Search engine optimization (SEO) can be a lucrative marketing pipeline for manufacturers. With SEO, you’re able to put your manufacturing brand in front of people who need your services right now and in the future. SEO content, such as blog articles and videos, establishes your expertise in manufacturing and builds trust with potential clients.
While SEO content is front-facing, technical SEO runs in the background. Both types of SEO impact your marketing power. It’s easy to evaluate the content your SEO partner produces, but many manufacturing marketers are left in the dark when it comes to technical SEO.
So, how can you review your SEO partner’s technical efforts? In this article, we’ll explain the benefits of SEO for manufacturers, and the technical factors your SEO specialist should constantly work to improve.
Benefits of SEO for Manufacturers
Before we get into technical SEO, let’s conduct a brief refresher on why SEO is worth investing in for manufacturing companies.
SEO brings in customers through organic search engines like Google. For example, potential clothing manufacturing clients might search for:
- Broad informational queries, e.g. how to manufacture clothes, how much does manufacturing cost, clothing line design
- Specific transactional queries, e.g. best clothing manufacturer nyc, clothing manufacturer reviews
And anything in between. With SEO content and keyword research, manufacturers can anticipate and answer the questions most relevant to their ideal customer.
Thanks to the targeted nature of SEO, your conversion funnel can continually be refined and optimized. SEO gives manufacturers trackable data that can’t be retrieved anywhere else. As a result, SEO can be done lean.
It’s no wonder why manufacturers invest time and money into SEO. Long-term results, impressive returns on investment, and more clicks than ads? It’s an invaluable marketing tool.
So, how do you ensure that your SEO partner is getting you top-of-the-line results if you don’t know the technical components on the back-end? Here are factors you can easily check.
4 Technical SEO Factors for Manufacturers
Technical SEO describes a set of components that affect how Google reads your website and delivers results to users.
#1 Site Speed
Websites that load quickly are rewarded in search results by Google. To check your website’s site speed, go to Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool and type in your website’s URL. Google will deliver an overall score, a subset of scores called “Core Web Vitals,” and suggestions for improvements.
The most common cause of a slow website is large image files. To see if your technical SEO partner is properly optimizing images, right-click on an image and save it to your computer. From there, you can right-click the file to examine image information. Images should be no larger than 500kB.
#2 Website Structure
Is your website easy to navigate for users? How about robots? Like the best manufacturing companies, websites need structural hierarchies to be efficient. Take a look at your main navigation bar and ensure you can easily access your homepage, about page, services pages, portfolio of case studies, and contact page from every single page.
This will help Google index your website. Ensuring your website is indexed is as simple as searching for it on Google.
#3 Mobile Optimization
Is your manufacturing website mobile-friendly? Because 80% or more of Google’s users are searching from their smartphone or tablet, Google’s SEO standards place a lot of importance on mobile responsiveness.
The best way to review your technical SEO partner’s work is by accessing the website from your phone. Are images cut off? Are all menus easily accessible? Does the mobile layout make sense? If there are issues, you will notice them as you navigate your website.
#4 URL Problems
URLs should be optimized to include your target keyword as part of your SEO content strategy.
But what about broken URLs? Or pages that have been moved or migrated and need to be redirected? Ask your technical SEO partner what tools they’re using to discover broken URLs and fix duplicate content problems.
Improve Your Marketing for Manufacturing
SEO content is important. But so is technical support. Not every development is a good development for search engine growth. If you’ve removed pages that could have been getting you traffic, or migrated pages and are now being penalized for duplicate content issues, it’s time to talk to a technical SEO expert.