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:
- Competitive and keyword research
- Website and design optimization
- Content creation
- Link-building and promotional activities
- Local SEO efforts
During the process, an SEO company will take a look at your website and assess your market position against your competitors. They will use tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console to assess your traffic and content and find potential areas of improvement.
Once an SEO agency has a better understanding of your specific niche, it will focus on specific, relevant keywords that are easy to optimize. These phrases should have high traffic potential with low difficulty. As such, this SEO strategy will maximize your search engine rankings while exposing yourself to minimal risk.
Benefits of SEO for manufacturing
If everything is done the right way, your manufacturing business will experience the following benefits:
- A steady, noticeable surge in organic traffic
- More secondary traffic (social media, direct traffic from other sites)
- Improved quality of leads
- Higher website engagement (click-through rate, pages per session)
- Better website experience
- Enhanced brand awareness
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:
- Inefficient SEO strategy
- Building too many suspicious links
- Using irrelevant keywords
- Avoiding more lucrative marketing tactics
SEO carries a fair share of risks. Most notably, incorporating a risky strategy can come back to bite you. Some marketers build shady links and use other tricks to manipulate algorithms. While this might provide a temporary boost to search rankings, it will eventually lead to a site-wide penalty.
Because of that, it’s vital that you hire a reputable provider that offers international SEO for manufacturers. Find an agency that has extensive knowledge of on-page SEO as well as off-page SEO, and has a solid track record to boot.
Average SEO Costs for Manufacturers
Optimizing a website for search engines presumes a set of unique steps. As mentioned, an SEO agency will start by checking your website design and making tweaks to it. After that, these marketing experts will learn about your industry and how best to attack the competitors.
Keyword research, content marketing, and link building are dynamic processes that follow the planning phase. Global SEO strategies might also involve local SEO, as a way of increasing the company’s reach.
Given the complexity of the process, it’s really hard to give a universal figure. For example, basic services might cost around $1,000 to $2,000 per month, and they can go up to $10,000 and more.
SEO and Other Marketing Tactics
Many manufacturing businesses are reluctant to add SEO to their marketing workflow. Although this process is separate from, let’s say, pay-per-click or social media marketing, it might disrupt overarching promotional strategy.
The good news is that SEO does not interfere with other tactics. In fact, it further enhances them. SEO works well when combined with various social media, paid advertising, email, and affiliate tactics. It works in conjunction with other strategies to deliver even more visibility.
Here are a few examples of how SEO affects other marketing processes.
1. SEO and SMM
Combining SEO and SMM is a popular choice among marketers, as social media campaigns can boost SEO performance and vice versa. With search engine optimization, you gain organic traffic from search engines, while social media gives you another channel to spread your message.
Each time you publish a new blog post, you can share it with your followers on Meta, X, Instagram, and other platforms. Furthermore, by using specialized software, you can automate the process, which will save you time while providing maximum benefits.
2. SEO and PPC
There are various forms of paid advertising you can utilize to promote your manufacturing business. However, when we use this term, we primarily refer to PPC within Google and other search engines. We also use the phrase for social media ads.
The great thing about search engine ads, in particular, is that they give you another chance of ranking for short and long-tail keywords. For example, your PPC places you at the top of search engine rankings for a target keyword. Alternatively, if you don’t manage to secure that spot through ads, you might get it through SEO.
Whatever the case, these two tactics work well together to ensure your place on top. This makes all the difference for a company’s flagship products, given that SEO traffic is the best-converting form of traffic.
3. SEO and PR
Many manufacturers use PR as a way of spreading their message around. This tactic makes sense, especially if you promote yourself on top-tier publications with lots of visitors. Unfortunately, without SEO, public relations marketing is a wasted opportunity.
When you also use search engine optimization, you generate more value from each post on an external site. Besides incorporating relevant keywords and sharing your message, you also receive a powerful link that will boost your placement within search engine results.
4. SEO and Affiliate Marketing
SEO and affiliate marketing don’t necessarily have the best cohesion. With affiliate tactics, external partners try to sell your products through their networks for a percentage of value. So, there isn’t a clear connection between the two strategies.
However, if you have a well-optimized site, the incoming visitors will have a better time browsing the pages. They won’t have to worry about broken design, slow loading speed, and other issues plaguing other platforms. So, in a way, SEO will always provide some benefit regardless of your preferred promotional tactic.
Risks of Omnichannel Strategy
If planned and executed correctly, a multichannel strategy provides numerous benefits for your manufacturing brand. However, it also comes with its fair share of issues:
- Loss of focus and waste of resources
- Conflicting interests
- Inability to optimize both tactics
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.