e-Business for Industrial Electrical Distribution SEO

This “e-Business” discussion is written specifically for Industrial/Electrical Distribution and just scratches the surface of search engine marketing for our niche industry. These are fundamental Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactics for Electrical and Industrial distributors. This is just one tactic. Knowledge-based suppliers can exploit their niche to demonstrate product subject matter expertise by publishing and distributing long-form content to win in e-business.  

OEM Legacy Branding Tactic

In the illustration below, the organization that incorporated OEM Legacy Branding into it’s Page Title earned a higher position on Google (see image) for the Eaton model number. Eaton Corporation absorbed Westinghouse and Cutler Hammer brands which are now part of Eaton. But folks who’ve been around the industry for a while will still search using any one of the three names. The searcher searched on the model number plus one of the brand names (Cutler Hammer or Westinghouse). That’s what appears in the headline/Page Title in the search result shown above. All the competitors in the search results missed out on this tactic by not applying industry knowledge to their SEO.

What’s the lesson here? If your inventory database allows, consider associating the Item Number number with each of the brands (cross-branding) your customers may use to find the item. The illustration below illustrates how one item number can appear in a search engine different ways depending on customer search criteria. Don’t miss this opportunity.

Many Industrial OEM model numbers have already been indexed by Google because of previous searches by millions of purchasing managers, contractors, distributors, inventory managers and end users. Their search queries are stored on Google’s servers. Now Item Numbers/SKUs on your site have a greater chance of high ranking listings in search engines because each legacy Item Number may be listed more than once if you have it associated with more than one brand. This is one of many tactics to be exploited with electrical/industrial IT, Marketing and Sales experience. There’s much more to learn and discuss. If you want to get technical, read on.

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Introducing Googlebot The web page discovery process will be aided by a sitemap text file uploaded to Google Webmaster Tools to aid googlebot in understanding your site’s construction. The sitemap will contain the URL of every page on your site. Note: only Google is mentioned throughout this article, however the process is similar for all search engines. Google’s algorithm favors websites that do the best SEO on their site based on such factors as how and where keywords and phrase links appear on the page. This “On-Page SEO” — the page’s main content, can put you ahead of competitors since page content is unique to each site. This will be accomplished through industrial/electrical keyword/keyphrase research in collaboration with you. The industrial/electrical community has its own jargon and can be exploited. You’ll have a head start by understanding the industrial/electrical supply chain and making internet marketing decisions using this knowledge and initiating tactics that will get your site favorable indexing with the search engines.

Your Content Is King Search engines are crawling the web looking for new content on topics like electrical wholesaling. motor control training, industrial data warehousing to name a few. Google has changed its algorithm several times in the past year to return the best content to its users. Now, more than ever, it is critical to generate fresh, quality content. Content-rich sites use  Content Marketing not only on their top domain, but also in subdomains which is a good place for a Blog. Many SEO’s recommend Microsites which are Highly Optimized “mini sites” for Discrete Product Subcategories or Services. A microsite can hold a position of its own in search results and point traffic to your parent site. Inbound traffic from other web properties will differentiate you from competitors who are generating little or no content on a routine basis. We’ll go over this under “Link Popularity” later in this article.

Product Attributes in Metadata Performing SEO on your website includes creating metadata for Page Title, Page Description and Keywords. Good titles are the most important factor among these three. The score for relevancy of a page compared to what the user is searching for is called Page Rank. Additionally, URL structure (canonical construction) and page content strongly influence Page Rank. This canonical factor can hurt your current site which currently has poor canonical formation. This means its URL’s are difficult for Google to make sense of, so the most important words, or “head terms” are normally best positioned  in the beginning of the URL. We will formulate URL’s that are easy for Google to read and optimized based on Industrial/Electrical internet research.

Page Rank and Link Popularity We explore external factors such as other industry web properties that can send inbound traffic. This is called offsite SEO. Microsites and Social Media (e.g., YouTube) are just the beginning. These inbound links can put your website higher in the search rankings

because it will have greater Link Popularity. In other words, these external industry-specific sites will be placing “votes” for your site content. This tells Google your site is important to the industrial/electrical community. Electrical Marketing researches these Industrial/Electrical sites, and has tools to discover industry-specific web “hang outs” where customers will find you.

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Greg Carter has 15 years experience in Industrial/Electrical marketing and sales. He leverages industry knowledge and incorporates it with “e-Business”.