We’ve talked about the science of SEO, not from the angle of in-depth algorithms and indexing procedures, but actually from the perspective of helping scientific companies to boost their own SEO and visibility. This can only work as a result of applying effective and targeted strategies based on our own experiences. This is generally gained from developing the ‘on site’ structure of many different websites over the years. It also comes from building a lot of very good quality external pages via the labface.com site, which concentrates on great unique content for scientific companies.

Well now we come to the engineering and processing industries. How can we also help these organisations and what makes them so different from the aforementioned science related companies?

Change The Industry, Change the Strategy

It all starts (and ends) with the visitor. Without the visitors nobody gets any business or makes any money. We have to look at the experience of the visitor and why and how they will turn into customers. This makes the difference between a business that succeeds and fails. Please-and-tease your potential customers and your conversion rates will be very good.

Of course, this changes dramatically with the type of industry you are in and the way we optimise scientific websites will be very different to how we optimise an engineering or processing related site. By the way, when we say ‘tease’ we just mean offer subtle call to actions and great capture pages to get the desired end result.

You see scientists, laboratory technicians, chemists and buyers of scientific products and equipment are interested in the analytical aspects as well as speed, accuracy and price. When you look at production, design or processing engineers then you have a completely different customer.

By their very nature, they are curious as to the inner workings and mechanics. They are interested in how the product will solve their problem in an efficient way, but they are always tracking back to make sense of the paths or procedures involved – that’s how they work!

So, to please them your site needs to have a mixture of technical information, terminology and applications which are set out in a certain way. You also need a good mix of serious content and a few more light-hearted pages to show them the ‘work and play’ side of your business. Don’t confuse ‘play’ with ‘amateur’ or ‘unprofessional’ – you should certainly not come across in that way. However, you can choose less serious content on good community pages and then the more serious stuff for the product specs and application pages. If they can find both, the chances are that they’ll feel comfortable on your site and give positive vibes to others through any community tools and functionality that you might have.

It is also a good idea to optimise your pages for both products and applications – ‘measuring temperature’ and ‘temperature sensors’ cover the same thing, but gives you the opportunity to talk about the product and the main use for that product. So it is a good idea to create two pages and then get the pages to link to each other through anchor text links. This will help your internal structure and also give your visitors a better experience.

Before you really get into the nitty gritty of your site, always make sure that you create a spreadsheet with the main keywords and phrases for each page. Use the free google keyword tool as a guide to find highly relevant keywords and phrases with high search volumes and then look at how competitive those terms are using the same tool. When you have decided on the best keywords, build a content page, which has been written from scratch in your own words and break it up with an image or two. Also make sure there is a call to action and a download or feedback/contact form on the page.

Oh, and also add a telephone number whenever you can as a lot of people would just rather pick up the phone and not fill a form in these days! Make it easy for them and they may just turn into a customer.

This is just the start of the SEO journey and we have only just scratched the surface of internal SEO. There is so much more to tell you!