B2B Industry SEO Experiment: industrietalk.nl

How does SEO work? Search engine optimization is not just a mouthful, it’s also quite challenging. There are many factors to keep an eye on and results sometimes take a while to show. But are we doing it right?

We like to prove that our approach works, we show dashboards and results (of course anonymously) and explain the strategy in detail. But especially if a client has never experienced SEO success before, there is still a lack of conviction. What else is needed? We believe a practical example works wonders.

SEO experiment

This is therefore the first article in a series about our efforts around 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 industry news can be found. This new site – a month ago there was nothing – has been built from the ground up to be highly findable and the management is very user-friendly.

Why industry? Because many of our clients are active in the industry or suppliers to the Dutch industry. And with a high-quality, well-findable site in the field of industrial news, we can give our clients valuable links that improve their position in the search engine. This is called link building and will definitely be covered later. Two birds with one stone.

Online marketing strategy SEO

But our clients are not the only reason we think we will make a difference with industry news. We have noticed for years that many industrial companies are poorly findable, put little effort into online marketing, and there is a lot to gain in SEO. There is plenty of news and content available, it just isn’t found enough. 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 to ensure excellent indexing by Google.

Structure and links

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

By structure we mean the build-up of the site. This is mapped by Google (and other search engines) through links (from page to page) and the URL structure (what the page address looks like). The ideal structure is like the hub and spokes of an old wagon wheel, the articles refer to the main page where you want to be found.

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

Attempt 1: companies central

Our first approach was a structure around companies. A news article is always linked to a company and the company page then shows an overview of the different articles. This is logical and prevents us from having to think up a structure around themes or topics in advance. We didn’t want that because it’s still unclear which themes or topics we will focus on. An example of the structure we wanted:

https://industrietalk.nl/companyname/title-of-article/

Unfortunately, this proved technically unfeasible. WordPress did not allow us to have a custom field ‘companyname’ that was both a page and the category of a post while the category function was discontinued. Too bad.

Attempt 2: themes or topics

Unfortunately, there was no alternative yet but we then accepted that (in the future) we will use a structure based on themes or topics. At this moment you see this reflected as follows:

https://industrietalk.nl/powder-technology/roller-chain-corrosion-wear-coating/

It is inevitable that in the future we will have to reclassify existing articles into other categories on which we want to be found. In the above article, for example, it is about roller chains, which is of course power transmission technology but we can well imagine that in the future there will be an underlying category ‘transmission’ or ‘chains’. Which one is chosen will become clear from the actual search traffic data we will gather over time.

Content realization

After choosing the structure, the time for theory and thinking is over. We have a basis, how does it work in practice? It’s time to enter content, in this case: companies and articles.

The specialists at Merkelijkheid are currently regularly posting content. We have agreed on a prize internally for whoever attracts 250 unique visitors first in one month. Based on those first visitors and all the data we gather from that, we can determine our next step. Note, for many industrial companies 1,000 unique visitors in a month is already very high.

In conclusion

This is our first article about our industrietalk project. Hopefully, you find it interesting to read more about our SEO approach and investigative working method. This often forms the basis of the online marketing success of our clients. Do you have questions or would you like to see a certain topic discussed? Please let us know by email.