How to Begin SEO in 5 Simple Steps

This complete beginner’s guide covers everything you need to know to get started, in a way anyone can understand.

So, you’re looking to dip your toes into the search engine optimization (SEO) tide pool but you don’t know where to start? Has your manufacturing business not put time into SEO yet and you’re needing a helpful hand to get started? Is your marketing agency pushing an SEO strategy and you need to know the basics to support the conversation??

Let this complete?beginner’s guide to SEO?be your resource to cover the basics in a way anyone can understand. By the end, you will learn everything you need to know to proceed on your own.

While this guide won’t provide you any secrets that will get your business to rank on search engines overnight, these best practices will certainly make it easier for you and your team to get the process started—and understand that SEO efforts never end; it takes time to reap rewards.

To get started implementing SEO, you can use these five steps as well as our?guide to SEO basics—overview, terminology and FAQs.

Step 1: Conduct Keyword Research

One of the most important factors in starting this journey is making sure your website will be found when a searcher is looking for a business like yours. When someone types in a term or question into a search bar, your website needs to be in at least the top 20, top 10 ideally, if you want to have a chance of being noticed. The first organic result in Google Search has an average click-through rate of just over 25%. This metric drops steadily from there. A study by Sistrix found the second and third positions have a 15% and 11% click-through rate (CTR) respectively. CTRs drop even more to 2.5% in the tenth position in Google results.

So, when a user searches for “mold builder in America,” you want them to find you quickly. The big questions are, “how do I know what people are searching for” and “how many people are searching for that term?”

This is where keyword research comes in. It provides valuable insights into the queries, or terms, your target audiences are actually searching for. These search terms can help direct what phrases to use within your current site’s content and when creating future content. And while appearing in search results alone is a benefit, keyword research has other benefits too:

• Marketing Trend Insights: Discover who is searching for what and when, as well as what your competition is ranking for.
• Traffic Volume Growth: Selecting several keywords that more people search for will help you rank higher in search results and attract more people to your site.
• Customer Acquisition: Selecting keywords that are relevant to your target audience and providing them with a strong call-to-action (CTA) will help lead them through the buyer journey—from awareness when they first see you, to connecting with you for a quote or more information.

Elements of Keyword Research

When conducting keyword research, there are four key elements to consider before selecting what terms and phrases are best for your business:

1. Relevance: Google will only rank your website or web page if the entirety of the content is both valuable to your audience and related to the search term. If your site isn’t relevant to the searchers, Google will recognize that and not rank it high in the results.
2. Keyword Density: This is a number assigned to a keyword or phrase based on the density of use on the Internet. The more the term is used, the harder it will be to rank for, and the higher the keyword density (KD) number. The lower the KD, the easier it is to rank for.
3. Traffic Volume: A good keyword research tool will provide a monthly volume number, giving you a good idea of how many people are searching for a specific keyword. After all, what’s the point of ranking for it if no one is searching for it?
4. Intent: Keyword intent tells you the search intent of the person using it. Informational (I) intent words are used by people only looking for information or answers to questions. Commercial (C) intent words are used by people investigating brands or services. Navigational (N) words are used by searchers looking for a very specific site, page or physical location. And finally, transactional (T) words are used by someone who is looking to make an immediate action or purchase.

Where to Find Keywords and How to Pick Them

Finding keywords begins by creating a list of 5-10 topics you want to rank for and another list of 5-10 topics you believe your audiences are searching for. By doing this, you will have some general topic ideas to plug into your keyword tool. For example, if you are a mold builder, these topics might be “injection mold making,” “mold design,” “mold engineering” or “plastic injection molding.”

Once you have the general lists of topics, you can begin to identify more specific keywords you want to rank for in search results. These are the specific terms or phrases your audience is looking for in their search queries. For example, if the general topic bucket is “plastic injection molding,” more specific keywords that are searched for are, and the corresponding metrics are:

• Plastic Injection Molding Companies: intent = C, traffic volume = 720, keyword density = 49
• Plastic Injection Molding Machine: intent = I, traffic volume = 1,000, keyword density = 50
• What is Plastic Injection Molding: intent = I, traffic volume = 110, keyword density = 58
• How to Choose the Right Plastic Material for Injection Molding: intent = I, traffic volume= 0, keyword density=22

As you can see, a variety of keywords with the slightest change of wording can have extremely different metrics. The more specific the term, the easier it is to rank for, but the less traffic volume you will gain. For manufacturing companies, this also means that the traffic you do get will likely be a better quality, or relevant, for your business—in many cases, like this, quality is better than quantity. The keyword strategy lies in finding the balance between a mix of intents, traffic volumes, ease of ranking/keyword density, and the relevance of the search term and content of the page.

Types of Keywords: Long-tailed vs Simple

As you may have noticed, there are different types of keywords that people search for. There are broader, more general and simple keywords—like those you initially outlined. And longer-tailed keywords that are much more specific and narrows the audience being driven to your site.

In any manufacturing business, the focus should be on long-tail keywords. Not only are they easier to rank for, but they typically convert more because the searcher is looking for something very specific. If your website appears in the search results, it’s likely they need something from your business, not many others.

For example, if someone searches for the term “injection molding,” they could be looking for how-to videos, images, definitions, examples, etc. This type of traffic won’t be very valuable to your business, however, the search volume is large. On the other hand, if the search term is “custom injection molding for the medical industry,” it’s probably a smaller audience being that specific in their search, so they likely need solutions from your business—your competition for this term is minimal and if it’s your specialty, you want to rank in the top 10 for it.?

Step 2: Begin Content Optimization

Content and SEO Work Together. Benefit from Their Synergy.

Now that you have your list of simple and specific terms that you want your site and pages to benefit from, you can begin to develop the content for them.

Topic Identification and Organization

We recommend you organize the topics by similarities and priorities. From here on out, we will continue using examples for injection molding businesses. And we will pretend we are looking to write a blog for a website. We want people to think of this company as an industry leader and use the website as a resource of information. The keywords that should be used in the blog’s content should be specific, informational and easy to rank for. We will start with injection molding tolerances as the blog topic—it helps build on the value that the business has strict quality standards and understands tolerance requirements for customers. Keywords for this blog might include:

• What are typical tolerances for plastic injected molded parts
• Best practices for optimizing injection molding tolerances
• Minimize the potential for warping and part misalignment
• Selecting the ideal material for my application
• Accounting for material shrinkage
• Significant deviations from tolerance requirements
• Minimizing deviations in manufacturing processes
• How to improve injection molding tolerances

Now, take a step back in time to middle school English class when your teacher required you to form an outline to organize thoughts. You’re going to do the same thing hre. You have selected the keywords and you know the topic to write about. It’s time to organize the keywords by how you would best incorporate them into an article. Perhaps start with broad keywords that introduce the topic to the reader, followed by specifics that answer questions or could be used in bullets, and finish with a keyword that would lead them to contacting you. The last bulleted keyword phrase above is a perfect example of this. The last paragraph might be start with: If you’re wondering how to improve injection molding tolerances (your keyword), consider partnering with an expert in manufacturing. Then, link the reader to your contact page.

Keyword Optimization for On-Page SEO

Finally, you have finished the research and outlined the topics into a sensible flow. Now, you need to identify the best way to use the keywords throughout the copy of the blog post. Make sure you include keywords in each of the areas outlined below. By doing so, search engine crawlers will better understand the content and relevance to searchers:

• Title tags: These tell search engines the overall topic of the page. They also appear in search results. They should be unique and short (50-65 characters, including spaces).
• Meta descriptions: These are short descriptions that show up with the title tag in search results. They should be concise (100-155 characters, including spaces) and paint a clear picture of the page’s content.
• Headline tags (H1, H2, H3, etc): Properly formatted headlines and subheadings that call out what words are most important on the page so crawlers can quickly grasp the basic idea of the content. There should only be one H1 headline tag—it’s the main title and theme. H2 headlines support the main title and might break down the content into more sub-topics. H3 headlines and those after it are headlines that continue to breakdown the topic into more organized batches of information.
• URL Slug: Ideally, the end of the page’s URL should include a short, simple keyword that is relevant to the page. To continue our example, the URL slug for the blog we outlined might be: www.injectionmoldexample.com/blog/optimizing-injection-molding-tolerances, where “optimizing-injection-molding” is the URL slug.
• Images: The image name and the alt text for the image are both factors in the SEO algorithms when determining how to rank and organize information. They also increase the accessibility of your site, so it’s best to ensure they are aligned with the page’s content. An image titled “img_1084905” wouldn’t do your website favors. But an image named “CNC machined injection mold” would be beneficial.

Content Length

There are many arguments on how long a page’s content should be to best rank on search results. Our crew would say, “it depends.” If a webpage outlines a company’s history, or information about the team or solution offering, the content on the page should be short and precise. Visitors to these types of pages won’t want to spend several minutes searching for the information they want. Content should be broken out into small paragraphs, included in infographics, or in links for readers to learn more. If the content being developed is for a blog, it needs to be lengthy to adequately cover all the relevant topics searchers are looking for. Here is your opportunity to be more descriptive. If someone is specifically looking for the information in that blog, they will spend a few minutes reading through the content. While some companies recommend a page has a specific number of words on it, we don’t really focus on that, but rather have you consider the page, intent of the people viewing the page and how long they would spend reading the information.

Step 3: Thoroughly Conduct On-Page and Technical SEO

Beyond Just the Content, SEO Has Technical Aspects

The content is written, but the job isn’t done yet. Beyond just writing the content and keyword research, SEO has technical aspects that need to be considered. These are often overlooked, causing issues for companies wanting to rank higher in results. Consider each of these technical SEO elements before publishing your page or website, and you will be one step ahead of most of your competition:

• Internal Linking: Linking content from one page on your site to another page on your site provides positive results for two reasons: 1) It keeps people on your site longer. The longer they are on your site, the more likely they are to use your solutions or visit again. 2) It helps crawlers navigate your site and quickly and easily find information. The rule of thumb is that both crawlers and website visitors should be able to find any piece of information within three clicks.
• Sitemaps: A sitemap is a blueprint of your website that helps search engines find, crawl and index your content. It also helps search engines identify the most important pages on your site. Some website design/development tools have built-in sitemaps, others use plugins to build and update the sitemap. Either way, a sitemap should be submitted to Google Search Console. Doing so helps you spot errors on the site and individual pages, and also helps you track search performance once the site is indexed.
• Mobile Friendliness: While having a mobile-friendly site (i.e., one that is easily viewed on a mobile device) for a manufacturing business may not seem like a major deal breaker—most of your traffic likely comes from people searching from a desktop—it’s important to consider the experience of anyone visiting your website. Plus, Google gives minor bumps in rankings to sites that are mobile friendly. You wouldn’t want to miss out on potential customers just because your site isn’t mobile friendly. It’s easy enough to do as most website templates now include mobile versions that don’t require much extra effort.
• Page Speed: Page speed is another element of a webpage that is often overlooked. In a world where people want and expect immediate results and gratification, and have less time to spend online, making sure your site loads quickly is critically important to keeping people on your site. If your pages take more than a second to load, chances are that your visitor will leave your site because they got frustrated. Consider limiting the size, not the use, of the images and videos on your site, as these can slow the loading process. When you can, embed digital videos with services such as YouTube or Vimeo. Also, do some research for website plugins that can help increase page speeds.
• Schema Markups: Schema markups are a special type of coded language that helps crawlers understand your website content more effectively and efficiently. This code helps differentiate an article from an FAQ page, a business contact page from a product review page, and a book review from an event. Schema generators, or structured data markup tools, take all the content on a page and convert it into coded, structured data for crawlers. While this type of technical SEO isn’t necessary, it does help increase a site’s ranking when used in tandem with the other SEO best practices.
• Featured Snippets: Featured snippets are short lines of text that appear at the very top of Google’s search results. Often referred to as “position 0,” this content quickly answers a searcher’s query and is automatically pulled from web pages within Google’s index. Common types of snippets include definitions, titles, steps and lists. This type of technical SEO is an opportunity to boost traffic from search results (receiving approximately 8% of all clicks) and it increases the number of “no-click searches.” Discovering how to implement this SEO feature goes back to using a keyword tool and conducting research. During your research through keyword lists, you should be able to filter out keywords that don’t result in Featured Snippet appearances.
• HTTPS vs HTTP: There was once a time when most websites used https:// before the URL. Now, many use https://. The difference between them is simple, the new “https” is secure, while the old “http” is not. HTTPS sites are more secure – and Google gives a slight bump in rankings to them – making it more difficult for traffic information to be stolen. Your website developer will be able to purchase the security certificate for your site to be an https site, ensuring information on and used for it is encrypted and safer from hackers.

Step 4: Build Backlinks and Linking Strategies to Establish Authority

One of the Most Important Factors in the SEO Process

Building backlinks and outlining a strategy to do so is one of the most important factors in this process. While writing content helps you appear in search results based on keywords, backlinks help you appear because your site is popular and reputable among other sites that are also popular and reputable.

What is a Backlink?

Simply, a backlink is a link from one website to another. They play an important role in SEO and your digital marketing strategy because search engines, like Google, use backlinks as a ranking signal. When one website links to another, it’s because the content is noteworthy. There are two types of backlinks:

• Nofollow: These links tell search engines to ignore them. Search engines won’t assign any value to the link, but in return, they have no impact on search rankings.
• Dofollow: These links help support your SEO efforts. It tells search engines that the link is valuable and should be considered in search algorithms.

What Makes a Backlink Valuable?

While every website wants other sites to link back to it, there are several websites that have bad, spammy or toxic reputations. When these sites link to yours, it can negatively impact your rankings. And if enough sites do this, it can cause Google to penalize or de-index your site. So, the goal is not to establish a lot of links to your site, but rather create links that are high quality (again, quality over quantity). For example, creating listings on random, unrelated directory websites just to have them link to your site will alert Google that your site could be spam. But if someone writes an article for an industry association website and it includes a link back to your site, the quality of the backlink will be strong.

Link Building Strategies

Using a tool like SEMrush to identify backlinks to your website and alert you to those that are toxic or positive will make all the difference when creating a backlink strategy. If your website is appearing on toxic websites, you should consider contacting the company and request the link be removed or switched to nofollow.

Once the toxic links are removed and you are no longer threatened with being de-indexed by Google, you can brainstorm ideas to create strong, valuable backlinks. Make a list of websites that you want to appear on and support your business by:

• Increasing your brand awareness because the site has a lot of regular, valuable (i.e., your target audience) traffic
• Being reputable and relevant to the content you want to link to
• Supporting your thought leadership efforts, confirming you stay connected in the industry and are updated on the latest trends

Once you begin to appear in top search results using keywords alone, you will notice your number of backlinks will grow organically—both bad and good. Stay updated on new backlinks that are created to your site and continually filter out the toxic links to ensure your rankings are never impacted.

Step 5: Continuously Analyze the Metrics and Tweak

You completed steps 1-4, give yourself a pat on the back, but don’t think the work is done. SEO is a long-term, ongoing activity. Search engines are constantly changing the algorithms used to determine rankings, and new technologies that impact how your site performs or what visitors expect of your site, are often deployed. It’s better to be proactive and stay on top of these changes because being reactive could push you back to the starting line.

Is My SEO Strategy Working?

Part of the never-ending process of SEO is knowing if the work you did is working. While any analyst would love to make a change on Monday and see the impact on Tuesday, this isn’t always the case. Search engines have millions of sites to crawl and the likelihood of them noticing your changes overnight are slim—it could take weeks or months.

But, keeping an eye on your site analytics over time will help alert you to your site’s performance. Using SEO tools will also help you identify areas of improvement. Some can even do an immediate analysis to alert you to any technical issues or give you suggestions to improve your content. This way when the search engine crawlers do get to your site, you will be ready, and the impact will be seen in your reports and hopefully site conversions.

What are the Best SEO Tools for Manufacturers?

When we mention using key tools for your SEO strategy and analysis, we recommend the following six SEO tools. These can make the biggest initial impact on your manufacturing business because of the valuable features and their ease of use.

• Ahrefs: Ahrefs is one of the most recommended keyword research tools—second to Google. It also has additional features including site audits and competitor analysis.
• Google Search Console: This little-known gem among SEO beginners lets you monitor and report on your site’s performance in search results. It allows you to add a sitemap, index pages and remove old pages from search results—preventing search audiences from stumbling across outdated content or broken links.
• SEMrush: SEMrush is considered an all-in-one marketing toolkit. It not only covers all the SEO factors in this guide, but also allows for social media automation/posting, alerts to new keywords you rank for, and allows you to directly compare your website with your competition.
• Moz Pro: Moz Pro is very similar to SEMrush as it is an all-in-one tool. The differences between the two boil down to your preferences of user-experience features and personal preferences of how you navigate a site.
• SEOQuake: SEOQuake is a handy Chrome extension that functions as an SEO checker, performing on-page site audits, assesses internal and external links and compares websites. Other SEOQuake features include keyword density, SEO dashboard and an export feature to share reports with your team.
• Structured Data Markup: Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper isn’t for the faint of heart but is one of the best generator tools to build schema so you can add it into your website and pages. Simply get started by adding your URL, selecting the type of page and following some instructions.

Final Thoughts

Once you are up and running in your SEO journey, the key thing to remember is making small tweaks to parts of your website when technologies update or you find metrics aren’t up to par. Each small change may seem incremental, but when summed together, they will have a noticeable impact on your website’s user experience and search results performance. If you already have the basics implemented on your site, keep this guide handy as you continue to write new content. Writing for SEO from the beginning of your process, is much easier than playing catch up after it’s been published to your site.

And while you may see this process as complex or simple—depending on your level of experience—keeping a network of SEO experts and partners close at hand will help support your efforts and be a guiding force to keep your entire digital strategy ahead of your competition.

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