7 traits your engineering website must improve if you're serious about generating new leads

In this post, I'm going to share everything I know about attracting good prospective engineering clients into your business.

I've separated the post into 7 traits which contain the most important aspects of a professional engineering website. Improving any of these traits will help increase the productivity of your website - generating leads for your business.

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7 traits your engineering website must improve if you’re serious about generating new leads

Read our handy reference guide as a PDF at your leisure.

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1. Display Authority

The work your firm does is technical requiring many competencies in skilled areas. It’s important your website demonstrates to visitors that your company is an authority in it’s field.

Accreditations & Awards

Showcasing Accreditations and Awards on your engineering website is crucial for establishing credibility. Place Accreditations and Certificates in the footer, ensuring they are visible on every page, especially near the contact form. Highlight recent awards on the Home page to showcase current achievements.

After 6 months, rotate these to an ‘Achievements’ section, keeping the Home page fresh with the latest honors. Regularly updating these accolades reflects your firm’s ongoing commitment to excellence and keeps your content relevant, affirming your status as a leader in the engineering industry.

About Us Page

The 'About Us' page, often one of the most visited on a website, serves as an ideal platform to present your mission statement, reflecting your company's core values and objectives. It's an opportunity to delve into more technical details, showcasing your certifications and key company facts, which underline your expertise and reliability in the industry. Crucially, this page should be customer-centric, addressing how your services can solve their specific problems, thereby establishing a connection with your audience.

Incorporating a Staff Section is pivotal. Here, highlight the qualifications, skills, and areas of expertise of your team members. This not only showcases your team’s professional capabilities but also brings a personal, approachable touch to your company. By presenting your team in a friendly and relatable manner, you humanize your brand, fostering trust and rapport with potential clients.

Testimonials

Testimonials are vital in building client confidence, acting as endorsements from satisfied customers. They provide social proof of your company's reliability and quality. Place these powerful commendations strategically across your site, particularly on key decision-making pages like the homepage, services section, and near call-to-action buttons.

This ensures that positive client feedback is always visible, reinforcing your credibility. Include specific details such as the client's name and project type to enhance authenticity. By showcasing genuine testimonials, you demonstrate your ability to meet and exceed expectations, encouraging new clients to engage with your services.

Case Studies

Case studies are an invaluable tool in illustrating your problem-solving prowess. They provide concrete examples of how you've successfully tackled challenges similar to those your leads might face. Employ a four-part structure:

  1. Identify the client's challenge
  2. Describe your approach
  3. Detail the solution implemented
  4. Highlight the successful outcome.

Enhance these narratives with photos and videos, adding a layer of credibility and engaging storytelling. Including a testimonial from the client involved in each case study not only adds authenticity but also reinforces your expertise and authority in your field. This multifaceted approach turns your case studies into compelling stories of success and reliability.

Blog Posts

Write about industry news to demonstrate that you keep current with technology and industry events.

Creating engaging blog content can be challenging for companies. The key is understanding what interests your customers. Your blog doesn't always need to focus strictly on your products or services. Instead, aim to provide helpful and informative content that adds value for your clients.

Topics can range from company updates, such as new products, services, staff additions, or awards, to broader subjects that resonate with your target audience. For authentic insights, involve your team. Encourage them to share what they're working on or proud achievements. While such company-specific events may be infrequent, diversifying your topics ensures a steady stream of relevant and shareable content for your readers.

The more you know your target customer the easier this is:

  • General engineering industry news can be tailored to news in your clients sector.
  • Solutions to common problems can be narrowed to specific problems your client has.
  • Write about industry events & expos that are relevant to your customer.
  • Technical papers & research bolster your authority in your field and encourage sharing.

Social Proof

Engineers, often hesitant to embrace social media, can significantly benefit from platforms like LinkedIn to forge stronger client relationships and showcase their projects.

LinkedIn not only facilitates professional networking but also serves as an ideal space to share case studies and articles, directing more traffic to your website.

“Your client may not care about numbers of followers or likes, but Google does.”

Encourage sharing these resources on social media to enhance engagement. Importantly, social media activity contributes to your website's search engine rankings, leveraging these platforms can improve your site's visibility and authority.

Integrating social profiles with your website ensures a cohesive digital footprint, extending your reach and influence in the digital landscape.

Global Reach

Highlighting your company's global reach is a powerful testament to your expansive influence and success. Demonstrating this international footprint, whether through a map on your website pinpointing global projects or showcasing international client testimonials, underscores your broad appeal and capability.

This evidence of worldwide operations not only enhances your company’s prestige but also builds trust and credibility with potential clients. It shows that your expertise transcends borders, positioning you as a formidable player in the global market.

2. Attract Attention

Photography

Photography is a powerful tool for engineering firms to visually showcase their cutting-edge technology and skilled workforce. Captivating images of LIDAR, Laser Profiling, Welding, or CAD can significantly engage and excite your audience. While stock images are a viable option, employing a professional photographer to capture your team and projects in action adds a unique and authentic touch to your brand.

Regularly incorporating these high-quality images across your website, especially in case studies, product, or service pages, vividly illustrates your capabilities and sets you apart from competitors. A well-curated gallery of photos not only enhances the visual appeal of your site but also effectively communicates the quality and detail of your work.

Video

Utilizing video offers a dynamic way to connect with your audience, allowing your staff to personify your brand through interviews or project rundowns. This medium effectively showcases your final products and team in action, adding a relatable and engaging dimension to your content. Hosting videos on platforms like YouTube or Vimeo not only taps into a broader audience but also enhances your online presence on diverse social channels.

Additionally, using external video hosting services alleviates the load on your website, ensuring smooth user experience without compromising on high-quality content. Videos, therefore, act as a versatile tool for storytelling, brand promotion, and audience engagement.

CAD & Illustration

Incorporating CAD drawings and illustrations on your website adds a unique visual dimension that showcases your technical expertise and creativity. These visuals can be used as straightforward images to give a clear view of your work's precision and detail.

Alternatively, they can be creatively integrated into your website's design by your web designer, adding an abstract, artistic element that enriches the user experience. This blend of technicality and aesthetics not only captures the essence of your engineering prowess but also makes your site more engaging and visually intriguing, helping to differentiate your brand in a competitive market.

Sketchfab

Sketchfab offers an innovative way to present your CAD drawings in 3D, enhancing your website's interactivity. This platform allows seamless conversion of your files into a web-friendly format, easily integratable into your site.

With Sketchfab, visitors can interact with your 3D models, rotating and exploring them from different angles. This interactive feature not only makes your website more engaging but also provides a detailed and immersive view of your technical drawings, elevating the user experience and showcasing your engineering expertise in a modern, dynamic format.

3. Maintain Accessibility

Responsive Design

Don't hold off from redeveloping your engineering website to be responsive. Ensure it looks great on mobile phones and tablets.

Along with the design, information can be tweaked to be relevant to the device it is displayed on;

  • If a visitor views your site on their mobile, they might be more inclined to call you. A phone number should be more prominent when viewed. It's easy to add a tap to call facility to make calling your company a one click task.
  • A client heading to your business may try to use your site on their mobile to get directions. It’s worth ensuring a Google map is available to them so they can navigate to your business.

With the wide adoption of 'Mobile first design', it's important to remember that in developed countries, much device usage is multiplatform i.e. consumers will use both smartphone and desktop.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)

The WCAG guidelines are a set of recommendations for making web content more accessible, particularly to people with disabilities. They are widely regarded as the international standard. In the UK, ensuring your website meets these guidelines can also help comply with the Equality Act 2010.

Keyboard Navigation

Ensure that all functionalities of the website are accessible via keyboard. This is crucial for users who cannot use a mouse due to physical disabilities.

Screen Reader Compatibility:

Your website should be compatible with screen readers, which are essential for visually impaired users. This includes proper use of HTML tags, ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) roles, and descriptive alt texts for images.

Contrast and Color Usage

Good contrast between text and background colors is important for users with visual impairments. Avoid conveying information through color alone, as this can be problematic for color-blind users.

Text Size and Readability 

Offer the ability to enlarge text without breaking the site layout. Use clear, legible fonts and consider line spacing and paragraph formatting for easy reading.

Captioning and Audio Descriptions

Provide captions for video content and audio descriptions where necessary. This helps users with hearing impairments or those who prefer reading over listening.

Clear Language and Content Structure

Use clear and simple language. Proper headings, lists, and content structure also aid in navigation and understanding, especially for users with cognitive disabilities.

Error Identification and Instructions

Ensure that form errors are clearly identified and instructions are provided to assist users in rectifying these errors.

Accessible Forms

Labels should be properly linked to form controls, ensuring that form fields are accessible to everyone.

4. Monitor Efficiency

Optimised Code

Your website should not contain bloated code as it slows down your site loading speed. The main culprit here can be premium “off the shelf” web themes or websites created by inexperienced developers.

CSS and JQuery should be minimal (unnecessary data removed) and load asynchronously if possible.

Plugins, Modules & Extensions should be kept to a minimum.

The best plugins have a small footprint and should not call unnecessary scripts on pages they aren't needed.

Optimised Images

Maximize your website’s speed and efficiency by adhering to a maximum image resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels. This balance ensures clarity without overburdening load times or server space, crucial for maintaining visitor engagement, especially on budget hosting platforms.

For modern responsive designs, high-resolution images are necessary but should be effectively compressed to avoid performance issues. Utilize Adobe Photoshop for pre-upload compression and tools like Imagify for advanced online compression, offering quality maintenance with reduced file sizes. For WordPress sites, server-side plugins like Kraken.io or WP Smush automate the compression process, essential for websites with regular image updates.

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) is beneficial for your website as it enhances user experience through improved loading times. By caching content on multiple servers around the globe, a CDN serves data from the closest node to the user, reducing latency and bandwidth consumption. This means faster page loads, which is crucial for retaining visitors and improving SEO rankings. Additionally, CDNs reduce the risk of traffic spikes overwhelming your server by distributing the load, increasing reliability and uptime. They also bolster security by providing DDoS protection and other security features, making your website more resilient against attacks. All these factors contribute to a robust, efficient, and user-friendly website.

You can create your own via Amazon or Google, use CDN services like Max CDN or choose hosting that includes a CDN as part of the service.

Quality Hosting

Many businesses consider hosting a grudging necessity and aim for the cheapest options available. However, the majority of site compromises, from hacks to downtime, trace back to low-cost shared hosting environments. Hosting quality profoundly affects your website's search rankings and overall performance. To not just compete but excel against competitors, it's wise to invest in superior hosting that:

  • Conducts frequent backups, safeguarding your data every four hours.
  • Performs regular malware scans to prevent your site from becoming a launchpad for spam or malicious activities.
  • Implements server-level caching for enhanced speed and peak site functionality.
  • Integrates a CDN to efficiently deliver images and media content.

For dedicated WordPress hosting that meets these standards, we recommend Kinsta.

5. Maintain Security

SSL Certificates

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption is now essential for all websites, especially e-commerce. It secures customer data and is crucial for preventing data breaches.

For most SMEs, free SSL certificates, like 'Let's Encrypt', provided by quality hosting services are sufficient. These certificates offer robust protection without storing sensitive data, which is usually handled by secure merchant gateways.

However, for sites handling highly sensitive information, a paid SSL certificate might be necessary. These offer advanced security and involve verifying company details, with costs ranging from £300 to £1000 annually.

The significance of SSL is also recognized by Google, which considers it in search rankings, and it's vital for GDPR compliance.

While free SSL suits most SMEs, evaluate your specific needs to decide if a paid SSL is right for you.

Server & Website Security Software

Reliable hosting should include server-side security features like malware scanning and a firewall to monitor and block unauthorized access to your site. If these aren't provided, third-party services like Sucuri can be integrated for similar protection.

For WordPress users, plugins like All In One Security and Wordfence enhance site safety with intrusion detection, firewalls, and password audits. Additionally, two-factor authentication (2FA) significantly bolsters admin security, typically using a mobile phone for access verification. While 2FA adds an extra step to the login process, it greatly strengthens your website's defence against unauthorized access, ensuring a high level of security for your website's admin area.

Regular Software Updates, Backups and a Disaster Recovery Plan

Regular Software Updates, Backups, and a Disaster Recovery Plan are essential components of robust website security. Keeping your website's software up-to-date, including the CMS, plugins, and themes, is crucial for protecting against vulnerabilities. Outdated software can be a prime target for cyber attacks, making frequent updates a necessary defense.

Equally important are regular backups. They ensure that, in case of a security breach or technical failure, you have a recent version of your site to restore. Automated backup solutions can be set up through your hosting provider or third-party services, offering peace of mind and continuity.

Lastly, a well-planned Disaster Recovery Plan is vital. It should outline steps to recover your website in the event of various scenarios, such as hacking, data loss, or server failure. This plan ensures minimal downtime and a swift return to normal operations, safeguarding your online presence and customer trust.

6. Promote Visibility

There are two main aspects of Search Engine Optimisation:

1. On Site Optimisation
The foundation of SEO is the most important and should be taken into consideration before building your website.

2. External SEO 
This involves outreach such as Press Releases, Link building and Social Media. This will have a greater effect on your web traffic once you have optimised your site.

1. On Site Optimisation

Google ranks every web page individually, only then considering your domain as a whole.

Many companies desperately try to get their home page ranked for their keyword or phrase. If your company offers only one service this is fine. Otherwise your homepage should only rank for your company name.

Google looks at internal and external links to every page of your site and from this ranks each page.

Internal Links

Internal links such as navigation are extremely important. They should follow a logical and structured pattern, allowing your visitors a clear way to navigate your site.

Separate areas of competencies and expertise into logical hierarchies for best results. These should form 'Content Silos'.

Use Content Silos to group relevant content within a logical hierarchy. e.g. Homepage / Services / Fabrication / Welding / TIG.

Allowing all services to be grouped in this way will help visitors and boost search rankings.

Bearing this in mind you will then have ‘parent’ pages. When optimising these it's important to evaluate what key phrases should be use in regards to their hierarchy.

Page Optimisation

The Title, H Tags and Images of one page should all contain the exact (and variations of) the key phrase you imagine visitors using to find the page.

Parent pages should use broader terms (e.g. Fabrication and Welding Services). Pages at the end of a hierarchy should use very specific terms (TIG Welding).

Throughout the content of your text your key phrase should be used in a sensible frequency that appears natural to a human reader.

SEO tools such as Yoast SEO can provide indicators for key phrase density. They also warn you about missed keywords within Images and Titles of the web page.

NB If you operate locally or wish to be found in local searches adding a location to these key phrases will increase your rankings for local search. (TIG Welding Newcastle)

Long Tail Content

If a visitor finds you using a search engine, unless they know your company name it’s highly likely they will arrive at your site via a lower hierarchy page. This is known as long tail content.

This is why it’s essential to view every page as a landing page – a page that will ‘convert’ your visitor into a customer. Ensuring your contact form is available on every page of your site. Ensure relevant ‘calls to action’ are present prompting visitors to contact you or provide their email in exchange for content.

Use Breadcrumbs as a further navigation tool to help visitors navigate back through pages. This will encourage visitors to read more of your website.

2. Off Site Optimisation

Off Site Optimisation is all about building external links from high authority domains. This increases your own 'domain authority' (DA) and has a massive impact on search results.

An authority domain contains highly relevant content and has many authoritative external links.

Top level sites are often news websites or big names of the internet.

Sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and national news are considered to be authoritative. Links from these sites carry good DA which flows to your website.

Get Engineering associations and industry specific blogs to link to your site. Links from authoritative engineering sites provide DA while bringing in targeted traffic. These are the links which will bring in new leads for your business.

Local SEO

When setting up your social media pages it’s important to register your business on Google Places. Being on local search will help local customers to find you easily.

Google places allows you to add detailed information about your business. Include photos, opening times and also receive reviews from your customers.

Your google place listing may often show much higher than your website in search results. This is fine if you have linked to your website and take control of your listing.

A great way of link building is to get listed in as many quality local and national web directories as possible. Your business might be already listed in a few directories. It’s important to build these links and also ensure they are consistent (contain the identical address, name and telephone number etc.)

Local Citation is a service that will check all the online directories you are listed in. The citation will ensure all entries contain identical listings and a chosen keyword. A report will list any steps taken to improve your listing status. Your business details are added to new directories relevant to the engineering industry.

Be sure to add a Google Map of your location to your site. It helps Google identify your website as the official business site of the location. It also helps your customers find and navigate to your premises.

7. Ensure a Return On Investment

The term ‘what can be measured can be managed’ is a given for any engineer. It needs to be easy to measure site performance to get the best return on investment. The bottom line should be generating new client enquiries or sales, all other performance indicators should only be used to guide you towards your goal.

Web Traffic

While traffic to your site certainly indicates site traction, traffic alone won't give you signs of any success on the horizon. The wrong traffic can increase bounce rate and damage your search ranking.

Bounce rate

This is a measure of how long the average visitor spends on your site. If your bounce rate is high it is often the case that a visitor is not getting the information they require. This can be through the use of the wrong key phrase or bad / unengaging structural design on your page.

Email Capture

Often new visitors won’t contact you immediately, as they need to gain a familiarity of your brand first. It’s important you try to capture an email list of potential leads.

The conversion rate of an email from a known company is much higher than any other method.

It’s no longer possible to capture visitor emails by simply asking them to join your mailing list. If you have downloadable content with value, use it as an incentive to exchange for an email address.

If you have printed brochures you can mail out, you can capture address information. Be sure to get consent to sign up for your mailing list.

Contact Pages

Contact pages should:

  • Exist on every page, and provide an indication of which page was used to contact included with the data.
  • Ask as much detail as possible without putting the visitor off from making contact.
  • Contain hidden data to prevent spam and provide info on the quality of lead.
  • Record entries to a database, viewable though a CMS so they don’t get lost in your email.
  • Return a visitor to a thank you page, so each page view can then be set as a goal within your KPI and measured.
  • Implement spam protection such as ReCaptcha to limit false leads.
  • Never use the term ‘Submit’ when other prompts can be more positive and encouraging.
  • Ensure transparency in how you handle personal data, as GDPR mandates clear communication of data use policies.

Improved Operation Efficiency

Gaining new leads is not the only way to secure ROI for your website. It's a great tool for selling to existing clients and providing valuable information. A FAQ section or WIKI can reduce time wasted replying to customer enquiries. Further than this your online existence could be extended to:
  • Facilitate a customer help desk
  • Create company intranet with secure storage
  • Build a web portal for existing clients
  • Create digital signage for your company reception or exhibit
  • Connect with CRM Software
  • Sell maintenance contracts & spares online

Download the PDF

7 traits your engineering website must improve if you’re serious about generating new leads

Read our handy reference guide as a PDF at your leisure.

GET THE PDF

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