SEO for B2B & manufacturing.
Bought slowly, by several people.

Nobody buys on the first visit

Industrial and trade purchases involve several people, several sessions and often several months. Somebody technical checks whether you can do it, somebody commercial checks whether you should, and the decision is made away from the website entirely.

That changes what the site is for. It has to be re-readable, forwardable and specific enough to survive being shown to a colleague who was not part of the first conversation. Persuasion aimed at a single visitor making a single decision misreads the situation completely.

Questions we ask before planning

Before proposing anything for B2B & manufacturing, these are the questions that shape the research and the scope:

Specifications are the search terms

Buyers in this sector rarely search the category name. They search a grade, a standard, a dimension, a material or an application, because that is how the requirement reaches them. A site organised around marketing categories is invisible to that vocabulary.

Publishing the actual specifications you work to, the standards you meet and the applications you have supplied is both the content and the keyword research. It is also the part that a competitor cannot copy, because their numbers are different.

A quote request is not the only outcome worth counting

Measuring only completed enquiry forms understates this kind of website badly. A buyer downloading a specification sheet, checking a certification or forwarding a capability page is progressing towards a purchase that may complete by telephone months later.

Agreeing which of those count, and how they are recorded, is worth doing before any reporting starts. Otherwise the numbers will describe a website that appears to do nothing while the business wins work from it.