How to Find Hidden Treasures in Industrial Content Marketing

Have you ever watched those TV shows where folks find old, dusty, ugly, items in the attic and then find they are worth thousands after being analyzed by an expert? Turns out the item was right under their nose for years. The recipients of good fortune often talk about the many times they wanted to take the item to the dump or rummage sale.  Now, to their surprise, they have an extremely valuable item…still old, dusty and ugly.

So it is with long-tail keywords for the industrial market.

Old dusty, long-tail keywords such as “15 infinite variable swing lathe” or “electric motor vibration analysis” or “quench oil coolers” or “Falk 5DTC gear reducer” can be extremely valuable.

Let me explain how you can be the recipient of good fortune as well…

A long tail keyword as opposed to a “regular” keyword is basically a hard-to-find item. For example, if you search for “gear reducers”, Google renders 1 million results. In other words, there are lots of web pages that have information on basic gear reducers…not so hard to find.  If you search for “falk gear reducers”, Google renders 64,000 results, far less. Whereas, if you search for “falk 5DTC gear reducer” Google renders only 33 results.

Common sense and good marketing data tells us a web-user that searches for a “falk 5DTC gear reducer” has specific intent…a marketers’ dream. Obviously, this searcher is more likely to convert to dollars.

As you can see from Google Trends below, monthly traffic for “gear reducers” is around 40-60 searches per month, yet there is not enough traffic for Google to render a graph line for “falk gear reducers” or “Falk 5DTC gear reducer”…indicating not much value in these specific, longer-tail keywords.

Google Trends confirms “gear reducers” receives more traffic than does a more specific term.  However, the specific term will be far more meaningful to searchers and more likely to engage your industrial customer..

Wrong…Mr. Industrial Marketer

In many years of helping industrial marketers navigate the stormy waters of the web, industrial marketers tend to build their websites featuring top-level, regular or “short-tail” keywords. As I will explain later, there is a place for top-level keywords, just not your focus in the world of AI (artificial intelligence) search, social and mobile.

When I first founded Market Pipeline, we would do basic keyword research and stuff industrial clients’ websites with top-level keywords. Botta…bing. Most of the time our good work did the job and our clients’ web pages performed well when prospects searched top-level keywords or basic variations of the one, two or three-word keywords.

How things have changed. Or…how Google has changed. The problem is industrial marketers have not kept up with Google’s desire to improve search and your customers’ buying habits.

As we know, people search differently than they did 5 years ago.  Now they talk to their mobile device as it were their best friend, “Siri, can you tell me if I can find a falk 5DTC gear reducer close to me?”

In case you are wondering…the example I just used, “falk 5DTC gear reducer” actually converted for a customer of mine into a $32,000 sale and then a $40,000 sale.

Not bad for an old dusty, keyword.

Today, industrial marketers are sitting on lots of dusty treasures. Long-tail keywords.

Think about it.

Almost every industrial supplier or mid-size B2B manufacturers’ warehouses are filled with items that are searched using long-tail keywords that have extremely high conversion rates, such as the one just described… “falk 5DTC gear reducer”

Now…when you architect your new industrial website, build “pillar pages” or “topic pages” around those top-level keywords…basically your most important products and service categories.  Then…link all those incredibly valuable long-tail keywords to your “pillar page” using additional industrial content marketing, such as a blog post, spec sheet, how-to guide, etc. You will receive rich rewards from Google.

Focus on those old, ugly, dusty, long-tail keywords turn them into YOUR good fortune.

The more specific your industrial prospect is with his search, the further down the tail and the more likely to generate a sale.