SEO for Manufacturers: Kickstarting Your SEO Journey

Damon Pistulka 00:00
Born ready? Damon, happy Monday, dude. How are you? I’m doing great. I’m not a boy scout, but I’m pretty much ready for anything that’s

Curt Anderson 00:07
That’s right, just get the Swiss Army knife out and you’re good to go. So, good weekend. How you doing?

Damon Pistulka 00:11
Yes, I do. I actually keep one very close. Oh, that

Curt Anderson 00:17
MacGyver, you know. And I’m showing my age. People like, ooh, that’s MacGyver. So, yeah,

Damon Pistulka 00:21
anyway, yeah, no. Great weekend. Ready to go for this week and ready to talk about SEO for manufacturers and helping them kick start their SEO journey. Yeah, absolutely.

Curt Anderson 00:30
So let’s dive in. So SEO for manufacturers. Now, I just returned from the Industrial Marketing Summit in Austin, Texas, 2025 man, I’m dude, you gotta put it on your radar. I really, I’d love for you to be there next year. It was the energy, the enthusiasm, the passion for manufacturing, industrial it’s just, it’s hundreds of marketers, and it’s just awesome. It was just absolutely just, what a what a gift to be there, hung out with, you know, tons of people that have been on the show and that type of thing, and just friends of ours. And it’s just, it really is just a great, great time. So anybody out there, and they did announce they’re having Industrial Marketing Summit 2026, so strongly encourage you, invite you, welcome you to check out the Industrial Marketing Summit. I’ll tell you. Damon, two the biggest takeaways, I don’t know there was a ton, but just the innovation, the networking, the friendships, the bonding, it just it, you know, it’s great doing all this virtually, you know, but man, taking it in person is just a whole different

Damon Pistulka 01:33
level, right? Yeah, it really is. It really is. Yeah, so good

Curt Anderson 01:37
stuff. Man, that was fun. Uh, hung out with Jeff Long Greg, miss you. Paul. Kisha Jay, call Chris Luecke. Meaghan Ziemba, you know, just Wendy Covey, Casey, who was on the show recently, just, I mean, the list just goes on and on. Moby, remember Moby, the phenomenal mustache. So anyway, just, just great people. Eddie Saunders, I could go on and on, forgive me, for anybody that I left out. But two big takeaways for SEO, obviously, the elephant in the room, AI, right? Just AI. AI is just taking it. It’s changing daily. And just, you know what, how that needs to be a part of your SEO strategy. And number two, video, right? It just, it’s really AI. And video. Now from let’s get back to the basics. From your perspective, what are some critical starting points for SEO for manufacturers? Well,

Damon Pistulka 02:29
I think you really need to know first of all keywords, right? Because, because, if we’re not really understanding our customers well enough to know what our Ricks, as we call them, those ridiculously important keywords are, you’re not going to know what people are using to search to find your kind of business. And that is, that is, I think, one of the, one of the first things that that people get, they really, really struggle with because they haven’t thought about that

Curt Anderson 02:55
Well, I think now Dale Bertrand, I tell you, what a powerhouse he so he gave two separate keynote speeches at the Industrial Marketing Summit, and he was just on a show a few weeks ago, and if you recall, he’s an anti keyword guy, and he and he said it on our show, he said it on stage, but I think there’s a little twist on it. It’s not, yeah, we want to ignore or neglect our keywords. What he’s encouraging us to do is understand the intent of the buyer. Yeah, right now, odds are they’re still going to use a key, maybe not that key word, a key phrase, but it’s almost flipping the script and understanding the question, what are they asking, understanding the problem, therefore. And so that’s where, like, I know Dale loves beating up the term keyword. But I think that’s where you still need to really understand that keyword or key phrase. What is your ideal buyer persona? We call them soul mates. Yeah, understanding them first and foremost, and then secondly, what problem do they have, and what are they typing?

Damon Pistulka 03:55
Right? Yes, yeah, it really is a statistical questions they’re asking. And I think that’s, I assume a lot of that, but I it is a great point that that it really is, what are they trying to do? And we talked about that before, is like, I don’t want to drill bit. I don’t want to drill I want to make a hole, right? That’s I need to make a hole in a piece of steel. But, you know, we need to understand what people are trying their intent is. It’s like, hey, if I want to have a custom fabricated metal, whatever, what am I? What? What am I researching to try to get to that point?

Curt Anderson 04:25
Right? Right? No, that’s a phenomenal point. And I was kid around, like, when we, you and I do our workshops and training, I’m like, you know, if somebody has a runny nose and they’ve never heard of a tissue or the word Kleenex before, what are they typing?

Damon Pistulka 04:40
Right? Yep. Want to stop that running, to stop

Curt Anderson 04:43
my runny nose, you know? So they, they, you know, I don’t know what a tissue is. I don’t know what a Kleenex is. So they’re thinking intent. And I think that’s what Dale’s point is, is understanding that intent. Because if they don’t know what a tissue is, they don’t know what a drill is, they just know, like, hey, I need a hole back here, because this my wall is so boring. You know, people. After like five years, you think I’d finally put a picture up there of something, you know, how about that? How about that? Right there, right there, right there. That. All right. So I got a picture of my daughter. I got my picture, my daughter over there. Um, I got a picture. I’ve got a beautiful Christmas card picture of the stocha family. Maybe I’m gonna, I might put that right up here. So, oh, I alright. So let’s type All right, so understanding your ideal buyer, what problem, what challenge did they have? Okay, yeah, so a manufacturer out there like, Hey, I’m a CNC shop. Well, is the buyer actually going to type like, hey, I need a CNC shop. Or are they typing like, I need this part that goes on this right here. Are they typing the part, the whole, you know, like, I need a hole in the wall, not knowing, not thinking about a drill. Are they taping the part or the product? Or are they typing CNC machining, you know? Yeah, yep. So I think really need to understand that, understanding that so, really belting out. So, like, we have a, you know, we have a fun little tool that we use for our clients. It’s called the digital game plan. It’s completely free. It’s a Google sheet that we give to all of our clients and really helps them spell out this whole process. Maybe, you know what demon? Maybe I should pull it up. What do you think? Well, we can,

Damon Pistulka 06:13
yeah, I think because really what we’re trying to do is to organize your thoughts around what what you can what types of questions you can answer for those people looking for your type of product or service that will help them get to know you get to understand how you could help them with your product or service, and then let them determine if it is something that they want to research more or potentially hit the buy button

Curt Anderson 06:42
exactly right? Alright, you can see my screen, right? Yes, again, of course you can. Okay, so let’s go here. I’m going to pull this down here. And Alright, we’re ready to rock and roll. So what we’d love to do with folks that we’re working with, we have this wonderful tool. We’ve been building this with our client for years and years. Yeah, real quick. And the thing is, each tab represents, like a fun little exercise. So like we mentioned, you know, understanding, who is that ideal? But I’d say like Damon at the at the workshop, you know, I heard buyer persona non stop constantly. You know, you’ve got hundreds of marketers. They totally get this. Understand this if you’re a new entrepreneur, or if you really haven’t taken the time to understand. You know, we have this fun exercise that we go through and again for with chat. GBT, it makes it so much easier. But I’ll tell you, we have some really sophisticated marketing clients that are very sophisticated in marketing. Man, I tell you, they roll up their sleeves and they dive right in and they fill this out, because the more you understand the client. And we’ve got clients that are gonna be coming on the show for the next four Fridays, and we’ll be showing some different examples on how our clients are using the digital game plan to help strengthen and enhance their marketing strategies. But first and foremost, the more that you understand that ideal customer, that soulmate, the more you can understand their challenges and dive into that buyer. You know whether you want to use the word keywords or key phrases or buyer intent, you can understand what are they searching for, right? Yeah,

Damon Pistulka 08:05
yeah. And that it really helps you, then to understand your buyer’s journey. What are they doing, when? How are they you know, what information do they need? And it leads into what we really leverage along a lot is SEO and getting organic traffic to your site, to your stuff, your content, by using video. Because, you know, video is the use of video is, is it proliferated so much? It’s just not a nice two anymore. It’s a must have. Because the you know what somebody say the other day, 60% of the people now are Gen Z, or millennials, something like that, that are that are buyers, right? They’re the people that are actually buying for our target in the manufacturing sector. And they are on their phone. They are on YouTube a lot. And if you can get on YouTube, if you can get on Tik Tok or one of these video channels with your content and and really begin producing it there you can there’s some ground to be gained.

Curt Anderson 09:08
Did you spend some time over the weekend on chat, GPT, proliferate. Did I hear that word Curt? They use the word like I just had a, I had a, I had to search it because I didn’t know what it meant. So, yeah, I mean pressure. You’re expanding your vocabulary at your young age. So that was very impressive. I have a word of the day that comes up or something. Yeah, good for you, dude. I’m telling your mom. I’m impressed. So yeah, here’s now if you’re okay. So like, I ridiculously important keywords. And again, like understanding the phrase, understand the buyer intent. Well, if you’re like, hey, you know what, this is kind of new to me. Again, go to chat. GPT, great way. And type in and say, Hey, chat. Here’s my website. Here’s what we do, here’s our process. Can you help me out? Give me back some like, what is my ideal buyer? What’s my soulmate looking for? Now the next thing is, next tab. We have so many questions. So if you’re not exactly sure what your Ricks might be, or like, hey, this whole keyword thing. A little bit new for me, or key phrases. Start diving in and think about every question that your ideal customer is, is typing Okay, or thinking or challenge or problem that they have, it comes now all these tie together, right? Because, as we’re building out that buyer persona, whether it’s somebody in engineering, somebody in purchasing, maybe it’s an entrepreneur themselves. It’s whatever. When we understand them better, now we understand what their challenges. I know it’s cliche, like, Hey, what are their what’s the pain? What are their pain points? But that’s, you know, like, if we’re not providing a solution to somebody’s pain, like we’re not in business, yeah,

Damon Pistulka 10:33
yeah, exactly. We need to do that. And these questions are key, and this is, this is really important for First of all, listen, we got a couple of people here Usman stopped by to say, hello. Oh, we got comments. And let me, let me, yeah, yeah, uzman, thanks for being here. Greetings from uzman. Back at you. Pavon asked this question that I think is really relevant, how can a new manufacturer outrank industry giants use an SEO Well, I’m going to tell you, Pavon, we do this every day. We do this every day because understanding your soulmate questions, understanding your keywords, understanding the way that you can produce video content that will gain you organic traffic is is a little trick that is not that hard to do when you when you know some of the tools? Yeah, and

Curt Anderson 11:22
I think if there’s see if Great question. Guys, thanks for joining us today. Happy Monday to you. Drop us a note, let us know you’re out there in the chat box. You know two things, Dame and I have a wonderful newsletter that we’ve got that goes out every Thursday. If you’d like to sign up for a lose newsletter, keep in touch with like, what guests we have come up on the live show, any jam sessions, webinars, workshops that we’re putting on, any events you keep us in the know. And we’re also dropping all sorts of like free content, free information, just to help you on your journey. So stop by B2Btail.com sign up for our newsletter. We would be honored to send those out to you. So I

Damon Pistulka 11:59
gotta say the name of the newsletter, though, it’s sauce, the secret

Curt Anderson 12:04
sauce, right?

Damon Pistulka 12:06
Yeah, yeah. Enjoy the name of our newsletter. But yeah, you can go to our our LinkedIn profiles. You can find the sign up that, you know, sign up there, but it is, we just dropped the the kind of stuff that we are we are practicing every day with our clients and and learning how to do this. And Curt, I believe you got a little example that you wanted to show us,

Curt Anderson 12:28
yeah, you know. And so for Pavan, if I’m saying that correctly, you know, for his, you know. So, like we have a we have a client that we work with that they’re in a very competitive space. Our friends that sell ground straps, and so they’re just putting out, just an enormous they compete against, you know, it’s a ubiquitous item, competing against multi billion dollar companies. They’ve got, you know, 30 employees, very small company been around since 1985 they’re 40. What is that? I can’t do the math, Dana, is that 40? 40/40 anniversary this year for Faulconer electronics. And, you know, they’re coming up on a lot of their key phrases all over the place, getting great organic ranking, just because they just relentlessly put out content on the on their products. And Damon, let’s, let’s go here, and then we’ll show an example our tagline that we love to use. You want to be, in my humble opinion, out, teach the competition. Out teach the competition. If you just want to be, if you could just dedicate yourself just being a fierce educator and have some fun in the process. We’d like to call it edutainment, if you will. Right? Yeah. But if you can be a fierce educator and just putting out information that’s helping your soulmate with that problem that Pavan that is a great way to help conquer now, again, if you’re in the you’re an OEM, and you’re in some, you know, consumer space, you’ve got a different there are some different challenges, right? You’re selling some like, heavy duty commodities. Damon, we’ve had some companies that are, you know, some entrepreneurs that are selling, like, home care products, health care products, hair products, pet products. It’s it’s a very competitive space. You’ve gotta get creative, you gotta build community. You’ve gotta get in. That’s why social media and video is so mission critical, right? Yes, yes. Okay, alright, so we talked about the digital game plan and the digital game plan another free, just free resource that Dame and I just give out no expectations. If you’re interested, email either one of us. We’d love to get that in your hands. We just love people using it. We’re trying to better it and improve it every day. Love to get those out to you. Now, let’s just use an example of of a key phrase, how, how we’ve been using our LinkedIn live show to capture rankings. And let me. Let me go here. Let me go here. Awesome. And hey, how about if I go here? Damon,

Damon Pistulka 14:43
How’s that look? That worked just fine. Okay,

Curt Anderson 14:46
so this as if you’re just catching us now in the early as we started the show, we’re talking about the Industrial Marketing Summit. It’s in Austin, Texas. It’s by it’s put on by our really close friends, Wendy Covet and her team at TREW marketing. It’s put on by Joe Sullivan and John Franco, owners of Gorilla, 76 man. I’m telling you, this is the place to be for industrial marketers. They were Damon. They were up 50% in attendance this year. 50 nice. And they just want to keep growing this thing. It was just so high energy. Now, if you Google industrial marketing summit 2025, even if I take 2025, out, shouldn’t change it. But we take a look here, and you see the organic, you know, and how many? But I just want to show you an example of you take a look here, and David, here’s here’s us. I’m live at the industrial marketing summit doing our LinkedIn live right and here it is. Here’s our YouTube channel right there. Here. We did a wonderful episode last Monday with Chris Harrington, our dear friend, Nelson and Matthew. And then we did another one here. But even if you go, if you go up here, if you click on videos, you know, here we’re talking to Lukey. Here we’re talking to Moby and Casey here. This was last Monday. Here we’re talking to those guys. Here we’re live at the conference. Here’s Jeff. You were traveling that day. We got Joe Sullivan right there. Here’s Megan, our dear friend, and dude, I had a great conversation with Megan. Man, yes, what a powerhouse. But here’s Lukey. I mean,

Damon Pistulka 16:15
this is all he’s asking. How can a new manufacturer outrank that? And that is consistency around those, those keywords that that make a difference,

Curt Anderson 16:26
yeah, and so I’m going to my point is here, like, let’s say, if you’re a small manufacturer, you’re going to a conference. You know, at this stage, this is going to last for long. At this stage, there might not many people that are really trying to get out ahead at that conference. So if you did something like this where you like, you you jump out and you start interviewing like, you know, start, start reaching out to the people that are going to speak at that conference and say, Hey, man, I see that, you know, I don’t want to steal the secret sauce before you actually speak at the conference. Well, what if I help promote you? Yeah, my audience to entice them or encourage them to go to the conference, or if they’re already going to at least catch your your session. And you know, what does that cost you to do now you’re getting now you’re aligning yourself with an influencer in your industry. You’re aligning yourself with a subject matter expert, and you’re producing great content. You don’t need to be the smart person in the room, the speaker can be the smart person in the room, and now you can nurture that content. You’ve got a video, you can turn into blog posts, you can turn into a YouTube short, you can turn it into a social media post, and now you’ve made a good friend. So now when you go to that conference, you’re friends with one of the speakers. So Damon, your thoughts, yeah,

Damon Pistulka 17:39
I think it’s, it’s a way for you to really dive into some keywords with some experts and and create some great content that will help your customers or potential customers, yeah, and your industry, yeah.

Curt Anderson 17:52
So, you know, so again, what, how do we so provide, you know, maybe being a little bit vague. And, you know, if we want to geek out on, like, on specific keywords, we could go into the or specific products or solutions, whatever that might look like. But again, you know, take, let’s, let’s do a recap. Damon, the buyer, understanding the buyer. Know that buyer persona, right? Number two, diving into like, what is the keyword? What is the phrase? What’s the buyer intent? What’s the problem? Challenge and challenge that they’re having. Why? What are they typing right taking now, where do we put that content? You know, putting out the content, answering those questions. I watched a video yesterday, uh, our teammate of ours, Jason, sent it over. Great thing that he did is, when you type a phrase on Google, Google will list a bunch of questions that are around that topic. This guy says, grab all those questions and answer them, put them into a blog post, yep, and now you’re answering all the questions that Google is suggesting that goes around with that question. Yep, that’s a great way to do it. It’s a, you know, pay attention to, like what Google is now listening their their AI is the first response. Pay attention to what’s going in. You know, start Googling a bunch of your phrases, your solutions, what your soulmate is typing, and start looking in that AI solution. What kind of content are you seeing in there? What questions? What are answers? What’s information that you’re putting in there? But again, how are you conquering that? Damon, do you remember Google eats? Yes,

Damon Pistulka 19:23
I do. What did you expertise? Expertise, authority, trust.

Curt Anderson 19:31
Experience, experience, yeah, no. Experience, the Google, the Google bucket of love. Or would you, yeah,

Damon Pistulka 19:36
the Google bucket of love is what I like called, I can never remember what it is, but it really is. Google wants to promote the best content that people that have shown their expertise or experience their authority, they’ve built the time, they’ve taken the time to build the trust, and they don’t want to show someone that that they don’t know is going to be the real helpful for that, that keyword phrase. So the more. Content you produce around a certain topic, right? That it’s going to really help you. So Pavon, with that, that’s how you outrank industry giants, because they’re going on reputation. And you can go on different digital means, yeah,

Curt Anderson 20:15
a lot. And there’s we could guide get into a lot deeper if you’re if there’s a manufacturer who really targets local So, for example, you and I were closely. We had a powder coating manufacturer in Chicago. So, like, they wanted to come up locally. They’re like, you know, I can’t really powder coat San Diego or, yeah, or Florida, you know, we want to own Chicago. So there’s a lot of strategies that you can do locally, in your city, in your community, locally, Google business profile is a phenomenal way to attack that. So again, you know, there’s all sorts of things you can do. It gets sometimes overwhelming, but when you strip it down, you’re like, hey, we, we don’t want to be everything, everybody. Let’s just get really good at a handful of things. But let’s, let’s, we’ll recap, and we’ll wind down. Damon, know your buyer persona, yeah, know that soul mate, inside and out, understand the questions that they’re asking and just unapologetically and relentlessly answer those questions and just do it over and over and over and over. And you said it earlier. Consistency is key. Yes,

Damon Pistulka 21:17
yes. If you want to see how we’re doing it, you can, like you said, you can go to B to B TAIL, reach out to Curt, and I sign up for our newsletter, the best cap secret sauce. Ask us about the digital game plan. We can get you a copy of that. And, yeah, you can get on your way.

Curt Anderson 21:35
You know, we didn’t even use AI for our our newsletter name, by the way. So that was like, that came that was like, that was us, man, that was that how, like, mom came, Mom, mom, both our moms are proud. So, yes, alright, we’ll wind down. So again, reach out to us. Connect with us on LinkedIn. Love to hear what you’ve got going on. We have a free digital game plan. If you’d like to get your hands on that, sign up for our newsletter. We’d love to connect with you there. And if you have anything, any other questions? Damon, any parting thoughts, words of wisdom as we close out for today. Just,

Damon Pistulka 22:04
just know your customers and answer their questions. I mean, that’s the only thing that I think we we consistently do day in and day out, is try to understand the customers, our clients, customers better and how they can answer those questions, those potential customers are asking. Yeah, here,

Curt Anderson 22:18
Damon, we’ll close out with two acronyms that you and I love to use, right? Ky, S, H Y S, H Y S, yep, a y s, h y s, k, y s, stands for know your soulmate. Just know that I do a buyer persona inside and out. Number 2h, y s, help your soul mate if you just do those two things, man makes life a lot easier. So yeah, hey, van’s got a comment here. Pull that up. It’s great getting answers from you giant. Hey, me. That’s thanks. Mister Curt, Mister Damon. I really love how you explain everything in such detail. Thanks for explaining my question so well. Fun. Thank you, dude. We appreciate it. We appreciate everybody out there. If you’re catching this live, thank you for joining us. You’re catching this on replay. We’d love to connect with you. We wish you an amazing and incredible, a wonderful, phenomenal day. Rest your week. Damon and I are back here Friday. We have a wonderful client that we’ve been working with that we’re going to bring on. And these are coffee manufacturers. This guy too. Yes, this guy is fire. So Michael is going to be on the show with us from heady coffee cup roasters in Illinois. And so we’ll see you guys Friday. Have a great rest of your week.

Damon Pistulka 23:20
See everyone. Bye.