ManufacturingMarketing

ATTRACTING SKILLED LABOR

WEBINAR

DECLUTTER YOUR WEBSITE

WHAT IS ONGOING SEO EXACTLY?

Janu

ary

22-F

ebru

ary

11 2

019

Google PageSpeed Scores: Do They Really Matter?

GROWING YOUR BUSINESS

COVER:

Google’s guidelines are a key resource for improving your website in 2019.

FROM THE EDITOR | January 22—February 11 2019 | Issue 22

1 | MANUFACTURING MARKETING

A jam-packed issue breaking down important Google updates.

ManufacturingMarketingIssue 22

ManufacturingMarketing

ATTRACTING SKILLED LABOR

WEBINAR

DECLUTTER YOUR WEBSITE

WHAT IS ONGOING SEO EXACTLY?

Janu

ary

22-F

ebru

ary

11 2

019

Google PageSpeed Scores: Do They Really Matter?

GROWING YOUR BUSINESS

Editor Dianna Huffdianna@huffindustrialmarketing.comDesigner Rachel Cunlifferachel@cre8d-design.com

Contact Manufacturing MarketingManufacturing Marketing is published bi-weekly by Huff Industrial Marketing and cre8d design. ISSN 2641-0214 (online).37 Plaistow Road, Unit 7-245Plaistow, NH 03865(603) 382-8093inquiries@huffindustrialmarketing.com

Subscribe to Manufacturing Marketinghuffindustrialmarketing.com/magazine

Magazine Archiveshuffindustrialmarketing.com/magazine/archives

Sponsor Manufacturing Marketinginquiries@huffindustrialmarketing.com

© 2019, All Rights Reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.

IN THE SPIRIT of the New Year, we also cover how to declutter your website and how to perform some much needed maintenance.

We’d like to call your attention to the fantastic video series we’re now watching: The Loyalty Loop by Andrew Davis. It all began last year when Andrew received a letter from Mercedes-Benz telling him his lease was up, and how to return the vehicle, file the paperwork etc.

The letter, however, didn’t attempt to keep Andrew as a loyal customer. Instead, it sent him off on a journey of considering other brands. Oh no!

This first video is a must watch. It’s that good. Then, subscribe to his weekly videocast. The advice he gives is applicable to any business and is positively brilliant.

Have a fantastic week.–Dianna Huff, Editor, and Rachel Cunliffe, Designer

Learn How to Attract Skilled Labor Free WebinarAttract skilled labor using the three assets you already have: your culture, website, and employees. Attend this free webinar that Rachel Cunliffe and Dianna Huff are running with Claudette Rowley on February 13 to learn how. See page 7 for full details.

THIS WEEK’S SPONSOR

GOOGLE SEARCH UPDATES

2 | MANUFACTURING MARKETING

IN BRIEF

• Commitment to increasing manufacturing jobs. Hershey and Walmart celebrate new jobs created. More.

• Investing in people’s job skills. SME shows what French companies are doing. Learn more.

• Bananas the new conference swag. Forget geeky light up pens and ubiquitous chocolates. Branded fruit is hot.

• Focus on strategy first. Tom Fishburne on why you can ignore marketing predictions. View the Marketoonist.

• SEO for 2019: Improve, improve, improve. Your website, that is. Good advice

• Change customers’ micro-moments. Fabulous video series about customer growth and retention. Subscribe. Now.

Google E-A-T: What It Means for Manufacturers By Dianna Huff

August 2018 saw a huge Google algorithm update. Termed the “Medic” update, many websites that present medical, diet, or fitness information saw a large decline in traffic.

According to some SEO experts who track algorithm updates large and small, this update tied back to an earlier one in February 2017, when websites that offer financial, legal, and medical advice were negatively impacted.

Websites that allow for the purchase of products or services were affected as well as Google views these as YMYL websites – aka “your money or your life.”

According to Google’s Quality Raters Guidelines, websites presenting legal,

financial, or medical information can “potentially impact the future happiness, health or financial stability of users.”

YMYL sites were being held to a much higher standard in terms of expertise, authority, and trustworthiness – or what’s now referred to as E-A-T. If they didn’t meet these standards, their rankings were negatively impacted.

According to Google, a YMYL website needs to present information from credible and authoritative sources.

A fitness company’s blog, for example, could potentially negatively impact users’ happiness and health – and even financial stability if the site was also selling fitness services or products.

GOOGLE SEARCH UPDATES

3 | MANUFACTURING MARKETING

What the E-A-T guidelines mean is that the fitness company can no longer write generic blog posts about fitness tips.

Instead, the company needs to present information written by credible authorities, e.g. credentialed fitness trainers or medical professionals, in order to prove expertise and authoritativeness to users.

The onus is on YMYL sites to demonstrate products, services, advice, and even the company itself, can be trusted.

GOOGLE GUIDELINES Google’s 160-page Quality

Raters Guidelines document gives full details of the actual guidelines their human quality raters use to analyze websites.

Google made these guidelines public to help businesses create better websites.

Google quality raters don’t actively reward or demote websites. Instead, their findings are used by Google’s algorithms.

Within the document is the concept of E-A-T, which encompasses a website’s onsite and offsite reputation, the credibility and authoritativeness of its authors or creators, and even whether or not it’s clear who owns and manages the website (e.g. is there a Contact page?).

For YMYL sites, including B2B e-commerce sites, lack of good E-A-T is a serious issue.

E-A-T AND MANUFACTURING WEBSITES

Whether or not you offer e-commerce or for-fee consulting or services, it’s imperative to view your site from the Quality Raters Guidelines perspective – especially with regard to E-A-T.

When Google changes its algorithm, it affects all websites – including those owned by smaller manufacturers where the information presented simply describes their services.

So what does this mean for you? Let’s break down each component.

EXPERTISE stands for the credibleness of the company or author who created the content.

For manufacturers, this is displayed via capabilities, FAQs, challenges solved, client list, company history and so on.

Especially important are management team bios which show the people behind the company and its products and services. Bios need to include people’s expertise, length of time at the company and within the industry, degrees, credentials, etc.

AUTHORITY stands for the accuracy of the content as well as outside metrics that support the company or content.

One important aspect is a website’s off-site reputation, which is seen in press mentions or write ups, reviews, and even BBB ratings.

According to the Quality Rater Guidelines, if a website says one thing, but media mentions or third-party reviews says

something completely different, Google tells its quality raters to believe the third-party sources.

For smaller manufacturers with limited media mentions or offsite reputational sources, onsite reputation is the key. Your website needs to show authority via testimonials, case studies, and other info.

TRUST stands for the trustworthiness of the website and the company. Does it use https? Does it have an About page and a physical address as well as email and phone information?

For manufacturers offering e-commerce, Trust also includes having easily accessible payment and refund terms, and a privacy policy.

It also means including your physical mailing address, phone number, and email so that people can easily contact you should they have a problem with their order.

Google wants it to be clear who is responsible for the website and the business. Having a verified Google My Business listing also helps.

Ensuring your website includes these E-A-T factors will help with better rankings as well as inquiries – because what’s good for Google is good for your customers. Dianna Huff is the president of Huff Industrial Marketing, a full-service agency specializing in helping manufacturers solve business challenges through marketing.

GOOGLE ANALYTICS

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Site speed is an important element of usability for your visitors and search engine optimization.

A slow loading site can easily frustrate prospects and can cause them to leave before making a purchase or getting in touch. Slow load times also play a role with how a website ranks; site speed is one of over two hundred ranking factors that Google uses.

Google now gives you the ability to view your page speeds from within Google Analytics. To find the tools and reporting, open the Behavior tab on the left menu, then select Site Speed.

Within this section, you can find the average page load time and suggestions for improving

the load speed and score for the individual pages that comprise your website.

Before getting into page scores, let’s look at what causes a webpage to load slowly.

COMMON CAUSES OF SLOWNESS

There are two different types of site slowness: one where it takes a while to connect before you see anything at all, and another where it takes a while to finish loading the page after it first begins.

SLOW CONNECTIONS

Slow connections can be due to the host server having technical issues. Or, your own Internet connection is experiencing problems.

If your website is being hosted on a shared server, then your site can experience intermittent or persistent slow connections because other websites on that same server are using a lot of the server’s resources, leaving little (or none!) for yours. For businesses which rely on their website to generate income, it is worthwhile paying more per month to not be on such a shared server plan.

One company we worked with couldn’t resolve slow connection issues with their webhost to their satisfaction, so they moved their website to a new host, with immediate results.

Slow connections can also be due to poorly optimized themes

Google Page Speed Scores: Do they really matter?By Rachel Cunliffe

GOOGLE ANALYTICS

5 | MANUFACTURING MARKETING

or plugins which pull information from a database in inefficient ways, or due to not having an appropriate caching system in place to minimize the load on the site.

AD SCRIPTS are always performance-intensive behind the scenes. With one website that experienced slow load times, running a test using Gtmetrix.com, with an ad blocker enabled, showed loads times at 5 seconds start to fully loaded. Without the ad blocker, load times were 23 seconds.

IMAGES can be large in file size and each image on a page requires a connection to the server to retrieve them for the first time you view them. Lots of images on a page can quickly increase the overall load time.

Image file sizes are determined by: • File type: If the wrong file type is used for an

image the file size can be much bigger than necessary (e.g. photos should be JPG, not PNG).

• Dimensions: The larger the image, the bigger the file size.

• Display size: Ideally the website serves the correct sized-image for what it’s being displayed at.

• Compression: Images should be correctly compressed rather than using a higher quality than necessary (e.g. a JPG at 100% quality is unnecessarily high, a lowerer percentage such as 86% should be used).

PLUGINS AND SCRIPTS — Each additional one your site is running contributes to the site loading time. An outdated or rogue plugin can wreak havoc with site speed. Some plugins connect with and send data to and from a central server, so if this server is experiencing issues then your site may be affected if the plugin code is poorly-written.

PRE-BUILT WORDPRESS AND SHOPIFY THEMES usually have many bells and whistles in order to get the most number of sales. Each of these features adds code to the theme, even if you’re not using these. This bloat can make the site slow to load.

Many more technical factors also contribute to page speed.

PAGESPEED SCORES VS. WHAT’S BEST FOR HUMANS

The Huff Industrial Marketing homepage, running on a custom-built WordPress theme, has a score of 100 for desktop and a mobile score of 58.

Google’s warnings and messages may look scary especially if you have no technical website skills:

GOOGLE ANALYTICS

6 | MANUFACTURING MARKETING

Fixing the “problems” that have resulted in low scores usually results in very tiny increases in actual performance. Making these changes can have major downsides too.

For example, analyzing the “Opportunities” listed for the Huff Industrial Marketing on mobile: • SERVE IMAGES IN NEXT-GEN FORMATS –

These aren’t yet supported by major browsers. While there are ways to serve fallbacks, it would currently make it hard to add new images to the site.

• DEFER OFFSCREEN IMAGES – This involves the concept of “lazy loading” images so that they appear when they’re about to scroll into view; images can be configured this way if it would help site visitors, but the tradeoff is that not everyone likes this effect visually.

• ELIMINATE RENDER-BLOCKING RESOURCES – This means to combine multiple files into one by using a caching plugin. The downsides, however, are many, including needing specialized scripts

and manual tweaks, as well as having to configure other plugins, which may no longer work out of the box.

Google’s scores are helpful in diagnosing problems if you do notice your website or a particular page is loading slowly.

Your goal should always be to improve page speed over improving your PageSpeed Score. They’re not one and the same.

If you have low PageSpeed scores and your site is loading slowly, contact an experienced developer for advice.

Rachel Cunliffe is the Designer and Creative Director for Huff Industrial Marketing clients. She draws on over 16 years of expertise in designing and building WordPress websites from scratch for companies around the globe.

To create marketing that exceeds your expectations, we turn off the constant distraction and noise and listen to you. The result: You make better business decisions, attract skilled labor and grow sales. Your trusted advisor: www.huffindustrialmarketing.com

“You make us feel like we’re your only customer.”

FREE WEBINAR

Attracting Skilled Labor: Leveraging Three Assets You Already Have

Learn how to use your culture, website,

and employees to attract skilled labor.

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See you February 13 at 12 PM Eastern!

WEBSITE MARKETING

8 | MANUFACTURING MARKETING

New Year Resolution: Declutter Your Website

Have you been watching the new Netflix series featuring Marie Kondo, author of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up?

In each episode, she works with people to declutter their houses and their lives, and in the process helps them make extraordinary changes.

Watching the show reminded us that websites also collect old content which is no longer used, and technical issues build up over time.

In the spirit of the New Year, here are a few things you can do to declutter your website and/or improve its performance:

• UPDATE SOFTWARE – Ensure you are running the latest version of WordPress and its plugins. Decrease the risk of your site being hacked. We offer this service.

• CHECK FORMS – Complete all forms on your site to ensure notifications are working and going to the right email. This includes RFQ, contact forms and newsletter subscriptions.

• CHECK IMAGES – They should all display correctly.

• TEST LINKS - Click all links to ensure they’re not broken.

• LOOK AT GOOGLE ANALYTICS – Check traffic hasn’t dropped precipitously and that all pages are being tracked/accounted for.

• CHECK GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE – Make sure Google isn’t having issues with your site and it’s not hacked.

• REVIEW TITLE AND META TAGS – Ensure these have been properly written and optimized for Google. (Search Console will inform you if you have missing or duplicate tags.)

• VISIT YOUR SITE – Last, but not least, go through each page on your site on both desktop and phone. Also try sitting next to a friend or family member and asking them to complete a few key tasks on your site. Notice any issues either of you have, anything which needs fixing, removing, updating, etc. Send this list to your website developer, or make the changes yourself.

QUESTION OF THE WEEK

Question of the Week

“Any ballpark estimate for ongoing SEO/mo.? I’m trying to compare apples to apples. I’m used to dealing with companies who typically charge a fee of at least $500/mo for SEO services.

My understanding is this has been mostly for monitoring the site for tech. issues, keeping up with Google changes, keyword/phrase research, tweaking to improve ranking and reporting several times a year.

I’ve always disliked these arrangements as there is invariability very little accountability and I have little understanding as to what’s really being done.”

What exactly is ongoing SEO?

9 | MANUFACTURING MARKETING

We received this great question from the owner of a small company. Many of the services offered in ongoing SEO marketing packages are based on dated SEO practices.

One company we talked to was paying thousands of dollars a year for simply having an “SEO” firm list their site in various online directories.

Another company was paying $500 a month to receive detailed automated reports, with no human analysis.

Even worse, the reports were rife with major SEO errors which negatively affected their search engine optimization.

These practices are a poor reflection on the SEO-marketing

industry as a whole. If you’re not getting increased

inquiries to your business as a result of a monthly SEO spend, then what you’re paying for is “busy work” or worse, harmful “snake oil.”

Everything an SEO company does for you should be measured against your specific website and marketing goals.

You should receive a report that tells you how the SEO work is resulting in increased conversions such as RFQ submissions, phone calls, email clicks, etc.

The key SEO factor is creating highest-quality information that sets your business apart from the competition versus posting

blog posts or adding the site to directories for the sake of it.

A strategic SEO program is based on creating authoritative and trustworthy content that answers real questions for prospective customers and drives leads that become sales over time.