How Engineers Can Leverage SEO To Generate New Business
No matter what engineering area you are in, the industry is competitive. SEO for engineers could be the difference between a successful business with new leads coming in daily, compared to a business that struggles to generate the income that it needs not just to survive, but to thrive. Get your SEO right, and the rest will follow.
Read on to discover how engineers can leverage SEO to generate new business…
What is SEO?
SEO stands for ‘search engine optimisation’. SEO is essentially the practice of optimising your website to ensure that it comes up on Google for the search terms that your potential customers are using.
From CNC machines, and precision engineers to industrial engineers, the search volume on Google for engineering is huge, but if you’re not leveraging SEO, you’re not benefiting from this.
Why do engineering companies need SEO?
In this day and age, when everyone takes to Google to find what they need, SEO isn’t really an option, it’s an essential. You need to be at the forefront of Google to be found, and the only way to do this is by implementing SEO.
Each and every second Google processes on average 99,000 search queries, which adds up to 8.5 billion searches per day. As of April 2023, Google receives approximately 83.9 billion visits worldwide. Google should be at the forefront of your focus when it comes to SEO – as the most used search engine in the world, Google owns more than 92% of the global search market.
The majority of people searching on Google will not click past the first page. A survey by Backlinko showed that only 0.63% of people look at the second page. If they can’t find what they are looking for on page one, they are more likely to change their search term than click beyond page one. This means unless you’re at least on page one, your business isn’t being found. That same survey also showed that the top-ranking organic listing is ten times more likely to receive clicks, compared to the result in 10th position. In 2022, Google’s revenue was $279.8 billion and is the fifth largest company in the world demonstrating its dominance.
How to SEO your engineering website
The first step when it comes to improving your website SEO is to carry out keyword research, and update your content based on your keyword strategy. SEO is all about ensuring your keywords appear within your content, and it’s important to make sure that your content is high quality too. Don’t forget that your content needs to work for the end user, as well as Google.
Populate your site with content optimised for search, ensure your keywords appear in title tags, meta descriptions, URLs, headings and the body of your content.
Great SEO is all about strategy and consistency. This can be time consuming and because of this, it’s essential to be sure that your strategy is the right one and that all of the time you spend on SEO will pay off. For this reason, you may want to consider outsourcing your SEO – we’re always here to help out, offering guidance, or taking your SEO completely off of your hands.
Keyword research
Keyword research is part of the planning phase, and is an essential step when outlining your SEO for engineers strategy. Keyword research isn’t just about outlining keywords that your customers are searching for. It is this, but it’s also about finding keywords with low competition, that you can easily rank for, while you work towards ranking for those search terms that will offer big returns.
Hone your website’s on-page SEO
Most of the SEO work that will help your site rank for your search terms happens on your website, rather than off of it. Some work can be done off-site to boost SEO, such as building backlinks, but the most important thing is to get your on-site SEO right. Here’s a simple breakdown of what optimising your website involves…
Keyword planning
As mentioned above, the first step in this process is to put a keyword strategy in place. Research what your potential customers are searching for, look at search volume and competition here.
Keyword optimisation
The next step is to populate your site with your targeted keywords. This can be done in a number of ways, but the main focus will be across the body of your content on your web pages and blog posts.
Meta title & meta description
This is the title of your page that shows up on Google’s search results. You can optimise each page on your website for your keywords by adding meta titles that include your targeted keywords. This is the description that shows up on Google under your page title, and essentially gives the user a short explanation of what they can expect to find on the page.
Header tags
Header tags are used within the main body of the content on your website. It’s important to include keywords in header tags, as Google uses these to determine how to rank your page.
URL structure
Your keywords should also appear in the URLs for each individual page on your website. Optimising URLs is another opportunity to strengthen your on page SEO.
Internal linking
Within your content on your website, you should include internal links to other pages on your site. This helps Google find and index all of the pages on your site. Internal links can be used strategically to send page authority to the most important pages on your site helping them rank higher on Google.
Image optimisation
Finally, images can be optimised using ALT tags using your targeted keywords. This will support SEO in general and ensure your images appear on the image tab on Google.
Create quality content regularly
Once your website has been properly optimised, it’s unfortunately not time to sit back and watch the traffic roll in. One of the most effective ways to get your site to the top of Google for your targeted keywords and keep it there is to publish new, high quality content regularly. It’s important to be consistent.
Not only does this strengthen your SEO for engineers and help populate your site with your keywords, it also allows you to position yourself as an expert within your industry. When someone searching for what you do has a query, they expect to find the answer they are looking for quickly and efficiently. With great content, you can provide those answers, bringing potential customers to your website, instead of elsewhere. There are a lot of people out there looking for answers – think about how often people are searching on Google every second, and with great content, you can be there to answer those queries any time, anywhere.
Through great content, and plenty of it, you can build up something called ‘topical authority’. This means being seen by Google as the ‘go-to’ place to find answers in your industry. This typically means deep diving into your niche, not just publishing one article about what you do, but hundreds, covering every possible question and topic. When you can achieve topical authority, Google will prioritise your site in search results.
Link building
Outside of your on-site SEO you have off-site SEO. The most important factor of off-site SEO is link building. This means gaining links from other authoritative sites within your industry pointing back to your website. Put simply, links are essentially a ‘positive endorsement’ from one site to another.
The quality of the link matters over quantity – a powerful link is far more beneficial than 10 low quality links. When Google sees a high authority site linking to yours, they see that your site must be important, and this will positively impact your ranking.
Need expert help with the above?
We understand that SEO can be time consuming, and for many, it’s a lot to take on on top of the daily running of your business. Should you need any support with your SEO, we’re here to help. From creating your strategy to carrying out the initial and on-going work, we can help you position your website to bring in valuable leads consistently.