Webinar | July 2022 | 61 minutes
Parin Mody explains search engine optimization (SEO) in plain language for manufacturing business owners: what determines your ranking, how to move up in search results, how to judge whether your current SEO is working, and which free tools show where your website stands. Three StratMg clients, all Illinois manufacturers, then share how SEO grew their businesses.
Parin Mody [2:47]
Thank you, and thank you to IMEC for hosting such a wonderful forum. I’m excited because the three people joining us have accomplished a lot in terms of business growth, and their businesses are very different, so there will be something in this for everybody. My job is to set the stage and level the playing field, so I’ll quickly go through a CliffsNotes version of the marketing technique we’re talking about today before we get into the panel discussion.
From our perspective, search engine optimization, or SEO, is a cost of doing business. Why? There are many ways to connect with a buyer. Traditionally, we always took the time to build a relationship. These days we don’t have the time or the patience to build a relationship and then get into a sales process. We want everything when we want it, where we want it, and how we want it, and we want it now. Technology is the best resource for staying in front of our buyers.
The other aspect is the internet. Everybody is online. Everybody is Googling, whether we’re looking for the best TV for our needs or for a partner in our supply chain. There are about 63,000 searches per second on Google alone. So the bigger question is: if everybody is online, are you and your business online? If you’re not visible, people don’t know about you. The days of cold calling are long gone. We believe the traditional philosophy of building a relationship still holds true, and the criteria still hold true, but the way we go about it has changed. That’s where strategy comes into play.
For every business owner today, marketing is not just media kits and events. It is a huge help to your sales team. There are sales-driven marketing channels and performance-driven marketing channels. To show that, we had about $235 million in client revenue impact attributed specifically to marketing channels and marketing execution at the time of this webinar. So please look at marketing as part of your sales arm, not just media kits. The goal of marketing is to be in the right place, at the right time, with the right message. The question is how we go about doing that, and if you’re just starting out, where you should start and why.
Where buyers look for suppliers [6:26]
This chart shows where prospects typically go to look for products and services. Website and email are number one and two. So if you’re a business owner who is starting out, look first at your website and at how you educate prospects on your capabilities. Second, organic search has been proven to be among the top three marketing channels that drive leads for your business, along with the conversions and revenue that go with them. Organic search is a critical part of growth that every business owner should take advantage of. Lastly, ROI: every business owner wants to know what they’re getting for their time and dollar investment, and SEO is among the top three channels where business owners have seen the best ROI for quality lead generation. If you’re starting out, SEO is one of the first places you want to look.
What SEO is: on-page and off-page [8:02]
SEO is a set of practices designed to help you promote your products and services in Google search. When you search on Google you see two sections: a paid section, marked as ads, and the organic results. The goal of an SEO program is to get your company, products, services, and capabilities listed among the top ten choices a prospect sees. The ideal goal is the top ten, because about 95% of traffic is lost after the first page. Of course, we have to earn our way there, and there are two critical components.
The first is on-page SEO. It is exactly what it sounds like: making sure the nuts and bolts and plumbing of your website, its topology, architecture, and programming, are set up so a search engine bot can index your site. If Google doesn’t know what your site is about, it can’t send people to your site. I keep saying Google because it has the majority of search market share, but Google, Yahoo, and Bing all look at similar attributes. That includes content optimization, which drives the two lines you see in a search result, and indexing elements such as your URL structure and robots.txt. All of that makes sure the search engine finds what it’s looking for, where it’s looking for it, in the format it expects.
On-page optimization is critical, because without it there is no SEO. It is not one-and-done, because Google updates its algorithm on an ongoing basis, typically with two major updates a year. Once you’ve met best practices, it’s mostly tweaking unless there’s a drastic algorithm change. On-page SEO becomes your ticket to the game.
Domain authority and trust by association [10:52]
The critical factor for success, where the rubber meets the road, is off-page optimization. Off-page optimization is about building trust with Google. On-page optimization is about credibility: telling Google your site has rich, engaging content that answers the questions prospects are asking, and showing that you update it regularly and take care of cybersecurity. Off-page is about trust, and there’s a measure called domain authority, which is how much Google trusts your website.
For example, if someone on LinkedIn searches for a product or service, finds your company, and clicks through to your website, Google sees that LinkedIn is a legitimate domain with no bot traffic, so the visitor is a legitimate person. If that person engages with your website, visits a couple of pages, and spends some time there, Google learns your website is legitimate. That is building trust by association. We build a contextually relevant ecosystem of domains with higher domain authority than yours, and by association your own domain authority rises.
IMEC has a Made in Illinois database, for example. If you register your company with a description of your capabilities and a link to your website, that link is a backlink from a reputable source. Google understands IMEC and Made in Illinois, and if you’re connected to them, you’re probably reputable too. Then the proof is in the pudding. If you’ve done your job on-page, more people engage, fewer people bounce, and Google believes in your website more and more. It becomes a snowball effect. Plan on about two to three months to get your ducks in a row, and that’s when you’ll start seeing the needle move, because it takes about eight to ten weeks for Google to index your changes and reflect them in search results.
Whether you do SEO in-house or with a partner, these are the two categories to get to the bottom of. On-page, are you just installing a Yoast plugin that checks whether your copy is SEO compliant, or is it more than that? Make sure you address both components.
SEO metrics that matter [14:27]
Every business owner wants to understand metrics, and this is where Google offers transparency. SEO is one of the most cost-effective channels and one of the highest in ROI, because with the same ongoing effort you compound results over time. If you have ten visitors in month one, you might have twenty in month three. From there, the more Google trusts you, the higher it ranks you, the more people visit, and the more they engage and the less they bounce, the more people Google sends you. It becomes an infinite loop that attracts prospects from areas you may never have explored, which also supports diversification.
As a business owner, track how many people are inquiring, whether for an RFI or to understand your capabilities, how many come from Google search, and your conversion rate. You could get 100 visitors, but how many become quotes or legitimate prospects? Also track organic traffic, because your leads should be a subset of it. If you’re doing your job right, both needles keep moving.
On the more technical side, on-page metrics include Core Web Vitals, the page experience signals Google introduced, which measure things like how long the main content of a page takes to load on mobile or desktop. Engagement metrics matter too. If a partner tells you your organic traffic doubled but your bounce rate is over 50%, that’s not good traffic, and it’s a double whammy: you’re paying a partner and Google is docking you for the high bounce rate. You want engaged traffic even if it isn’t high volume. Page depth tells you that, and the percentage of return visitors is a good measure of content quality. Are prospects coming back to you as a trusted resource?
Off-page, watch your domain authority, the amount of trust Google has in your domain, and your referral traffic from sources like IMEC’s Made in Illinois database, LinkedIn, and your social media channels. If high-authority sources are bringing you quality visitors, you’ll grow faster. Together, these show you how to evaluate an in-house or partner SEO program, both for your top line and for the quality of prospects coming to your website.
Free tools to benchmark your website [19:24]
To get a baseline of where you stand, website health report tools such as WooRank and HubSpot’s grader show how a search engine views and ranks your website. Google’s own performance tool, web.dev/measure, gives you specifics on performance and correlates with Core Web Vitals, and GTmetrix offers similar capabilities. All of these are free. For website traffic quality, Google Analytics is almost a business intelligence platform, a treasure trove you can slice and dice to learn what prospects are looking for and what is and isn’t working. Very few platforms beat Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
Editor’s note: Google has since retired web.dev/measure. Use PageSpeed Insights for the same Core Web Vitals report.
Keyword research: products vs. use cases [20:43]
Lastly, it’s garbage in, garbage out. If your keywords don’t reflect the words your prospects actually search, you won’t get the right traffic, and your time and effort won’t pay off. Spend real time and due diligence on keyword research. A common issue we see is that people want to use their product names or service capabilities and miss the use cases. Don’t discount product names, but some people search for a use case more than the product itself. Finding the right strategic balance, and then the right keywords in those areas, is well worth it. Otherwise the rest of the effort may not yield results.
I didn’t want to spend a lot of time, because we have an excellent set of panelists. I just wanted everyone on the same page about what SEO is, why it matters, how to approach it in-house or with a partner, and how to evaluate its effectiveness.
All three panelists are StratMg clients. Their results came from SEO programs StratMg ran in partnership with IMEC, and each company has a full case study on our site.
F.N. Smith Corporation
F.N. Smith builds custom machinery and tooling for the cereal and snack food industry. Chris started the SEO program within his first month at the company as part of a crawl, walk, run strategy that began with growing awareness among existing Fortune 100 food customers.
When the program launched, one target phrase appeared in the first two pages of search. Within about three months, 60% to 70% of the phrases were on page one or two. The company saw significant growth, including during the pandemic, driven largely by inbound demand. The program started with a simple list of about 25 phrases that the team refreshes roughly every six months.
VMC Chinese Parts
VMC Chinese Parts in Carbondale, Illinois sells parts for Chinese-made ATVs, go-karts, dune buggies, and dirt bikes. When the company started in 2015, it could not be found in search, and early pay-per-click spending outpaced revenue.
Brian built SEO in from the start, including descriptive image names, and later added off-site SEO with StratMg. Most of his tracked keywords now rank in the top ten, with a goal of the top three. He keeps pay-per-click at about 10% of revenue and uses it as a dial to turn up or down. The company adds 2,000 to 3,000 new customers a month, and about half of its business is repeat business.
The Armoloy Corporation
Armoloy provides metal finishing, coatings, and metallurgical consulting across 18 locations in seven countries and was consolidating its websites into one authoritative site. Jake measures SEO by quote requests, information requests, and new customers and their lifetime value.
His most valuable audience is the “researcher’s market”: buyers and engineers searching for a problem before they know the solution. Two people spent about 40 hours over three weeks listing synonyms, adjectives, and symptoms customers use, which produced more than 3,000 keyword ideas to prioritize. In his words, if Google trusts you, your customers will trust you too.
[57:32] We use the term cost of doing business deliberately. People are looking for things online and shortlisting partners before they ever have that first conversation. Having a website is not the end of it. Having a website that meets 21st century expectations is step one. SEO is not a marketing luxury.
One example stands out. A metal forging client of ours was contacted through search by a jeweler who wanted custom forged areas in a drum set so he could embed jewels and sell it at a premium. It was not the forger’s core business, but it was very high margin and filled capacity between orders. They would never have spent resources pursuing that kind of work, but SEO brought it to them, and it changed the way they started doing business.
Parin Mody | 29 sec
Whether your shop is flooded with orders or looking for more, Parin explains why SEO is the most cost-effective and productive marketing channel for manufacturers, even if you don’t need leads today.
