SEO for Manufacturers: The What, Why, and How (The Ultimate SEO Guide)

As 2024 rolls around, B2B and B2C businesses are leaning more and more on Search Engines for potential leads and customers. A study from Industrial Sage suggests that 79% of manufacturers already have an SEO strategy. 

This contributes to their branding as well. That’s why people need to be careful and often need help. Well, that’s why we are here. This article will help beginners and experts alike as we’ll tell them why and how SEO is done for Industrial Companies step-by-step. 

If you want exclusive help, our guys are always a call away to assist you with your project. 

Do You Really Need SEO for Your Manufacturing Companies?

Here’s something to bore you with, a stat. According to Gitnux, 57% of the B2B marketers believe SEO is the best way to go to generate more leads. 

But why do you need SEO, or if you actually don’t need it despite what the math says? Let’s discuss everything and more as we look into the importance of SEO for different B2B and B2C Industries.

Organic SEO Helps You in Reaching to More Clients, Suppliers, and Consumers 

SEO can help your industrial company reach a wider range of audiences and potential buyers. Nowadays, most people (businesses as well) search for products online as it’s the easiest way to do it. 

In fact, 84% of the customers searching for services in the manufacturing industry turn to the internet to get an idea of the components and services they need to go for (source). 

Now let’s delve deeper into this number.

According to Google, B2B buyers do 12 searches on average before they settle for a brand. The number may sound low but it actually translates to a whopping 69% of the leads a manufacturing company such as you can get.

This is why you NEED a solid digital platform (AKA website) as well as a comprehensive strategy of using search engines IF you need more leads. 

People might scoff at us when we say leads, we get that. However, leads you get through organic SEO methods have a staggering 14.6% closing rate than traditional ones with only 1.7%. More closed leads mean more clients, supply chain options, and consumers. Numbers don’t lie.

Organic SEO is your Cost-Effective Branding

Traditional or conventional SEO means you’ll have to collect leads and convert them into clients. This is known as Outbound SEO as well. The process of collecting leads and running it through conversion funnels will cost you a lot. 

Compared to that Organic SEO will cost you virtually nothing. Organic SEO is a practice where you don’t pay Google or Bing to get onto the first page. Instead, you work with what you have and slowly climb the rankings.

Getting your brand on the map through organic SEO will cost you a fraction compared to outbound SEO where you might be looking at running paid ads, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Insta reel promotions.

Proper SEO Involves Steps that Showcase Your Product’s Value

You yourself prefer to have a good look at a product or service before you make a purchase, right? Your customers do the same. 

The first step of making a sale is presenting the excellent qualities of the products you manufacture in a compelling way.

You also need to get the words out about the things that sets you apart from the rest of the competitors. Your pros like low delivery charge, or the option to make customized orders are the things that you need to highlight to potential customers. 

A perfectly good website details all the information about the company, including information on the quality of the product and the previous buyers’ experiences.  

However, just making a compelling presentation of selling points doesn’t help. You need to make sure these reach the interested customers. This is the point where you need SEO. 

Imagine you have the right product. A product that solves people’s problems. Proper marketing can help to get your website right up there when your targeted audiences are looking for help with their issues.  

SEO Grants You A Good Reach

You have top-of-the-line products that work, check! You have a good website with great UI and UX, check! You have a decent supply-chain management system and consumer base, also check! But you still need Organic SEO to do your bidding. 

Particularly, Google My Business Verification. It helps manufacturers and businesses get onto Google’s map and radar. Users can interact and post reviews for businesses that offer the perfect product or solution. 

As time goes by, user reviews will provide a positive signal to Google AND it will highlight your Ecommerce Store or B2B company in the knowledge graph or as a brand when people search for it.

Let’s Discuss How To Boost SEO For Industrialists!

Buckle up because now you are in for a long ride into SEO. Many articles and videos will tell you lots of stuff, most of which you don’t actually need. 

But we understand the value of each and every moment. So, to save you from wasting your time, we will only discuss the very essential things you need to know to get started with SEO for your manufacturing company.

Keywords are the KEY!

Keyword research is crucial for effective SEO strategies as it allows businesses to understand their audience's search behavior and optimize their content accordingly.

However, in recent times you may experience a drastic change in keyword research practice as it is no longer confined to only tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, Ahrefs etc. 

When researching for keywords, using these tools help you consider factors such as search volume, relevance to your content,keyword difficulty and many other parameters to filter a cluster of keywords and finalize your list.

What Type of Keywords You Should Look At? 

SEO for manufacturing Companies depends on keywords that cater to people that seek out your services or want to know what you are offering.  

Microters knows that for a fact. That’s why we go beyond conventional methods to find different types of keywords and categorize them based on user interest and intent.

Our team makes an effort to understand your business and the target audiences. We look into your locale as well and use tools to find relevant keywords. 

For example, users may search with terms like: 

• Best Manufacturer for Clothing in Ontario.
• Clothing Manufacturers Near Me.
• Clothing Manufacturing Company in Ontario Canada.

Microters Team has worked with keywords which are not directly related to purchase decisions as well. The thing is, not everybody wants to buy something from you. Part of your audience might need particular information.

Look at the following keywords:

• Eco friendly clothing manufacturers.
• Small order clothing manufacturers.

These are just some examples where people are interested in a particular aspect of the clothing company rather than buying apparels from them.

Factors You Should Consider when Looking into These Keywords

Once you’ve got yourself a long list, you’ll have some questions in mind. Namely, “Which keyword to go for?” “Which one will work out the best?” Answering these questions requires tons of experience. 

You need to analyze the keywords and all the possible alternative ways of phrasing the keywords. Then you have to figure out the search volume of each of these keywords. 

If you are a beginner, opt for keywords that have around 50 search volume per month.

When selecting keywords for, look at the intent. Does the visitor intend to buy something indicated by the words or he/she just wants information? Both buying intent keywords and informative keywords are important to have on your website. 

Depending on them, the content plan will vary (more on that later). 

When selecting keywords, measure the keyword difficulty of a phrase. It tells you how easy or hard you will find the keyword to rank with. For beginners, we advise to go for low hanging fruits. 

Remember, low competitive, low search volume keywords are fine but your keywords need to be relevant to your website as well.

Where to Hunt for Keywords?

At microters, we believe in going the extra mile for our clients. Modern problems require modern solutions. 

Hence, besides using these tools, we look into forums related to the topic, competitor websites, and social media profiles which are working in the same business. 

We analyze peoples’ questions and find keyword and content gaps we can fill  and present a complete picture to our client’s target audiences as well.

Our experience tells us, SEO for manufacturers can be a bit tricky if you’re  writing sales pages for your products. People often rely on tools too much and don’t think out of the box. This is where you need to be different. 

Explore Google Trends and find what keywords people are interested in these days. Select keywords that match your niche and product. Keywords can be queries, informative sentences, or something people search based on a specific time of the year.

Let us give you a gem of an idea. If you’re in the ecommerce industry, you’ll notice some keywords which people search for but Search Engines don’t have reliable data on them. These are “Zero Search Volume” keywords. Optimizing your website pages for these will give you traffic that other people yarn for.

Still seems like too much of a hassle? Using complex tools, running analysis, and categorizing keywords can be a hassle for the untrained. This is where Microters comes in. We can help you finalize your keywords and topic clusters within your budget. We’re your SEO team that you always wanted.

Build a Fast and Fantastic Website

You need to have an excellent website to make your manufacturing company reach potential customers. Now, how do we identify an excellent website? 

You’ll have to tick certain boxes to achieve that. Let’s go over them!

• Choose a brandable domain name for your website.
• Make sure to use a CMS that’s easy to handle (cue: WordPress).
• It has to have a relevant theme.
• It has to load fast.
• It has to have an attractive and user-friendly UI.

Search engines prioritize websites that are fast and easy-to-navigate as a priority and it can help boost ranking for the keywords. 

Afterall, a top-notch website is all it takes to make it to the top. 

Improve your UI and UX, and you’ll see the user staying on your website for long enough for Google to take note. This helps specially when Google is focusing more on “Helpful Content Update.” 

We’re going to be honest with you, building a website is no child’s play. There are tiny things about a website that make a huge difference. Let’s take a look at the To-Do list you need to follow to get your website off the blocks!

Get Your Hands on a Good Hosting Company

Firstly, you will need a competent hosting service to get the website online. This is easier said than done, you’ll have to choose from several options.

Depending on your business size, estimated fanbase, and location, different server locations and hosting packages can be better for you.

You can start from a shared hosting, then upgrade to a dedicated one when you feel the need. When choosing a hosting provider, the logistics they use, uptime count, and the kind of support they provide are important as well.

This is why Microters suggests one of the following:

• DigitalOcean – If you have an established brand with a great following and expect good traffic to your website.
• SiteGround – Great support and perfect for small businesses.
• Hostinger – Customizable options that help users get the best out of their hosting packages.

Depending on which company you go for and what package you choose, your pricing and support quality for your website will vary. Each company and package has it’s benefits and drawbacks, so be wary while choosing one.

After you’re done choosing a hosting package, you have to design each and every detail of the website from scratch. 

Design Your Website

This includes developing the website design, the structure of the website, the presentation of contents, etc. You have to do all these keeping in mind the user's experience. 

Depending on your developer’s skills, you might have to spend $500 - $4000 on the development of your website.

The good news is, we’re here to help. SEO is a continuous process, Microters understands that.  

Yes, there are effective tools that can handle everything (Cue: Content Management Systems). Content management systems like WordPress can make things easier for you. 

It even has ready-made themes that you can use for your manufacturing company depending on the type of products you sell. 

Just select a good theme, select a responsive layout, design a website navigation menu, and publish some content (more on that later).

Ensure You Have a Website that Loads Fast

The next thing to do when designing a website is to ensure it loads fast.

In case you are wondering how you’ll know the loading speed of your website, then no, you don’t have to sit with a stopwatch and count. 

Google’s PageSpeed Insight Tool  is here to help. Put your website’s name and have it tested for free. All you have to do is input the page URL and press “Analyze.” 

If the feedback indicates that there’s room for further improvement, then take the necessary steps as soon as possible.

However, there’s a catch. Page Speed Insight only gives you data analyzed from Google Chrome. This IS helpful, however, it’s not the complete picture. 

When analyzing website speed, we’ve found GTMetrix more helpful. We dare say, this little service is better at analyzing different aspects of your websites than Google’s tool. 

It takes different factors into account while analyzing the website and uses different server locations for the speed test. Also, you’ll find detailed instructions on how to fix several issues. 

Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly

As we are on the topic of websites, it’s also important to make the site mobile-friendly. Why is it so important? Let us give the answer in numbers. 

Google claims to process more than 8 billion searches every day. 63% of these 8 billion searches are made from mobile phones. So, chances are your potential customers are looking at your website on their smartphone. 

If your website is not optimized to fit onto the screen of a phone, the content will just look weird. As a result, the lead you could’ve had will be gone instead. 

For phone screens, the fonts need to be larger, but not too large that the user has to scroll every 2 seconds. Here, the visuals need to be properly formatted as well. 

Google too recommends mobile-friendly websites, we get it.

But how do you know if your website is mobile-friendly enough for SEO? This article will help you with that. It’s a guide to Google’s “Mobile Friendly Test” to assess just how mobile-compatible your website really is. 

Do the Technical SEO Right

While you’re onto optimizing websites for smartphones and tablets, don’t forget about doing some 

Our advice would be to link your website to Google Search Console. The first thing you need to do is set the permalink style. Microters heavily favors site.com/category/postname style of permalink instead of the traditional permalinks. 

This thing is called a “Silo” structure where internal links from other websites will pass on some link juice to your homepage, the category of the article, and the actual article. 

Make sure to submit your website’s sitemap to the search console. Use Google XML Sitemap plugin and you’re golden. Setting this thing up is really easy. It takes around 10 minutes. 

While fiddling with Search Console itself, make sure to decrease the crawling budget of Google and ONLY allow it to crawl important pages of your website. 

Configuring the robot.txt file is paramount as well. A technical SEO expert from your team will do these things rather quickly.  

People fuss a lot about setting up Schema markups as well. Schema Markups are a set of tags Google uses to identify your content. For example, you’ll find tags for blogs, personal data, company information, video content, service pages etc. 

Despite how it looks, it’s rather easy. You’ll find the schema wordpress plugin rather helpful. Just install the plugin and fiddle with the settings. You’ll have to enter the basics of your website along with the logo. Trust us, you’re done. 

Your technical SEO assistant will tell you, there’s schema available for: 

• Movies,
• Events,
• Recipes,
• Articles,
• Local Businesses, 
• Reservations, etc. 

You can verify your schema information from Google’s Search Console’s testing feature. 

Pro Tip: Several SEO plugins (i.e: RankMath) comes with Schema Markup functionality as well. With RankMath and other plugins, you don’t need a separate thing for your schemas. 

Again, if any of these steps for SEO for Manufacturers sounds too hefty for you, just get in touch with us and we’ll do a free audit of your website before we get to what we do best, set up the perfect, crawlable, and profitable website for you!

Moving onto GMB Verification

When you’re working as a manufacturer in a specific area (or Globally), your own physical outlets or factories matter. Both to your target audiences, customers, and Google. 

This is why you’d want to verify your Google Map Address and GMB business account. As a result, Google will let you use services like Google Pay and optimize for facilities like knowledge graphs. 

One benefit we can think off our hats is the fact that you’d get a verified phone number people can reach you on Google. With proper optimization, you can rank on Google Map Pack and optimize your listings. Great local SEOs will optimize your profile regularly.

This leaves room for users to leave you feedback and star ratings. Industry SEO Gurus can unlock additional statistics with Google’s help to better understand their target audiences as well. Trust us, you’ll have it worth for your services. 

You have several ways to get your account GMB-verified. Let’s go over some of them, shall we?

• You can verify your GMB profile via email submission.
• Feel free to do it over a phone call if you choose.
• We’ve done video submissions for our clients as well.
• Believe it or not, your target customers from your industry can verify things about you as well.

Pro Tip: We’ve seen people post fake things on the internet for Google My Business verifications. That’s why we advise our clients to be on the lookout for fake reviews and info and knock out spoof competitors whenever they see them. 

If maintaining a GMB account is too much for you, feel free to contact us and we’ll be happy to help. 

Plugins We Recommend!

Creating and managing a website is a lot of work. Fortunately, certain plugins can help you monitor the user experience, optimize website speed, protect sites from spammers and a whole lot more. Here are some plugins you need to try out,

• WP Rocket: It’s a must. This plug-in gives you gzip compression, cache pre-loading, and such. The optional features like the DNS prefetching, and CDN support can make the website much faster.
• SearchWP: Searching for a specific term on the website? This is where the SearchWP comes in. This plugin keeps a good track of every word you write, Making it easier for the users to search what they are looking for.
• RankMath: This is the SEO plugin we recommend. It’s primarily known for helping you with meta titles, permalink structure, meta descriptions, and 301 redirects. Look deeper and you’ll see keyword optimization features along with schema markup support as well. The plugin betters your content without pushing it.

These are the plugins we use while developing websites for our clients. Of course, there ARE alternatives. However, these go well with our workflow and process. 

Yes, we develop websites, do the technical SEO for our clients, and monitor their website for the entire duration of the project. That too, within the capacity of their wallets.

Curious about our pricings? Take a look at the details(placeHolder):

Interested in partnering up with us? “Contact Us” to have a chat!

Content That Helps Users is the Content that Sells

Think about this simply, have you ever bought anything that you didn’t think will be helpful for you in any way? Even if it’s something luxurious, you bought it for the sake of satisfaction, right? 

The same goes for online content as well. If you don’t create content that promises to help the visitors and users, your content will not get any traffic. 

Do’s and Don’ts of Website Content

It’s no secret that search engines like Google enlist websites on the top based on the value the content is likely to add for the users. Why is it absolutely essential to stay on top? 

50% to 60% of Google users click on the first three results, there’s no alternative to satisfy Google’s requirements and secure this position. 

You also have to keep the writing style in mind as well. Just random product descriptions or information will only damage your website. 

Focus on making the content engaging so that the visitors stay hooked to the article and spend more time on the site. 

As per the writing style goes, keep it simple. Short sentences, to-the-point text is what readers are looking for on your website.

How Should You Use the Keywords in Your Content?

Now let’s talk about the point where the keywords you worked so hard for come to use. You have to make sure to add these keywords into certain strategic places. 

For example, the content title, the meta description, and some of the headings must have the keywords in them. This will help the search engine recognize that your copies are targeted toward certain keywords. 

Incorporating the keywords in the meta descriptions the right way can make it easier for your readers and Google to accurately position your article. 

In other words, proper usage of keywords in important places helps the content get ready for the particular searches. 

Apart from making the content helpful and engaging for users, you should pay attention to equipping the copies with relevant photos and graphics. The right kind of visuals help a lot to keep the users engaged. 

What Type of Content Do You Need on Your Website?

Now let’s talk a bit about what kind of content you need on your site. 

• We’d advise you to come up with a detailed home page for your website. This page should detail your operations, the manufacturing process, how you handle your dealings, etc. Organize the sections of the homepage talking about different aspects of your company. Optimize the page with broader keywords.
• If your business is clothing, you should have pages detailing several products and their benefits to certain people. 
• There should be a page (cue: About Us) which details who you are, for how many years you are active, your company policy, your accolades and other stuff. 
• There should be a “Services” section which details what you provide to your clients. 
• As a manufacturer, you must have your own facilities and factories that contribute to your product lineup. Create pages detailing how these factories or facilities work.
• The “Blog” section should have articles on trending topics in your industry and how you tackle them. You should also have a “Case Study” section detailing how you helped others to success as a B2B company.

Backlinking Makes the Bucks

Backlinks are like upvotes. People linking back to your article from their website means they found your content helpful. Google puts a ton of value in such “Upvotes.” 

You need a good website AND good content to compete. Backlinks tell google you have what it takes.

Are we being too vague? Well, let us explain. As Mail Chimp defines it, backlinks are, “Links on websites other than your own that go back to a page on your website.”

When you naturally, purposefully credit a website which helps your audiences, it is called backlinking. You can say it’s one kind of referencing. 

Quality backlink validates your content. When you mention references from outer sources, it shows that you’ve done your research and have backings to your information. 

It’s actually an open secret in the current SEO scene. Industrial Sage shows that 68% of the manufacturing marketers build links with other websites for the purpose of SEO. 

The Type of Backlinks You Can Build for Your Website!

Now, you can get backlinks through several channels. Let’s go over some of them, shall we?

• You can do guest posts on reputed blogs that talk about the manufacturing of goods, different facilities of the process, supply chain management of goods, and do comparisons on their websites explaining how you are better than the rest.
• While we are a fan of guest posting, it really helps if you can contact some media outlets through HARO (HELP A REPORTER OUT) Technique. You or your SEO team contact reporters, they will interview you about your company, prepare an engaging copy, contact a reputed newspaper and get you published. This helps with branding. We heavily endorse this if you are into SEO for manufacturing companies.
• People might not practice this much but reaching out to news outlets in your locale helps a great deal. Better yet, hire a digital PR team. The team will sort out news outlets and reputed websites for you, develop a Press Release Copy or a newsletter, and contact outlets to publish them.

Building backlinks requires time and planning. Keeping up with the plan can be tedious for your business if you’re doing it alone. This is where we’re offering you a helping hand! 

What’s Our Promise to You?

At this point, you will not be amazed if I tell you that only 25% of the people who search on the internet go to the second page of the search result. 

The rest stay on the first page, the majority of which click on the first three websites, take a look at what they were searching for and leave. Thousands of websites with poor plans, resulting in hundreds of dollars being wasted. 

We can help you avoid that. Microters can be your 360-degree solution to the puzzle we call digital marketing.