I have looked at a lot of manufacturing and industrial websites over the years, and one thing continues to surprise me: companies will spend a significant amount of money building a professional-looking website and then wonder why it generates very few qualified opportunities. The problem usually is not that the website is ugly. In fact, many of them look pretty good. The problem is that they were built to represent the company rather than help a potential customer make a buying decision, and those are two very different jobs.
Your website is not simply your online brochure anymore. For many B2B buyers, it is one of the first places they go when they are trying to determine whether your company can solve their problem. They may never fill out your contact form if they cannot quickly find the information they need to decide whether you are even worth talking to, which means the website can lose the opportunity before your sales team ever knows the prospect was there.
I also see another problem that is especially common in manufacturing: websites that have essentially been abandoned. Some have not been meaningfully updated in 10 or even 20 years, even though the company itself has changed dramatically during that time. New equipment, new capabilities, new markets, new leadership, new certifications and new customers may all exist, but the website still reflects a company that no longer exists. That creates a credibility problem before you ever get the chance to have a sales conversation.
A website does not have to be flashy or constantly redesigned to generate business, but it does have to be useful, current and built around how your buyers actually make decisions. Here are 10 things I would look at before deciding that the answer is simply to build a new website.
1. Start With the Buyer, Not Your Company
Go to the homepage of many manufacturers and you will see some variation of, “We have been serving the industry for 40 years with quality, innovation and exceptional customer service.” There is nothing wrong with being proud of your company, and I would be, too, but your prospective customer is not visiting your website because they want to learn how proud you are of yourself. They are there because they have a problem, a need, a specification, a deadline or a sourcing challenge they are trying to solve.
The first few seconds on your website should help them determine whether they are in the right place, which means your positioning needs to clearly communicate who you serve, what you do for them and why you are a good fit. You can tell them about your history and your accomplishments after you have given them a reason to keep reading.
2. Get Much More Specific About Your Ideal Customer
This is one of the biggest disconnects I see between marketing strategy and website strategy. A company tells me it wants more business, so its website tries to appeal to everyone by listing every industry it has ever touched, every service it has ever offered and every capability it has ever purchased. The intention is understandable because nobody wants to turn away business, but the result is often a website that says a lot without really saying anything.
Your best customers should be able to recognize themselves in your website. If you are a precision machining company that excels at complex, repeat production work for industrial equipment manufacturers, for example, I want that to be obvious. I do not want you trying to sound like you are the perfect fit for every company that happens to need a machine shop, because being specific often makes it easier for the right opportunities to find you while allowing prospects who are not a good fit to self-select out.
3. Stop Telling Buyers You Are Great and Start Showing Them
Quality, innovation, precision, reliability, customer-focused and world-class are words I see repeated across industrial websites all the time. The problem is that every competitor is using some version of the same language, so those claims do very little to differentiate one company from another or give a buyer confidence that you can actually deliver what they need.
Buyers believe evidence much more readily than they believe claims, so show them the equipment you use, the tolerances you hold, the certifications you maintain, the inspection processes you have, the materials you work with and the kinds of challenges you have solved for customers. When you can, tell stories about actual projects by explaining what the customer needed, what made the job difficult, how your team approached it and what changed for the customer as a result. That gives a buyer something they can evaluate instead of asking them to simply take your word for it.
4. Make It Obvious What You Actually Do
I have visited manufacturing websites where I had to click through multiple pages before I could figure out what the company actually manufactured, and that is a problem when your prospective customer may be researching several suppliers at the same time. Your buyer should not have to decode industry jargon, guess what a particular service means or dig through a PDF to figure out whether you can handle their requirements.
Your capabilities should be presented in a way that makes sense from the customer’s perspective, including the types of materials, components, volumes, tolerances, applications and industries you are equipped to support. This is also where talking to your salespeople can be incredibly valuable because they know what prospects ask, what prospects misunderstand and what information causes someone to move forward or disappear. Your website should be answering those questions before the salesperson ever gets the call.
Just as important, your website needs to reflect the company you are today, not the company you were 10 or 20 years ago. I still come across industrial websites with outdated photographs, old equipment, employees who have long since left the company, obsolete capabilities and content that gives no indication of what the business is doing now. Even if the company itself has evolved dramatically, the website can leave a prospective customer with the impression that nothing has changed, and in a competitive B2B market, that can be enough to make someone move on to another supplier.
5. Fix the User Experience
A website can contain all the right information and still fail because the experience of finding that information is frustrating. I see this frequently with industrial websites that were built around what the company wanted to say rather than how a buyer actually researches a potential supplier. Navigation may be confusing, important information may be buried several clicks deep, pages may load slowly, PDFs may be difficult to access on a phone, contact information may be hard to find, or the site may simply feel like it was designed for an entirely different era of the internet.
Your buyers are busy, and they are often comparing multiple potential suppliers at the same time. They should not have to work to figure out whether you are a fit. The website should make it easy to understand what you do, who you serve, what makes you different, what evidence supports your claims and what the logical next step should be. Good user experience is not about making a website look trendy; it is about removing friction from the buying process.
This is particularly important for manufacturers because technical buyers often need to find very specific information quickly. If an engineer, sourcing manager or procurement professional cannot easily locate your capabilities, certifications, materials, tolerances, industries served, quality information or RFQ process, they may simply move on to the next supplier rather than spending time trying to figure out your website.
6. Build Content Around the Questions Buyers Are Already Asking
One of the easiest ways to improve an industrial website is to stop guessing about what content you need and start listening to your customers and prospects. What do they ask during sales calls? What information do they request before sending an RFQ? What objections come up repeatedly? What makes a prospect hesitate? What do customers need to know before they feel comfortable moving forward?
Those questions can become some of the most valuable content on your website because they are coming directly from the people you are trying to reach. This is bigger than SEO because while answering specific questions can certainly help you get found in search, it also helps a buyer determine whether you understand their world and whether your company has the experience to help them. The best website content often comes directly from the conversations your sales and customer-service teams are already having.
And this is where those 10- or 20-year-old websites create another problem. If the last meaningful content update happened when your current customers were still using different technology, different buying processes and different sources of information, you are missing an opportunity to demonstrate current expertise. Your website does not need a constant stream of superficial blog posts, but it should continue to evolve as your business, customers and industry evolve.
7. Give People a Better Next Step Than “Contact Us”
If someone is ready to request a quote, make it easy for them to request a quote, while someone who is still researching should have access to something useful that moves them closer to a conversation, whether that is a capability overview, a relevant case study, a technical resource or another logical next step based on where they are in the buying process.
Not everyone who visits your website is ready to talk to sales today, and that does not mean they are a bad prospect. It means your website needs to accommodate the buying process instead of assuming everyone arrives at the same stage. The goal should be to make the next step feel natural rather than forcing every visitor into the same generic contact form.
8. Look at Your RFQ Process Through the Buyer’s Eyes
I see plenty of manufacturing websites with an RFQ form that basically asks for a name, email address, phone number and a vague description of what the prospect needs. That may make the form easy to complete, but it does not necessarily give your sales or estimating team enough information to qualify the opportunity or understand what the prospect needs before the conversation begins.
At the same time, I have seen companies make their RFQ forms so complicated that a perfectly good prospect gives up before submitting it. There has to be a balance between collecting the information your team needs and respecting the fact that the person filling out that form is busy. Just as important, what happens after the form is submitted matters just as much as the form itself because if your website promises a response and nobody follows up promptly, you have created a marketing problem that no amount of SEO can fix.
9. Make Marketing, Sales and Operations Part of the Website Conversation
This is where my holistic approach really comes into play because I do not believe you can fix an industrial website in isolation from the rest of the business. If marketing is generating inquiries from customers sales does not want, there is a positioning problem. If sales keeps hearing the same questions that the website never answers, there is a content problem. If operations cannot support the type of business marketing is attracting, there is a strategy problem. If customers are promised one experience and receive another, there is a customer-experience problem.
The website is often simply where some of those problems become visible, which is why I always want to understand what is happening across the business before recommending a bunch of website changes. A website can amplify a good strategy, but it can also amplify problems that already exist elsewhere in the organization.
10. Do Not Confuse Website Traffic With Marketing Success
I have worked with manufacturers that were getting more organic traffic but still were not generating the kind of opportunities they wanted. More traffic would not have solved the underlying problem because the issue was not simply how many people were arriving; it was who was arriving, what they were finding and what happened next.
Traffic is useful when it comes from people who fit your ideal customer profile and have a legitimate reason to consider doing business with you. Otherwise, you can end up celebrating a metric that has very little connection to revenue. I want to know whether the people coming to the website fit the company’s ideal customer profile, whether they engage with the right content, whether they become inquiries, whether those inquiries become qualified opportunities and whether those opportunities eventually become profitable customers.
That is the connection between marketing activity and revenue, and it is why I am much more interested in what happens after the click than in simply reporting how many clicks you received.
Your Website Is Part of Your Sales System
This is why I get frustrated when a manufacturer tells me they just need a new website. Maybe they do, but before spending thousands rebuilding it, I would want to understand why the current one is not producing the results they want. Maybe the messaging is wrong, maybe the ideal customer has never been clearly defined, maybe the site is attracting the wrong traffic, maybe the sales process is broken, maybe follow-up is inconsistent, maybe the content does not address the questions buyers are asking, or maybe the customer experience does not match the promise the marketing is making.
An outdated website can certainly be part of the problem, particularly when it gives buyers an inaccurate picture of the company or makes it difficult to navigate and find information. But replacing an old website with a new one without addressing the strategy behind it can simply give you a newer version of the same problem.
Your website should be working with your marketing, sales, operations and customer experience rather than sitting over in its own little corner of the business. When those pieces are aligned, your website can become much more than a digital brochure because it helps the right prospects understand that you can solve their problem, gives them evidence that you can do it, answers the questions that might otherwise slow down the sales process and makes it easier for them to take the next step.
That is what I believe an industrial website should actually do: play an active role in moving the right buyer toward a conversation, a quote, a customer relationship and ultimately revenue.