SEO for Contract Manufacturers

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should be a key focal point for contract manufacturers seeking to grow their business. If you’re the leader of a contract manufacturer and haven’t engaged in an SEO initiative yet, you’re missing out.

Do you remember those Thomas Catalogs that used to sit in an engineering library? Inclusion in those catalogs was a key strategy for most manufacturers “back in the day” when they were effectively the Yellow Pages for B2B. Those days are long past. A new crop of engineers and buyers are now in decision making positions and they have no experience with looking up suppliers in a paper catalog. They’re online.

Having a website doesn’t mean that you’re going to show up when people are looking for a contract manufacturer to meet their needs. A website is like a new employee, you have to work with it in order for it to do work for you. Your website should be a lead generation tool, not just an online brochure for people to find your facility. If you’re not getting leads from the internet, it’s not because the internet won’t generate leads. It’s because the internet is generating leads for your competitors, and not for you. There is a way to resolve that, and it’s called Search Engine Optimization.

Search Engine Optimization is about getting your business to show up online when a prospect is out looking for you. There are two types of search volume, branded search, for instance “Acme Manufacturing Company” and non-branded search, such as “Automation Equipment Manufacturer”. Don’t worry about branded search, those people already know who you are and where to find you. In SEO initiatives, we’re after the non-branded search traffic.

The first step of an SEO initiative is to find out how people are searching, i.e. to understand the “search behavior”. Don’t assume that the search behavior is obvious or that you know the answer. This is usually an onion that needs to be peeled.

Use google to seek out a supplier of raw materials for your own business. Use different phrases to find what you’re looking for, and you’ll likely see differing results on the page. Start broad and then narrow your search to specific components or materials that you might need for a given project. If you do this exercise, hopefully you will see how your own potential prospects might behave when looking for your business.

“CNC Machine Shop” is one way to search, but so is “13485 Machine Shop”, “5 Axis Machine Shop” or “Hastelloy Machining”. “Food Ingredient Supplier” is a very broad search phrase, whereas “Contract Spray Dryer of nutraceuticals” or “agglomeration of citric acids” starts to get more specific. The better you rank for these more specific phrases, the more likely you are to obtain new prospects that are a good match for your plant.

Search behavior for Contract Manufacturer’s generally falls into four categories:

• Your business category, such as “Electronic Manufacturing Service Provider” or “EMS”, “Machine Shop”, “Sheet Metal Fabricator”, etc.
• Capabilities, such as “Sheet Metal Laser Cutting”, “Agglomeration”, “Roll to Roll Die Attach”, etc.
• Materials, such as “Hastelloy Machining”, “Polyimide Printed Circuits”, etc
• Markets & Applications, such as “Kiosk Manufacturing”, “Aerospace Machining”, “Diaphragm Valve Manufacturers”, etc.

But search behavior is not limited to these categories and only through keyword research can the best patterns be determined.

When doing keyword research for a client we start by getting to know your business. It’s important that we understand your capabilities, markets and the products you specialize in. It’s also important for us to understand your strategic objectives. If you want to enter a new market, such as Medical Devices, we can help you do that.

Our next step is to find as many phrases as we can that describe your business. When you Google a phrase, notice how Google tries to help you by autofilling the search bar? Search phrases are all stored in Google’s Database and we use tools to search and find the phrases that engineers, buyers and other targeted personas are using to find businesses like yours. We pull the phrases and the average monthly search volume and start generating and categorizing a list. At this phase, we’re making the list long and looking for patterns. Once we feel that we have “the list”, we then start filtering that list by search volume, relevance and competition. Using this refined list of potential phrases, we’ll sit down and work with you, our client, to determine the short list of phrases we will target together to drive new organic traffic to your site and generate leads.

Once we’ve agreed on a list of phrases to target, we content that is focused around those phrases. This often results in new pages on your site and a revised site map and navigation to get the job done. We partner with our clients to get the content developed and published. There is also a list of technical work that we can do in the site that is harder to describe than what is intended for this article.

Another reason for doing SEO work is to evaluate a market or a capability that you’re considering adding to your portfolio. A good client of ours was considering adding a new manufacturing capability due to a need by their clients, but they couldn’t fully utilize it for this one client. Before making the investment in capex, this client asked us to research the search traffic for that particular manufacturing capability. The research revealed search traffic with a reasonable volume, and the capability was added to the plant. In parallel we developed a section of the website dedicated to that particular capability and now the website generates leads that help absorb capacity on that piece of equipment.

Essentially EVERY business needs to make some investment in Search Engine Optimization. Whether a Dentist or a retailer or a B2B manufacturer, the internet is where prospects go to find a new provider. For more complex business, such as B2B Contract Manufacturers, an SEO imitative is not a simple exercise that can be accomplished for couple hundred dollars a month. Copying the SEO work from one Dentist to another is pretty straight forward and that’s what you get from those “robo-dialers” that offer inexpensive SEO services. SEO projects for contract manufacturers requires a team that really understands your business and has experience driving new prospects to a sales team in a technical manufacturing environment.

For more information about how we can help your plant, give us a call. We’d be delighted to review your needs and develop a unique plan that can help your business achieve your goals.