The Industrial Advantage

Search engine optimization within the industrial market has it’s own very specific challenges. Web pages often have to be targeted toward engineers and specifiers, rather than the simpler end-consumer targeted pages of B2C sites. The information that users are seeking is more technical and detailed, yet still has to be understandable to buyers removed from the technical process, and of course for search engines.

But the industrial market also has some significant SEO advantages over other markets. Prime among those is the industrial market has far less competition than B2C markets, and this lower level of online competition creates some openings that a search engine marketing team can take great advantage of.

Online Competition

It’s important to clarify that when we’re talking about competition online, we’re not necessarily talking about the same companies that we would consider competition in the offline world. Any site that is ranking, or trying to rank, for the same relevant keyword phrases that you’re trying to rank for is competition. They’re all attracting click throughs from the search engine results page — click throughs that we want to attract.

But even when you open the competition up to the entire internet, the view is much rosier than it is for any kind of B2C site. For example:

• Aluminum Cases: a consumer-oriented product that isn’t even very broad, certainly not on the level of clothing or computer searches. Nevertheless when you search for aluminum cases you will come up with150 million results. Compare that to…
• Open Die Forging: forging is a solid industrial market industry, and open die forging is used to strengthen the raw material for countless other industrial processes, but unlike the cases above, open die forging shows a mere 390 thousand results in Google. While that’s still a large number, it’s indicative of how much lighter the competition is. Let’s take another example…
• Driver’s License Restoration: here we can take a look at a service that is consumer oriented, rather than a product. It’s very specific and yet there are still well over a million search results for driver’s license restoration in the searches. Compare that to…
• Flexible Shaft Couplings: a solidly industrial product, flexible shaft couplings are used in motors and servo motors across the motion control industry, in everything from robotics to windmills. But as an industrial market product, it seeks only 300 thousand search results — less than a third of even the very specific driver’s license restoration search above.

Again, every site that is competing for the same keyword phrase is online competition. So if you were an open die forging company, you’d have 390 thousand pages to compete against. But the vast majority of these aren’t real competition. The real competition is just the pages that are ranking on the first page of search results, and that’s where we come up against the strength of our competition.

Competition Strength

The strength of online competition can be measured in many ways. We can look at the size and age of the sites in the top ten search results, how well they’re optimizing the text on those pages, how many backlinks they have and the quality of those backlinks. This analysis gives us an idea of the amount of work that we’ll have to do to outrank them.

Happily within the industrial market not only is the competition smaller in numbers, but the competition is also typically less sophisticated in SEO techniques as well. The online strength of that competition is less. Just look through companies in the Industrial Marketplace Web and see how many of them are employing SEO tactics. Very few are.

This means that within many segments of the industrial market, search engine optimization efforts can carry your company a lot farther than they could in a B2C market. Where B2C companies often spend tens of thousands of dollars a month on pay per click, SEO, and linkbuilding campaigns, industrial market companies can see even bigger gains with far less investment. A quality, attractive site design with good SEO implementation combined with a modest SEO program can double, or quadruple online leads in a fraction of the time that B2C sites take to get a small portion of those results.

Of course the reason for this advantage is largely that so much of the industrial market either doesn’t pursue SEO practices, or handles it poorly. Thus the industrial market is ripe with opportunities to expand your customer base and trounce the competition — but only if you take it.

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