You Know SEO is Important, But You Might Not Know Where to Start
As a metal fabricator, you likely already have a number of marketing strategies in place to help you generate new business. Over the years, you’ve likely invested in new and better looking websites that explain your capabilities and give customers an opportunity to reach out to you in the way that works best. However, if you’re like the metal fabricators we’ve worked with, that website likely isn’t performing as well as you’d hoped. This is likely due to an absence of SEO for metal fabrication, specifically.
Just as with any other industry, it’s important to dig deep to ensure you’re going after the right keywords, people, and markets in order to make the most of SEO for metal fabrication. You know that this is an important part of SEO, but you might be unsure where exactly to start or how an overall SEO program should flow. Below, we will outline some of the fundamentals of an SEO for metal fabrication program to help you take the right first steps and support your revenue generation goals.
Fundamentals of SEO for Metal Fabricators
- Conduct industry keyword research — Because you’re directly involved in your industry, you will have the most insight into what people search. Consider putting together a list of terminology around your capabilities and products that you think people might search for. It’s important to remember that the way you, as a metal fabricator, think and write certain terms might not be the same as your customers. Take their perspective and think about what they would search for if they wanted to work with a company like yours. Consolidate all of this into a list for further analysis.
- Research competitor rankings — For your top competitors, run their websites through an appropriate SEO tool that reveals their rankings. Note that in order to obtain this information, you will likely need a paid subscription to an SEO service. Once you have these rankings, save them separately from the industry research and prioritize them based on their performance. The best keywords will likely be the ones worth going after first; however, if other keywords are more important to your business and sales process, those can come first.
- Research current rankings — It will also be important to collect your current website’s rankings. It’s likely that you’ve already earned valuable search positions for terms related to metal fabrication. If those keywords are good performers, it makes sense to continue using them, but of course, you can’t do that if you don’t know what they are. Save these keywords separately from the above research.
- Prepare a content strategy — Looking at the keywords you’ve collected across these different resources, you can begin to prepare a content strategy for your website. This content strategy should include assets such as informative and educational blogs that answer common questions and address other needs from your audience. Those keywords should also be used to inform core site rankings, such as service pages, industry pages, and other pages about your company.
- Develop a paid search strategy — This next step is optional and depends on your marketing budget and preference for paid media. In conjunction with your content strategy that will support organic rankings, it may be worth doing a paid campaign around high-volume keywords as well. This effectively serves as a double whammy by allowing you to rank for organic searches as well as show up higher on search engine results pages (SERPs) via paid ad spots. Note that just because an organic keyword is strong doesn’t mean that it will be a worthwhile paid keyword. It’s important to conduct an audit first to understand what the landscape is for your keywords and what the competition for them looks like.
- Explore backlink opportunities — Last but not least, it’s important to consider off-site SEO opportunities to supplement all of your on-site work. This includes getting links on other sites that link back to your site. This can often be a time-consuming and even expensive process, but you should still be able to find free opportunities. Associations, industry news sites, and others are all valuable resources for getting backlinks to your site. These backlinks tell Google that your site is authoritative because multiple sites are linking to it. With your site, it’s important to maintain these backlinks and ensure they’re working at all times. Balance this with other on-site SEO work as best you can.
Going Further: How Does This Influence Sales Strategies?
SEO for metal fabrication should not be done in a vacuum. All marketing efforts must be developed in coordination with sales to ensure they best support revenue generation goals. Remember, it’s easy to bring traffic to your website, but your goal is to bring the right kind of traffic to the website. This will help support conversions and feed the sales pipeline with the right kind of opportunities. This can only be done through communication and collaboration between marketing and sales teams.
At Athena, we combine front-end sales support with a holistic marketing approach that includes SEO for metal fabrication. Our team absorbs all the administrative aspects of sales so that your core sales team can focus on doing what it does best. All the while, we implement proven inbound and outbound marketing tactics that consistently generate new leads. We then work to qualify those leads on behalf of your sales team, ensuring that by the time they reach your team, they are already qualified and ready to move forward.