Why wood products manufacturers need to treat their website like any other tool

You wouldn’t consider purchasing a tool, setting it up in your shop and never touching it again. But many manufacturers think that building their website is a once-and-done process. In this article we’ll look at why treating your website like any other tool can yield benefits in the form of leads and sales.

Imagine never checking the squareness of your radial arm saw, the accuracy of your miter saw, or the set of your planer knives. You know what problems that would cause further down the production line. You would be wasting not just materials and time, but opportunity and profit. By continually monitoring your tools and making fine-tuned adjustments you are ensuring reliable production. You maximize your output and seize new opportunities through efficiency.

Likewise with your website, you need to regularly monitor your pages to keep them optimized for search engines (SEO – search engine optimization). Optimization is the process of monitoring and refining the keywords and phrases on a page to increase the page’s search ranking. To reach a wider audience and be found, you need to elevate your website page rankings. That’s really worth doing. 89% of B2B buyers research products online, and 46% use their research to create a short-list of potential vendors. If they can’t find you, you’ll never be on the short-list.

Most people don’t realize that visitors who reach a site through a search engine are much more likely to arrive on a page other than the home page. Home pages are not good candidates for optimization because they contain so many competing keywords and phrases in order to direct traffic to different parts of the site. Really effective business websites have optimized pages for specific search terms to get higher ranking for those terms. The point being that higher ranking will result in greater visibility, increased traffic and more sales opportunities.

But just like the tools in your shop, you need to actively monitor and adjust your pages to achieve those benefits. So think of it like the regular maintenance you perform on your equipment. Keeping your tools sharp and the shop clean goes a long way toward maximizing production efficiency. You invest the time because you recognize that efficient production increases profitability.

Invest time in your other machine, your sales machine, your website. Create and optimize pages so they will deliver quality leads. Focus pages on specific keywords or phrases for maximum effect. Then monitor your analytics and page ranking, and continually refine the page content until your pages begin to deliver leads and sales. It’s worth remembering that maintenance is an ongoing effort that results in long-term benefits.

 

Learn 9 ways to improve your website. Read more.