The manufacturing industry is the backbone of the global economy. These companies supply us with all the necessary products to live comfortable, joyous lives. Through online shops, we can have furniture, clothes, and other items delivered to our doorstep.
Unfortunately, although everyone knows about large wholesalers such as Amazon, most people have limited information about their featured manufacturers. For example, you might buy a nice piece of furniture or home appliance from their site without remembering the producer.
Because of the focus on large web shops, promoting manufacturing businesses is often hard. Luckily, there’s a solution to this problem. By investing in search engine optimization, you can get your business at the top of Google. Finally, with this marketing tactic, you can start selling through your site instead of paying commissions to third-party platforms.
How Does SEO Help Manufacturers?
Search engine optimization, or simply SEO, is a marketing approach that maximizes Google, Yahoo!, Yandex, and Baidu traffic. By understanding search engines and their algorithms, marketing experts introduce various tactics to promote content and gain website traffic.
They will suggest numerous improvements to your website pages that will make them more suitable for visitors. SEO professionals will also start creating relevant content, followed by a wide-scale PR campaign that will attract visitors to your brand.
The best thing about SEO for manufacturing companies is that people will start reaching out to you, and not the other way around. They will find your site organically, via search engines, which will ensure better experience and higher conversions. This is a far cry from traditional marketing, where brands try their best to garner attention at the risk of being annoying.
What Does the SEO Process Look Like?
Most SEO strategies rely on the similar steps:
Ultimately, all of these things will lead to more sales. You’ll be able to pinpoint your target audience and sell to them at a higher rate. SEO also creates a basis for brand awareness, helping you make a name for your manufacturing company.
SEO Drawbacks
There’s also a handful of potential issues that might occur during an SEO campaign:
While SEO works well in conjunction with other digital marketing strategies, there are situations where you’ll have to choose one or another. For example, you might have to decide whether you wish to focus on a certain trend or keyword.
The entire marketing process becomes more convoluted, and you’ll have to merge two teams. Of course, we also have to consider that you’ll double your investment.
Luckily, there’s a way to circumvent some of these problems. Having a good international SEO provider who can create a winning strategy makes all the difference. Hire someone who has experience running an omnichannel strategy and can coordinate several specialized teams.
Common SEO Timeframes
If you had an opportunity to talk with your colleagues, you might have heard similar complaints. Many businesses are reluctant to implement SEO because they’re worried about timeframes. Search engine optimization is notorious for taking a long time to show results, which is why many brands don’t even bother with it.
While these stories aren’t necessarily exaggerated, the potential benefits make up for the slow development. Organic website traffic beats just about any other online traffic in terms of quality and conversions. So, even if you have to wait some extra time, it will be more than worth it.
Campaign Lenght
Although you can hire an agency for a month or two, SEO campaigns generally last more than a year (usually several years). In fact, if you can’t commit for a longer period, we suggest you avoid this promotional method altogether.
The thing about SEO is that when you start doing it for the first time, you have little to work with. Your website is completely blank, and you need to create dozens and even hundreds of pages targeting relevant keywords. Just setting up the website and performing an audit will take about a month.
After that, you need to go through a process of creating articles and promoting content. Link building, in particular, is what slows down everything. You can’t simply generate hundreds of links out of the blue; this would get you penalized and wipe out all your past work.
First Results
While SEO campaigns are long, you’ll likely notice that the first traffic will trickle in after two or three months. Keep in mind this will be a limited number of visitors, measured in dozens, and will likely have no impact on your bottom line.
In half a year to nine months, you might reach upward of a hundred visitors. However, the real impact occurs between years one and two, when your website starts getting enormous traction within search engines. This is where your investment will slowly start to pay for itself.
Hiring an SEO Agency
If you wish to get the most out of this marketing strategy, you need to find the right people for the job. That being said, here are some tips that will help you during the selection process:
1. Ask for Screenshots
The SEO process mainly revolves around figures and trends. Assessing movements over time is the best way to determine whether a campaign has any impact. So, if you want to know how an agency performed while working with past clients, you need to ask them for screenshots.
The provider needs to show you former clients’ accounts in Google Search Console, Google Analytics, SEMrush, and Ahrefs. Here, you can see changes in keyword rankings, traffic, and other relevant information. Ideally, you should compare these figures with other candidates’ results to assess what kind of value an agency can provide.
Keep in mind that this comes with a caveat. As this is confidential information, a marketing agency should be careful not to disclose the former client’s name. If they do, this will show they don’t care about clients’ data and that they’ll eventually reveal your information to other companies.
2. Check Their Rankings
Another good tell is the company’s search engine rankings. As someone who’s meant to optimize your site and draw traffic from Google, they need to have a well-optimized website themselves. Search their placement for relevant marketing keywords, such as “link-building,” “SEO outsourcing,” and so on.
We suggest you check at least ten or more relevant keywords to have a better picture of the market and its performance. Bear in mind that SEO is a highly competitive niche and is populated with a handful of marketing companies that don’t even provide optimization services.
Some of the top-ranking agencies get most of their leads through recommendations. Therefore, they don’t necessarily need to continuously update their websites, as they already have more clients than they can handle. In other words, you should take these rankings with a grain of salt.
3. Contact Their Clients
You can learn more about an agency and its practices by contacting its past clients. Perhaps the best way to start is by checking testimonials on the website. However, as these are usually satisfied customers, we recommend you dig a bit deeper.
Go to Google reviews and check what people have said about them. Try to find disgruntled clients via forums and other channels. Even if someone left a negative comment on their Meta page, it might be worth it to contact them and inquire about the company’s work.
4. Ask for a Quote
You can also get some valuable information about a provider by asking them for a quote. The general rule is that you should never work with an agency that is too cheap. Then again, that doesn’t necessarily mean you should go with an expensive provider.
Conclusion
Finding the perfect SEO provider for the manufacturing industry can be hard. There are so many agencies out there with varying experience. Ideally, you should find someone who has already worked with your category of products and who knows the market well.
We recommend that you take the time to review potential partners. As mentioned before, this is a long-term process that usually takes several years. It’s much better to start with the right agency right away instead of changing your partner every few months.