Five Manufacturing SEO Services to Try—And What to Avoid

The digital landscape is bursting at the seams with SEO agencies offering their services to manufacturers of all types. However, some manufacturing SEO services are better than others for helping you find more of your ideal customer.

Explore the types of SEO services we recommend the most for seeing lasting, sustainable growth—plus what we don’t recommend.

The Benefits of SEO for Manufacturing Companies

More Qualified Leads

It’s one thing to attract more traffic to your website, but what if the people coming to it don’t take the actions you need them to take? SEO allows you to understand how your ideal customers use Google, and what you can do to get them to convert on your

Better Brand Authority

Brand authority is earned through months and years of effort. SEO for the manufacturing industry can help you continue to build brand authority and reach your target audiences in more meaningful ways.

It allows you to illustrate your subject matter expertise and establish trust with people who are searching for your services over time. That way, when they’re ready to take the next step in their buyer’s journey, they’ll know you’re the best manufacturer they can choose for the job.

Long-Term Results

SEO isn’t a sprint—it’s a marathon. You can’t give up a few months in and expect to triple your sales immediately. However, once your brand has established itself after months of consistent work, you’ll be able to keep attracting new leads to your website, even if you stop creating content for any reason.

Similarly to a marathon, you also need to work consistently to get the results you want. That’s why so many SEO companies worth their salt will tell you that regularly adding new and valuable content to your website—and updating your content whenever it’s relevant—can make a huge difference in helping you attract the business you want from search engines.

5 Manufacturing SEO Services to Try

1. Technical SEO Audit

This generally refers to analyzing the back end of your website to ensure search engines can properly index all its pages. This helps you identify and fix pages that aren’t being indexed properly and allows you to identify potential broken links on your site.

Another key part of improving your standings from a technical standpoint is improving your website’s load speed. Auditing your website allows you to identify pages that are slow to load on mobile and desktop and take steps to help them load faster. This benefits your overall user experience in addition to optimizing your site for Google.

2. SEO Consulting

If you have an in-house marketing department that’s familiar with SEO tactics, it could be helpful to hire the services of an SEO consultant. While they’ll give you their best recommendations to help you rank higher for the keywords that are most relevant to your business, your team can dedicate the time to developing SEO-rich content. Your consultant will keep providing guidance, assistance, and recommendations as you continue to develop content that will drive more valuable leads to your business.

3. Content Writing

Content writing is the backbone of any good SEO strategy—and we’re not just saying that because a content writer created what you’re reading right now. Good, SEO-driven content prioritizes people, rather than just focusing on search engines.

Your content strategy should reflect how your current and future customers use search engines when they’re searching for answers and insights. This in turn allows you to build consumer trust and attract your ideal customers to your manufacturing business.

4. Google Business Profile Help

Your Google Business Profile is one of the first things people will see when they’re searching for your business. Maintaining and updating your Google Business Profile allows people searching for your business to get a snapshot of the most relevant information they need to know. Some of what they can find on this profile include:

• A basic overview of your manufacturing services
• Your hours of operation
• Where you’re located
• Some of the questions people ask most often about your business
• Reviews from your customers
• Your products
• Recent updates about your business

5. Backlinking Campaigns

Backlinks from other legitimate websites are worth their weight in gold. However, building backlinks to your website is practically a full-time job because of all the outreach that’s typically involved.

Some backlinking campaigns involve working with reputable directories or industry experts to have them provide links back to your website. It might include writing guest blog posts or otherwise networking with the host website in a way that’s mutually beneficial to both domains.

5 Manufacturing SEO Practices to Avoid

1. Keyword Stuffing

This refers to the practice of adding as many keyword phrases into your content as possible, to the point that it feels unnatural to read. Google can tell when you’re doing this, and it will penalize your (lack of) effort by not allowing your pages to rank.

Find ways to organically fold the keywords you’re targeting into your content. A content writer with an eye for SEO will know how to do this seamlessly, making your webpages and blog posts read in a natural, conversational tone.

2. Pure AI Content

We’re not in the business of naming names on this point. But, when someone tries to pass off AI content as something written by humans, it’s as cartoonishly obvious as that old trick of three kids standing on each other’s shoulders in a trench coat.

You might think this is the easy way out of taking the hours it takes to write content by hand, but you’re only hurting yourself. People—and Google—can tell when you plug something into ChatGPT or another generative AI tool and publish it without making any changes.

Your website visitors will also know they can’t trust you to be able to put your own thoughts onto the page.

All this isn’t to say that AI is a bad thing—it can be great for developing baseline ideas about specific subjects. However, you should still add your own thoughts and input to pieces without relying on it exclusively to create content your audiences will find engaging.

3. Black-Hat SEO Tactics

Black-hat SEO tactics encompass a number of different tactics that violate Google’s best practices for search engine optimization. Some of the most common tactics falling into the realm of black-hat tactics include:

• Link farming: Think of this as like the evil twin of a good backlinking campaign. Some SEO agencies without a moral compass will create websites purely for the intention of backlinking to other sites. Google looks down upon this, so it won’t do any good for your brand to have your domain associated with these cheap, illegitimate websites.

• Cloaking: This is the act of showing one piece of content to search engines and another to your users. While this might result in short-term rankings if you manage to fly under the radar, Google penalizes websites for doing this.

• Sneaky redirects: Black-hat SEO agencies will sometimes do this alongside cloaking. Typically, it involves sending someone to a different URL than they intended to click on to manipulate search engine results.

• Hidden text: It doesn’t get much cheaper than this. Hidden text involves stuffing text with keywords that’s the same color as your website’s background or positioned behind an image to make Google read it and rank the site higher. Search engines aren’t stupid, and they’ll penalize you for trying this.

4. Guaranteed Rankings

The only two guarantees in life are death and taxes. That also applies to SEO. If an agency is guaranteeing you’ll rank for a certain number of keywords each month or is otherwise promising results of any kind, that’s your sign to run.

We’ve worked with far too many manufacturers and companies in other industries who have been burned this way. Because of that, we always recommend viewing any guarantees about results—rather than methods or practices—with a healthy dose of skepticism.

5. One-Size-Fits-All Services

What works for your top competitor in SEO won’t necessarily work for your manufacturing company. Each company has different needs and strategies that work best for it, and a good SEO agency for manufacturers knows that.

That being said, while service packages aren’t necessarily a bad thing, beware of companies that offer you a standard service that isn’t tailored to your company’s unique needs and doesn’t take your specific target audience and service offerings into account.

Frequently Asked Questions

How Do I Choose the Right Manufacturing SEO Agency?

The key to finding the best partner for manufacturing search engine optimization is to look for a company with experience both inside and outside the manufacturing industry. Your industrial SEO partner should also be transparent in how they communicate about what they’re doing for you. Be wary of agencies that overpromise or claim things they can’t back up with evidence.

Reviews, both on their website and Google Business Profile, can also be a great way to determine what it’s like to work with them.

How Much Does Manufacturing SEO Cost?

It depends on the level of work you need from your agency. If you need them to work quickly to establish content on your website or need more intensive work, you can generally expect to pay more than you would for a slower rollout that involves creating fewer pieces of content.

However, as the old adage goes, you get what you pay for. If someone is promising you rapid results for a two-figure price per month, you’re likely about to get scammed or otherwise not get your money’s worth.

How Long Before I Start Seeing Results?

If someone tells you they can get you immediate SEO rankings, you might as well ask them if they have a bridge in Brooklyn they can sell you. In truth, SEO for industrial companies takes time. It can take several months before you start seeing tangible results from your SEO strategy.

Once in a while, our team can identify low-hanging fruit that can help you rank for specific keywords quickly, but it usually takes Google’s algorithm some time to start recognizing your efforts.

On the other hand, once you’ve started ranking highly on certain pages, it’s easier for Google to rank your other content at similarly high positions for a long time.

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