Has traffic to your engineering website become stagnant? Or perhaps visits have always been poor? There are many ways you can increase traffic to your website, however, some can be costlier than others. SEO is a cost effective long-term solution that when done right, will drive more quality traffic to your engineering business website.
In this post, our engineering SEO specialists will outline 5 ways engineers can use SEO to increase website traffic.
Watch the video or scroll below to read about the top tips in full.
1. Keywords based on your services / products
Incorporating keywords into your content is essential. It's crucial to find the words and phrases users are typing into Google when they are searching for your services or products. Here are three updated ways to effectively perform keyword research:
- Use AI Tools: Leverage AI-powered tools like ChatGPT, SEMrush, or Ahrefs for advanced keyword insights. These tools can help predict search trends and uncover hidden opportunities.
- Voice Search Optimization: Optimize for voice search by incorporating natural language and question-based queries into your keyword strategy. As more users turn to voice assistants like Siri and Alexa, this becomes increasingly important.
- Competitor Analysis: Examine your competitors' top-ranking pages to identify the keywords they focus on. Tools like SpyFu or SimilarWeb can offer detailed insights into competitor strategies.
2. On Site SEO for your Engineering website
You should consider all on-site SEO factors for your website, including technical SEO and user experience. Here are key aspects to focus on:
- Core Web Vitals: Google's Core Web Vitals—Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)—are crucial for user experience and ranking. Ensure your website meets these benchmarks.
- Mobile Optimization: With Google's mobile-first indexing, ensuring your website is mobile-friendly is essential. Use responsive design and test your site on various devices.
- Technical SEO: Resolve issues such as broken links, duplicate content, and crawl errors. Improving your site's architecture and ensuring a clear, logical structure can significantly impact your rankings.
3. Correct Use of meta data
Meta tags, including the page title and meta description, are fundamental for SEO. They act as a summary for the page content, giving users an idea of what to expect if they click through to your page. Here are updated tips:
- Schema Markup: Use schema markup to help search engines understand your content better and enhance rich snippets. This can improve your visibility in SERPs.
- Dynamic Rendering: For JavaScript-heavy websites, consider dynamic rendering to ensure proper indexing by search engines.
4. Good use of images
Image optimization can significantly increase traffic to your website. Here are updated tips:
- Modern Image Formats: Use modern image formats like WebP for faster loading times without compromising quality.
- Lazy Loading: Implement lazy loading to defer the loading of images until they are needed, improving page speed.
- File Names and ALT Tags: Include keywords in image file names and ALT tags. This helps search engines understand the relevance of the images, which can enhance your SEO.
5. Link Building
Link building is highly influential for SEO. Here’s how you can build quality links:
- Content Marketing: Create high-quality, shareable content such as white papers, case studies, and infographics. This type of content is more likely to earn backlinks.
- Digital PR: Use digital PR strategies to earn high-quality backlinks from authoritative sites. Engage with industry publications, contribute guest posts, and build relationships with influencers.
- Internal Linking: Link related pages and blog posts within your website. This practice helps distribute page authority and keeps visitors engaged.
- External Linking: Include trusted outbound links to help search engines understand your content category and enhance your site’s authority.
Here we’ll outline how you can build links in two ways, via linking internal content and using external sources:
▸ Content interlinking
Good practice is to link related pages and blog posts within your website. Interlinking should entice your readers to spend more time on your site and should, therefore, help page rank and send more traffic to those pages. For example, if you have a blog post where you talk about the effects of data centre downtime, you may want to link it to another blog on how to increase data centre uptime.
Remember it’s about quality not quantity- it’s not the number of links that’s important, it’s how the content is structured and how well the user is guided through the information to ensure they stay on the page.
TIP: use keyword rich anchor text when creating internal links- this will help these pages perform better in search engines for the anchor text keywords.
▸ Gaining backlinks
If you create excellent and engaging content on your blog which ranks highly, you have a good chance of gaining backlinks from other websites who may quote your content or back up their own opinion using your content.
For engineering websites, it is essential that you get linked by accredited associations that you are a member of as they are considered as high quality links.
Online engineering directories and engineering blogs are also good for getting backlinks to your website.
When building links to your website, remember to keep them relevant, so for engineering companies, the majority of backlinks from your website should come from engineering related sources.
▸ External linking
Including trusted outbound links on your site not only helps search engines decipher your category, but it helps the authority if your site which plays a vital role improving your SEO.
External linking to trusted sites will also help your readers see you as a credible source of information. Try to link to reliable sites that fall into the same category as you, like for exam theengineer.co.uk or engineering.com.
TIP: If you’re unsure about the authority of a website you’re linking to, use a ‘nofollow’ tag so you don’t pass your page and search engine rankings onto them.
Things to avoid?
▸ Don’t keyword stuff
Have you ever come across a page that looks super spammy? Perhaps something like:
“Joe’s cheap broadband is the best cheap broadband you can get. Contact us now for cheap broadband.”
Overusing, or keyword stuffing not only irritates readers but it also upsets search engines too. Google Panda will pick it up in no time and you’ll tumble down the rankings at lightening speed. Google is looking for a fluent text that’s well structured and nicely written.
TIP: Instead of repeating your keyword numerous times, use synonyms when possible. Google is now smart enough to recognise them.
SEO is a cost-effective solution to your website traffic issues, but it’s a long-term strategy. You won’t see results overnight—be patient, and quality traffic will, in time, come.
Regularly audit your site, monitor your SEO performance using tools like Google Analytics and Search Console, and stay updated with the latest SEO trends to maintain and improve your rankings. By following these updated strategies, your engineering company can increase website traffic and achieve sustained online success.
