client per month

I actually think that the 2% call to action in this case is low. Somebody looking for a firm that does X will not go through 50 sites prior to contacting one, but I’ll go with that to be conservative.

The owner has to buy into the benefits of SEO. Being able to put a solid ROI calculation in front of them is a good first step.

My background is in engineering, and while my clients cover a wide range of industries, I draw on that engineering background to deliver services through a logical process.

The process that I use to implement Search Engine Optimization engagements for my clients is loosely based around the principals of ‘Lean‘ derived from the Toyota Production System.

An example of this approach is:

• Senior Management discuss and agree to the goal of website SEO
• Brainstorm to identify the client project leader and set SEO objectives
• Communicate the SEO plan and vision to the client
• Assemble client SEO implementation team
• Train and enable the client team
• Baseline the website current state
• Implement the SEO project
• Evaluate the SEO results, encourage feedback
• Stabilize the results to establish a ‘habitual’ implementation of SEO
• Introduce the ‘Next Step’ to make additional SEO improvements

I’ve got this process listed on this blog’s Lean SEO page. As I refine it and add details over time, I’ll keep that page updated.

Whether its its an SEO service for a client or I’m just doing a quick check of a client’s site to get an understanding of their business, one of the first things I observe in a review are the website page title tags. The formula is simple, but the execution is often lacking.

Lets keep it simple to start as the following items will get you 90% of the effectiveness of the title tag:

• Every page should have a unique title.
• Figure six to twelve words totaling less than 80 characters.
• Utilize your keywords in your page title.
• Keep search engine results in mind.

Your title is going to be in bold listing on the search results. While you want to think about the search engine understanding what the page is about, it wont matter if you are high in the search results but the listing doesn’t make sent to the user. They will be less likely to click through to your site.

Want to put maximize the results of your website? Click here for your Chicago based search engine optimization consultant.