Can manufacturing websites become successful, attract visitors and convert them into new loyal customers?
With tough online competition for attention, making your manufacturing website stand out is crucial and challenging (but not impossible).
In this 8-minute read article, you’ll find tips for creating successful manufacturing websites, from effective design and layout to clear messaging and user experience.
Manufacturing websites - 5 tips for success
Website design for manufacturers
Designing a manufacturing website that captures attention and builds trust with potential customers is crucial for success in today’s digital age. The website design should reflect your brand identity and convey trustworthiness to potential customers.
Website design for your manufacturing business should help convert visitors to your new loyal customers.
Here is how you can achieve that.
7 most important factors for a great manufacturing business website design
Here’s a list of critical factors to consider when designing a beautiful and effective manufacturing business website:
Clear branding
Your brand identity is crucial in creating a strong impression and lasting impact on your target audience. A clear branding approach with a well-designed logo and consistent color scheme can visually represent your brand and leave a long-lasting impression on customers.
Modern and clear design
A well-designed website has a simple, clean, modern look with easy-to-navigate menus and clear call-to-actions that direct visitors to the desired pages. This design strategy can provide a user-friendly experience and leave a positive impression on visitors. If you are unsure whether it’s time to redesign your manufacturing website, check our article When is it time to invest in the website redesign.
Mobile responsiveness
With an increasing percentage of website visitors accessing the web via mobile devices, a mobile-responsive website is critical.
As of 2022. all internet traffic coming from mobile phones is over 50%; meaning, over half of all searches, is conducted on mobile devices and vertical screens.
Your design strategy must ensure that your website functions, layout, and composition look great across all devices and creates a positive user experience.
High-quality imagery and videos
Visual content is imperative in creating a visually appealing, compelling website. High-quality imagery and videos provide a professional look, showcase your products and services, and can substantially influence customers’ purchase decisions.
Clear and valuable content
Your website content should be concise, clear, and valuable. It should provide in-depth information about your products, specifications, company history, etc. Clear content can educate and inform visitors about your products and services, ultimately driving leads and conversions.
Easy contact options
Providing easy-to-find contact information can help visitors reach out to you with any queries or concerns. Contact options, including a phone number, email address, and live chat, can put visitors’ minds at ease and improve your website’s credibility.
SEO optimization
Search engine optimization is critical in determining your website’s visibility and ranking in search engine results pages. This involves incorporating relevant keywords, optimizing your website code, utilizing link building, and other SEO strategies that help improve your search engine visibility and drive more traffic to your site. Do you want to know if your manufacturing website is SEO optimized and if it has reached its highest possible ranking? Ask for our free SEO and rank check. In less than 24 hours, you’ll get the matrics and improvement advice.
The best manufacturing business website structure for excellent UX
The best website structure for a manufacturing business has easy navigation and sections that entice visitors to explore further. Also, it should align with your website’s goals and branding. Here’s a general website structure for a manufacturing business and the web pages you should have:
- Homepage
- Product/Services
- About us
- Testimonials/Reviews
- News and Updates
- Contact
- Blog
Manufacturing website Homepage design
The home page should be visually appealing and give visitors a clear idea of your business offerings and all benefits of doing business with you (or purchasing from you). A brief company overview, services, and featured products should be displayed on this page with clear CTAs.
Designing a beautiful, highly-converting Homepage is not easy.
The 12-minute video Homepage Design Secrets For a Highly Converting Website by Wes McDowell will help you evaluate your manufacturing website homepage and plan design improvements.
Products/Services page design
This web page should clearly showcase your business’s products or services. Pay special attention to understandable and SEO product/service descriptions, specifications, and other related details. We recommend hiring a professional photographer, so you’ll add realistic images. Most importantly, you should further address why your company is the best choice for potential customers
About page for the manufacturer's website
The about us page should create a bond and a sense of connection with visitors, promoting brand loyalty and customer trust.
IMPORTANT: be aware that people do not care about you. They come to your website searching for the solution to their problems.
Do not bore them with unnecessary details just because you are proud of them – they will leave if they don’t find the information they are searching for.
When creating the About page, address their problems and answer the question: What is unique about you that guarantees you are the ideal solution for their problems and needs?
CHECKLIST FOR THE GREAT ABOUT PAGE
If you are genuinely committed to having a highly-converting About page, answer these questions:
- Do your About page talk to the visitors and address their needs, problems, and desires?
- Will your About page keep visitors glued to the website?
- Do you clearly state benefits and how you provide them?
- Is the content inspiring and engaging?
- Did you offer proof of all you stated?
We found a great 15-minute YouTube video that will surely help you improve your About page design, message, and structure:
How Good is YOUR ‘About Us’ Page?
High-ranking content for a successful manufacturer's website
Google announced that as of August 2022. website ranking will mostly depend on the quality of the content. Factors that Google considers when ranking websites are:
- originality
- relevancy
- topical authority
- honesty-what is it when related to content
- SEO
- freshness
- user experience
Google “expects” manufacturing business websites to provide content relevant to their industry. The more content you add regularly, the higher your ranking will be.
Content originality
Originality – search engines are hungry for new content. You shouldn’t copy/paste anything already published on the internet. You can use similar content but present it in a new way.
RECOMMENDATION for creating original content:
If you are describing your manufacturing service, process, or product, here are the steps you should follow:
- Check the internet – go incognito and type in the keyword.
- You’ll find specific types of content listed on the first and second pages in SERP.
- Present your product/service/manufacturing process/team from a new angle.
- Add unique information relevant only to your manufacturing business and brand.
Content relevancy
Content relevancy is an essential factor Google considers when ranking search results. It assesses the quality of content about the user’s search query and determines whether the content fulfills their search intent.
Good content should match the keywords internet users type in when they “Google” for a solution to their problems.
Search engines evaluate content relevance by assessing its ability to answer questions and provide solutions on a subject matter. The more comprehensive and authoritative a website’s content is, the higher it will be ranked.
Keywords should be incorporated naturally with rich semantic context.
Additionally, the website should have consistent headings and sub-headings (on-page SEO) formatting so that Google can accurately understand what each page is about.
Topical authority for the manufacturing website
Website topical authority measures a website’s knowledge and authority on a particular subject. It is evaluated based on the frequency and relevancy of backlinks, citations by authors, and other factors.
Google evaluates websites more favorably with links from reliable sources such as industry-authoritative websites, news, magazines, and blogs.
To achieve high topical authority for your manufacturing website, you should strive to create exciting and engaging content for readers.
This means focusing on topics that inform and educate readers about key industry trends and solutions, as well as relevant product updates.
NEVER BUY BACKLINKS or hire someone to apply black-hat link-building techniques. Google will notice that and severely punish your manufacturing website.
It is better to have 10 backlinks from websites connected with your niche and industry than 1000 backlinks from irrelevant sources.
What is "honesty" when considering content?
All content must be truthful and accurate, avoiding any exaggeration or misinformation that could lead to confusion or misinterpretation. It is also important to highlight features and qualities of the products without overselling them, as this can lead to customer disappointment and negative reviews.
Google punishes websites that use black hat techniques like cloaking. Cloaking is a black hat technique where a website shows different content to search engine bots than what is shown to visitors. This can be done by using code or redirects so that when the search engine bots crawl the website, they see different URLs, keywords, or content than what human visitors see.
Other unethical practices that are considered not honest include
- keyword stuffing,
- buying backlinks,
- link farming, spamdexing,
- content plagiarism (taking someone else’s work and passing it off as your own).
Nowadays, search engines easily recognize listed black hat techniques and punish websites by excluding them from SERP.
SEO for manufacturing websites
As the owner of a manufacturing website, you want to increase visibility and ensure more potential customers visit your manufacturing website.
SEO can help you accomplish this goal by optimizing your website to appear higher in organic search engine results. This will give you an advantage over competitors as potential customers may be more likely to choose your website over theirs.
Is your manufacturing website SEO optimized?
We can answer in less than 24 hours. And not just that – we will
- evaluate your manufacturing website design,
- list issues you should fix,
- assess your SEO ranking score, and
- provide improvement advice and steps you should follow.
"Freshness" of the content - what does it mean?
Search engines prioritize content that is regularly updated with fresh and relevant information, as this indicates that the website is active and up-to-date.
By regularly publishing new content, you’ll ensure a higher ranking in search engine results pages (SERP), which will lead to more potential customers.
If your manufacturing website design is beautiful, the site structure is well organized, and you put inviting Call-to-action buttons at the right places, be sure you’ll convert over 5% of visitors into new, loyal customers.
WHAT SHOULD YOU DO TO ENSURE THE FRESHNESS OF YOUR CONTENT?
To ensure that you have fresh content on your manufacturing website, it is essential to release new and original content regularly. This could include:
- articles,
- blog posts,
- tutorials,
- whitepapers, and
- other resources related to the products or services offered on your website.
Additionally, you can update existing content with new information and customer reviews. This will show potential customers that your site is an active hub of relevant and engaging information.
User experience on manufacturing websites
User experience (UX) is a visitor’s overall impression, reactions, and feelings when they explore your website. It depends on design, layout, and navigation and should be tailored to meet the user’s needs and create satisfaction.
Here are some tips to achieve a great user experience on your website:
- Keep the design clean and simple.
- Make navigation intuitive and straightforward.
- Utilize engaging visual elements (images and videos, creative typography, interactive charts, graphs, hover effects, etc).
- Incorporate relevant feedback loops (communication channels that connect customers to the business and provide real-time feedback. This can include surveys, customer support inquiries or automated message responses).
- Make sure there’s an obvious call-to-action – ALWAYS TELL VISITOR WHAT TO DO NEXT!
- Ensure content is optimized for mobile devices.
- Provide Help resources or FAQs.
How to bring traffic and increase conversions
- Are you satisfied with the number of visitors to your website?
- Is the number of new customers high enough to justify the investment in your website?
- Are you considering creating or redesigning a website?
Here are some tips on how to bring traffic and increase conversions of your manufacturing website.
If you want to truly utilize your manufacturing website, there are two sub-goals:
- Bring visitors to a website
- Convince visitors you are the best option to solve their problem or satisfy their need – convert them to new customers.
Tips to bring traffic to your manufacturing website
- Perform on-page SEO on the entire manufacturing website: The purpose of SEO is to help Google understand what your manufacturing website is about and what each page/post/product’s purpose is. By optimizing your website for search engines, you can increase visibility and bring in more organic traffic to your website.
- Leverage Social Media Platforms: Establish a presence on social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram so potential customers can find and follow your business.
- Create Engaging Content: Offer entertaining, informative, and engaging content to attract visitors.
- Run Promotional Events and Giveaways: Running promotional events or giveaways can help attract visitors to your site and generate more leads.
- Develop an Email List: Growing an email list of subscribers will allow you to reach out with offers and updates whenever needed, helping you stay top of mind with customers.
- Give Discounts for Reviews: Product reviews are a great way to engage customers and encourage them to revisit your website. People trust other people. Using positive reviews on the Homepage, About Page, landing, or additional pages will be pure gold. Instead of talking about how great your manufacturing business is, just use reviews and build trust.
- Make SEO Google Business Profile: Creating and optimizing a Google Business Profile can help bring traffic to your website by increasing visibility in local search engine rankings. A profile with accurate information and good reviews will improve your chances of ranking higher and garnering more organic visits. Additionally, having customers leave positive reviews on your listing helps boost trust, credibility, and reputation.
Want to know more about methods to bring traffic to your website? Please, read our 7-minute read article 50 Ways to Improve Your Website, and download our full checklist to help you on your path.
6 proven tips to increase conversions
We give you 6 tips for increasing conversions and statistical data supporting our advice.
- Improve your manufacturing website design: An attractive and easy-to-navigate website design will increase conversions by up to 30%. If you are not convinced how much the manufacturing website design is important, please check our 5-minute article “Benefits of website redesign and reasons to do it“.
- Give to get – give purposeful discounts: Incentives and discounts will boost conversions and profit by 33% on average.
- Pay special attention to responsiveness: Optimizing for mobile devices increases revenue by as much as 20%.
- Use professional images – this is not something you want to save money on: Studies have shown that professional images can result in a 98% increase engagement on websites.
- Utilize all modern visual incentives: Using visuals such as videos, graphs, infographics, and charts results in a 34% increase in conversions due to their ability to draw attention and engage users.
Mistakes to avoid as the owner of the manufacturing business website
4 major factors can lead to your dissatisfaction and the conclusion that you wasted money building a website for your manufacturing business.
They are:
- Poor content
- Lack of visuals
- No SEO or poorly done SEO
- Ego before customers
1. Poor content is the major mistake
What does Google consider poor content?
- Duplicate or plagiarized content – Content should be unique and original, as Google penalizes websites with duplicated text from other sources, no matter if the source is your or another company’s website.
- Keyword stuffing – an unethical SEO tactic that worked a decade ago, keyword stuffing is the excessive use of keywords to manipulate search engine rankings. Not only that, it won’t work (search engines are more clever each day), but it will put your manufacturing website at the bottom of SERP or, in the most severe cases, exclude the website from search results.
- Unclear or low-quality content – text that is difficult to comprehend and understand due to a lack of grammar, spelling mistakes, improper formatting, or contextual cohesion. This type of content often lacks clarity and detail, resulting in users quickly losing interest or having difficulty understanding the meaning. Furthermore, unclear content negatively affects search engine rankings as it is less likely to be indexed correctly.
- Low word count on web pages of your website – Pages with fewer than 300 words have low rankings, meaning – no traffic.
What are the consequences of making the number one mistake when building your website?
- Search engines harshly penalize websites with low-quality and/or duplicate content, drastically lowering rankings in organic search results.
- Even worse, potential customers will spot poor content easily, leading to a sharp decline in web traffic and conversions.
- If left untouched, poor content can leave a lasting negative impression on your brand image, potentially deterring users from ever visiting your site again–ultimately resulting in permanent damage to website rankings.
RECOMMENDATION:
Do not write the text yourself if you are not a professional writer. Or, at least, invest some time to learn how to write for the web. No matter how big an industry expert you are, you should learn how to produce engaging content and highly-converting copy.
Edit, edit, and re-edit before publishing.
2. Lack of engaging images and other visuals
Internet users won’t stay on the website with walls of text. We expect engaging content that we can grasp in seconds.
Images and other visuals are essential for your manufacturing website because they:
- create a great and positive experience for viewers;
- help showcase the manufacturing process in a way that words alone cannot do;
- add an element of authenticity to your site, establishing trust;
- quickly convey complex ideas and concepts, simplifying tutorials, product information, and customer reviews;
- help break up large amounts of text, making long pages more manageable and easier to read.
RECOMMENDATION:
Use professional images, replace text with infographics, add charts and graphs, and embed videos.
3. No SEO optimisation
If your website is not SEO optimized, search engines will have difficulty understanding its purpose and usefulness, thus lowering its ranking.
According to recent estimates, over 4 million new web pages are published daily. This number is constantly increasing. Since Google’s mission is to provide users with the quickest possible access to relevant information, combining these two facts, it’s obvious how difficult it is for search engines to grasp all new information correctly.
SEO helps tremendously, and Google will appreciate it, rewording your manufacturing website with a higher ranking. The higher the ranking, the more traffic you’ll have.
RECOMMENDATION:
Poorly done SEO is even worse than no SEO, and we’ve seen it numerous times. You can not apply SEO techniques after watching one video or reading several articles.
Either invest several weeks learning SEO or hire someone to optimize your manufacturing website.
The best results will come from the cooperation of an expert – you know the field and customers, and an SEO expert knows how to utilize your experience.
4. How your ego can harm your website's success
Here comes a part many wouldn’t like to hear, but during our 15+ years, we’ve noticed that one of the biggest mistakes manufacturing company owners make is this:
They can’t exclude their ego while managing website creation.
If you hire an expert to design your manufacturing website or a programmer to develop it, we strongly recommend listening to their advice.
The biggest mistake is hiring (and paying) an expert and not utilizing their knowledge.
It is important to remember that the website should be designed with the customer experience in mind, not so that it showcases the owner’s personal preference or style.
RECOMMENDATION:
- Consider feedback from customers and users when making changes to the website, and avoid making any changes simply because you enjoy them personally.
- Do not focus too much on your successes at the expense of ignoring customer needs and feedback.
- Focus on customer satisfaction and create a user-friendly, attractive, and optimized website for search engines.
Modern small business manufacturing website designs examples - our picks
We chose websites we consider good or excellent among small business manufacturing companies. It is easy to have an amazing website if you are a large company with a several thousand dollar budget.
Our picks are from the sea of small to medium size manufacturing company websites that can be built for under $1000.
We do not promote any of the listed manufacturing companies.
If you have a suggestion, please send us a link to add to our list.
Contrado, UK clothing custom printing manufacturer – beautiful design, clear message, easy navigation, low-risk transparent call-to-action. In our opinion, perfectly designed manufacturing website with a high conversion rate and full on-page SEO optimization.
SeaComp USA – example of darker website design. Although there is a slider on the hero section, which is outdated, and there are too many call-to-actions, we like the general idea, Hompage structure, and good navigation.
Intimate apparel samples – UK manufacturer for men’s and women’s underwear – Colorful design, clear message on the Hero section, visible call-to-action with a high probability for clicking (low-risk decision for a visitor)
Midland printing and packaging manufacturer – a very colorful design that will put visitors into a cheerful mood, clear message, inviting for scrolling. Trust building structure. There is no call-to-action in the hero section, but the arrow at the bottom (should be more transparent and positioned higher) invites visitors to scroll.
Associated Fastening USA – standard manufacturing website design, clear message, good usage of two call-to-actions, sections structure well positioned to build trust and provoke action.
Entech Electronics Australia – White, clean and modern design. Very elegant and definitely unique among manufacturing websites. Focuses on trust immediately. Exceptional user experience with highly-functional and easy navigation. The only fault at first glance is the unbalanced layout – the hero section is too much on the left. The withe space should be distributed evenly.
CGR Products USA – user-friendly hero section with an understandable message and transparent low-risk call-to-action. Great navigation with two menus for a better user experience. Clean and modern design, with a video as the background. Video might slow down the website, but CGR paid attention to that, and the loading time is excellent.
Sourci Australia – bold usage of the color pink. Excellent hero section with a clear message about what they do. The website has customer satisfaction and trust in mind—Good job convincing visitors to become customers. The menu is not sticky, which is not good for the user experience and might increase the bounce rate.
When designing manufacturing websites, we use 100 industrial website design templates as a guide. We highly recommend using free templates to improve your manufacturing company website.
If you need a new website for your manufacturing business or are considering a redesign, feel free to explore.
Check our affordable offer for designing a manufacturing website, starting at $60, or fill in the form to get a quote for your manufacturing website (re)design.