Website Maintenance for Manufacturing Businesses
This is part six in our series: Marketing Your Manufacturing Business Online Effectively
The business-to-business marketplace is changing. Your manufacturer’s website has become an instrumental tool you can use to market and sell products online, attract new clients, and use it as a place for both to research and find solutions to their needs.
Why is regular maintenance to manufacturing websites so important?
Because your website is an important part of your company, it needs to be maintained, just like your factory, to keep it running smoothly. Keeping your website running smoothly is required if you expect to attract visitors, and convert them into leads who will ultimately become loyal customers.
Here are some things to consider when performing regular maintenance on your website:
- SEO Research and Optimization: This is critical for manufacturing websites; with 89% of B2B researchers using the internet during their research process, understanding the technical terms that your buyers are likely to use when doing an online search helps you target and update specific keywords, so your company continues to have greater visibility online. Data from Google Analytics, as well as Google Search Console, gives valuable information you can use in deciding what additional actions are necessary to improve your SEO.
- Security Update: Contact and quote forms are a must-have on manufacturing websites and the information they collect is valuable. Google understands how important it is for websites to secure that information, and they will indicate that a page is not secure if it contains a form, but an SSL is not enabled. You should never lose a customer due to an alert that your site is not secure! By testing and reviewing your site for any security issues, you can make sure that your manufacturing site is safe. There is also an SEO benefit since SSL is now part of Google’s search ranking algorithm.
- Website Back-up: Back-up is essential and must be done regularly. You do not want to lose valuable data. Perform secure off-site backups of your database and file system so your website can continue to function while you work on it. If something goes wrong with the technology, your site can be restored to the most recent back-up, and you will never lose your valuable work to server or database crashes again!
- Fix Broken Links: These need to be fixed right away! Getting a 404, page not found message, is frustrating for a user; they may bounce and find another site to look at. It can also cause Google to downgrade your website. Make sure all internal and external links are working correctly.
- Load Speed: Your website needs to load in less than 3 seconds for the best user experience. Since manufacturing websites should have numerous photos, optimizing the size of photos is one of the ways you can increase your load speed and keep visitors to your site happy.
- Responsiveness: A responsive website adapts to any size device and will be deemed mobile-friendly and moved up in search rankings by Google. In contrast, non-mobile optimized websites will start to see a ranking decline in the Google search results. Review, test, and optimize your manufacturing site to keep it mobile- friendly as part of your website maintenance services.
- Updates: The large amounts of information manufacturing websites have can be technical and can change rapidly. Google will only place your company among its top searches if your content is updated frequently. Additionally, make sure your CMS is updated to the latest version and make sure all extensions are compatible with it.
We know that as manufacturers, you are continuously looking for ways to improve your operations; keeping your website maintained is critical for your manufacturing business and its overall sales.
This was the last post of our series: Marketing for Manufacturing Businesses. We hope you found our series useful and informative. Feel free to navigate through any post of the series:
2. Social Media for your Manufacturing Business
3. Local Search Engine Optimization for your Manufacturing Business
4. Email Marketing for your Manufacturing Business