The idea is simple: grow your manufacturing business with inbound marketing tactics. But what does that really mean? We've written a lot about the various areas of inbound marketing, and how they relate specifically to manufacturing business, but today I wanted to dig into one of the more important but confusing areas of inbound tactics.
I want to talk about how keywords can be used to grow your manufacturing business. Keywords are hugely important when it comes to inbound marketing. Keywords are the reason your website ranks on search engines, which is one important way people find you, which is what people need to do before they can become leads. But like everything in inbound marketing, it's all about attracting the right kinds of people so that they can become good, qualified leads. To do that you need to...
1. Optimize for long tail keywords
Before you can start optimizing for keywords, you need to get cracking on your keyword research and focus on long tail rather than high level keywords. High level keywords are tempting to focus on because they are often intuitive. If you manufacture laser marking systems, then "laser" is likely to be one of the first keywords you think of.
There are a couple of problems with high level keywords, however. First, high level keywords tend to have a lot of competition. If you thought of "laser", so did all of your competitors. This means it's going to be much harder to rank higher for these types of keywords.
Second, high level keywords don't offer a lot of differentiation in searches. "Laser" is a very broad term and covers a huge range of specific types, purposes, industries, sizes, etc. Which leads us to the third problem; high level keywords are lousy converters. Someone searching for "lasers" is probably not ready to make a purchase. On the other hand, someone searching for an "air cooled 20 watt fiber laser" is much more likely to be ready to make a purchase.
So when you are looking to grow your manufacturing business you need to find the long tail keywords that your ideal leads are searching for. Once you've got your keywords, you then need to optimize for them. Which leads us into the second step:
2. Create new content targeting ideal prospects
Long tail keywords can help you create new content that is highly focused and relevant to your ideal prospects. Long tail keywords let you know the specific areas of your business that your prospects are interested in, so think of them as writing guides.
If one of your long tail keywords is "air cooled 20 watt fiber laser" brainstorm all of the things you can think of having to do with air cooled 20 watt fiber lasers. You could create compare and contrast articles, buying guide whitepapers, or best practice blog posts. Whatever content you create, however, is going to help you rank for a long tail keyword that your prospects are looking for.
The key to growing your business is finding the best way to be in front of the people who need your product or service. Long tail keywords are a great way to do that because they let you know what your prospects are searching for, and give you the ability to create content that will allow you to rank for it. Long tail keywords put your website in front of prospects.
Topics: Marketing, Manufacturing
