B2B Industry SEO experiment: industrietalk.nl

To demonstrate that our approach works, we gladly showcase dashboards and results (of course, anonymously) and explain the strategy in detail. However, especially when a client has not experienced SEO success before, conviction may still be lacking. What else is needed? We believe that a practical example works wonders.

SEO Experiment

Therefore, this is the first article in a series of articles about our efforts regarding an SEO challenge. We share all strategies, insights, and considerations and take you along on our journey to number 1.

SEO in Practice: industrietalk.nl

We challenge ourselves with industrietalk.nl, a website where the latest Dutch industrial news can be found. This new site – a month ago there was nothing – has been built from the ground up to be highly discoverable, and its management is very user-friendly.

Why focus on the industry? Because many of our clients are active in the industry or are suppliers to the Dutch industry. By having a high-quality, easily discoverable site for industrial news, we can provide our clients with valuable links that improve their search engine rankings. This is called link building and will definitely be discussed later. It’s a win-win situation.

Online marketing strategy – SEO

But our clients are not the only reason we believe that we will make a difference with industrial news. We have noticed for years that many industrial companies are poorly discoverable, put little effort into online marketing, and have a lot to gain in terms of SEO. There is plenty of news and content available, it’s just not being found adequately. So, there is room for a platform where companies can share their news with a larger audience.

Our strategy is simple: we optimize and enrich the text of recently published news and press releases, ensuring excellent indexing by Google.

Structure and links

Naaf en spaak SEO model

The trigger, strategy, and realization of the site are a necessary first step for any online marketing project. But the real work begins when we put all of this into practice. And where do you start? With structure and links.

By structure, we mean the organization of the site. Google (and other search engines) map this out through links (from page to page) and the URL structure (how the page’s address looks). The ideal structure is like the hub and spokes of an old wagon wheel, where articles refer back to the main page where you want to be found.

One of the reasons for writing this article is, of course, so that we can place a link from merkelijkheid.nl (with high domain authority) to industrietalk.nl. This should significantly boost the position of industrietalk.nl.

Attempt 1: Companies at the Center

Our initial approach was to create a structure centered around companies. In this structure, a news article is always linked to a company, and the company’s page displays an overview of the different articles. This is logical and prevents us from having to design a structure based on themes or topics in advance. We didn’t want to do the latter because it was still unclear which themes or topics we would focus on. Here’s an example of the structure we wanted:

https://industrietalk.nl/company-name/article-title/

Unfortunately, this turned out to be technically unfeasible. WordPress did not allow us to have a custom field ‘company name’ that was both a page and the category of a post, while the category function was eliminated. That was disappointing.

Attempt 2: Themes or Topics

Unfortunately, there was no alternative at the time, but we eventually accepted that we would (in the future) use a structure based on themes or topics. Currently, you can see it like this:

https://industrietalk.nl/aandrijftechniek/rollenketting-corrosie-slijtage-coating/

It is inevitable that in the future, we will have to reorganize existing articles into different categories that we want to be found for. In the article above, for example, it’s about roller chains, which is, of course, a form of power transmission. However, we can well imagine that in the future, there may be a subcategory like ‘transmission’ or ‘chains.’ The choice will be based on the actual search traffic data that we will accumulate over time.

Content Implementation

After selecting the structure, it’s time to move from theory and planning to action. We have a foundation; how does it work in practice? It’s time to input content, in this case: companies and articles.

The experts at Merkelijkheid are currently busy posting content regularly. We have set a prize among ourselves for the first person to attract 250 unique visitors in one month. Based on these initial visitors and all the data we gather, we can determine our next steps. Keep in mind that for many industrial companies, having 1,000 unique visitors in a month is already quite significant.

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