Two people decide whether your company gets the order, and neither of them is a marketer. The engineer or designer who has to work out whether it fits and whether it will hold. And the buyer who has to justify that decision with a price, a lead time and documents.
Both arrive from a search engine, both have four competitor sites open as well, and both leave within a minute if they cannot find their own thing. And crucially: both do it before you ever learn they exist.
This article is about what a manufacturer's website has to contain to satisfy those two. In the order they look for it, with the numbers it follows from.
Why it gets decided without you
Research among technical buyers, now in its eighth year, measures one thing very precisely: how much of the buying process happens online before an engineer approaches anybody at the company.
How much of the decision happens before anybody calls you
Composition in per cent
- Online, without you60%
- With you40%
| Label | Value |
|---|---|
| Online, without you | 60% |
| With you | 40% |
There is a fair objection to this kind of data: it is research from the English speaking world, so why should it hold for a machining shop in Moravia. The answer is in the same research, because it also asks by region.
Share of the buying process spent online, by region
Values in per cent
| Label | Value |
|---|---|
| Asia Pacific | 63% |
| Europe | 60% |
| Africa | 60% |
| Americas | 59% |
Europe sits right on the average. The differences between regions are a few percentage points, while the difference between your website and your competitor's is usually measured in tens. That is where the leverage is.
Who is actually looking at your website
Before we get to individual pages, it is worth naming the fact that two different visitors arrive with two different sets of questions. Most manufacturers' websites serve a third one that nobody sent: themselves.
| Question | Engineer and designer | Buyer |
|---|---|---|
| What they need to find | Dimensions, materials, tolerances, datasheet, drawing or model | A ballpark price, a lead time, certificates, proof you have done it before |
| What gets you rejected | No numbers. The catalogue is an image or a forty page PDF | No price and no range, no certificates, no named contact |
| What convinces them | Being able to check a parameter without writing to anyone | Evidence, and somebody who replies by the next day |
| When they contact you | Once they have verified it fits technically | Once they have two or three suppliers to compare |
An engineer does not want to talk. They want to verify a parameter and be left alone. A site that forces a conversation loses to one that does not
The datasheet is the most valuable thing you can publish
When the same research asks technical buyers which type of content they consider highly valuable, the answer has not changed for eight years running. The report puts it like this: datasheets, articles in technical publications and CAD drawings are rated the highest.
Translate that into practice: the thing produced inside your company as a boring obligation for the shop floor is the most valuable item on your entire website. And most manufacturers keep it buried in a forty page PDF catalogue that can only be downloaded, never searched.
On a website a datasheet should look like this:
- Its own page for every product or product line, not one PDF for everything. A search engine finds a page, it does not find a page inside a catalogue.
- Parameters as text and a table, not as an image. Whatever sits in an image cannot be found by search and cannot be copied into an enquiry.
- Ranges, not single values. From and to for dimensions, materials, pressures, temperatures. An engineer is checking whether their case fits inside the range.
- A drawing or a model to download where you have one. On engineered components it is the fastest way into somebody else's project, and what gets drawn into a project is what gets bought.
- A revision date. To an engineer a datasheet with no date is as suspicious as a certificate with no date.
Catalogue to download: one 12 MB PDF, forty pages, tables inside it as images. A search engine reads nothing from it, an engineer spends five minutes looking for their size and on a phone will not open it at all.
A page per product line: parameters in a table as text, from and to ranges, datasheet and drawing to download, a revision date, and below it a link to two case studies where it is used.
Capacity and technology: the first thing an engineer looks for
In make to order manufacturing the catalogue does not decide anything. The question that decides is whether you can make it at all. And that can be answered with numbers your company has known for years and never put on the website.
| Instead of a general claim | Write something specific |
|---|---|
| A modern machine park | A list of machines with working envelope and number of axes |
| Precision manufacturing | The tolerance you can hold and how you measure it |
| Metalworking | The materials you machine routinely and the ones you do not |
| Small and large batches | The minimum batch you take and what counts as large for you |
| Short lead times | The usual lead time from confirmation and what you can do in a rush |
| In house design | How many designers, in what software, and what you deliver |
| Export experience | Which countries you supply and in what languages you communicate |
The sentence this part of the site has to carry is simple: an engineer must be able to tell whether their case is inside your range or outside it. Both are good answers. A pointless enquiry pleases nobody, and neither does an engineer who says goodbye again.
Prices: the hardest decision, and why a range pays off
In make to order manufacturing there is no price without a specification, that is a fact and nobody sensible disputes it. But without a ballpark figure a buyer cannot even build the list of suppliers they will send an enquiry to.
In a survey of more than four hundred verified buyers, price per unit came second among the criteria for choosing a new supplier, right after availability and lead times.
So you do not have to publish a price list, which would not make sense in make to order work anyway. It is enough to publish something that lets the order of magnitude be estimated. The options that work and commit you to nothing:
- A range for a standard product. From and to, with a note on what pushes the price up.
- A worked example. A real job and its price, with the scope described. Ten frames from ordinary structural steel land in this range.
- A minimum order value. The most effective way to stop receiving enquiries for one part worth thirty euros.
- A calculator. On standard products with clear parameters the price can be worked out on the site and the customer clicks it together themselves.
Anyone with none of those four leaves the buyer to guess the order of magnitude. They will guess it from the competitor who published theirs.
Certificates belong on the site as evidence, not decoration
In the same survey, quality certifications sit among the main selection criteria, and that makes sense: a buyer needs them so that the quality department on their side can approve you at all.
There are usually three mistakes with them. The certificate is only a logo in the footer and cannot be opened. Or it is an image with no date, so there is no telling whether it is still valid. Or it lives on the About us page, where no buyer goes.
Done properly it looks like this: a dedicated certifications page, each one downloadable as a PDF, with a certificate number, the issuing body and a validity date. Plus the standards you work to even where you hold no certificate. And a link to that page from the menu, not just from the footer.
A certificate with no validity date is as useful to the quality department on the other side as a stock photo of a handshake
Case studies: what counts as evidence and what is just a logo
A strip of logos on the home page proves exactly one thing: that you once invoiced somebody. At this stage a buyer cannot pick up the phone and ask how it went. They can only look at what you can prove, and shortlist or reject you on that basis.
Research into B2B buying journeys confirms that this is how it gets decided: buyers evaluate around five suppliers, three of them are on the list from day one, and four out of five deals go to the one they favoured before the first contact.
One two paragraph case study is therefore worth more than twenty logos. What belongs in it: the brief, what was difficult about it, how you solved it, in what timeframe and with what result. Ideally with a number, and linked from the page of the technology it belongs to.
A named person, not info@
This is the cheapest fix in the whole article and it matters more than the design. An engineer with a question about tolerances does not want to write to a generic company address. They want to know who is on the other side and whether that person will understand them.
So the site needs the name, role, phone number and email of the people who answer technical questions and enquiries. For an exporter, also which language you can speak to them in. Response time is part of the same thought: in buyer surveys a reply within one working day is what suppliers are expected to manage, and the worst possible option is no reply at all.
The practical consequence for the website: the enquiry form should have three or four fields, an attachment for a drawing, and a visible phone number next to it. Whoever wants to call, calls. Whoever wants to send a drawing and be contacted can do it without filling in a company registration number.
Language, units and standards
If you export, a second language is not an add on but a condition. And it is not only about translated text.
- Give units and standards in both systems when you sell outside Europe. A figure in millimetres is extra work for a customer who thinks in inches, and it is work they will not do.
- The standard designation belongs next to the parameter, not just a verbal description of the material. An engineer searches for S355J2, not for structural steel.
- Terminology has to be the one your customer uses. This is not translation but the vocabulary of the trade in the target language; machine translation makes mistakes here that read as incompetence.
- A separate URL for each language. Without that the English version will not gain a foothold in search, however well it is translated.
What does not belong on a manufacturer's website
So that this is not only a wish list, here is a short account of what takes up the best space on manufacturers' websites and serves nobody.
- A rotating banner with eight slides. The customer reads the first one and the rest spins into the void.
- The sentence welcome to our website, or we are a dynamic company with a long tradition. Neither says anything checkable.
- Stock photos of handshakes and somebody else's factory. An engineer spots in a second that it is not your shop floor.
- A PDF catalogue as the only source of parameters.
- A twelve field form where the registration number is mandatory but a drawing cannot be attached.
- A News page whose latest item is from 2019. That is the only date on the whole site and it reads like the date the company closed.
Video: it belongs on your site even though people watch elsewhere
In manufacturing, one video from the shop floor does more for trust than three paragraphs. Where it gets watched is less obvious.
Where technical buyers watch work related video
Values in per cent
| Label | Value |
|---|---|
| YouTube | 70% |
| Vendor website | 46% |
| 32% | |
| 23% | |
| 7% |
The practical conclusion: upload the video to YouTube, because that is where it gets searched for, and embed it on the product or technology page, because almost half of these people watch directly on the supplier's own site. One without the other is half the job.
A shop floor video does not need a crew. Two minutes at the machine with subtitles explaining what is happening beats an image spot with a drone.
How a manufacturer's website actually gets found
In manufacturing the structure of a site is also its visibility. An engineer is not looking for a company, they are looking for a thing: a material, a process, a dimension, a standard, sometimes a part number. A site with one Products page and one Services page has nothing to show for those queries.
In the research among technical buyers, 73 per cent rely on vendor websites and technical publications when making decisions. The condition is that the page exists as a URL of its own.
| Section | What it holds | Which queries it answers |
|---|---|---|
| Processes | A page per process with ranges and tolerances | Stainless milling, tube bending, aluminium welding |
| Products or product lines | Parameters in a table, datasheet and drawing to download | A specific type, size or part designation |
| Industries | What you do for that industry and what you comply with | Automotive supplier, food industry supplier |
| Case studies | Write ups with results, linked from the process pages | Who has done this before and how it ended |
| Certifications | Documents to download with validity dates | Do you hold ISO 9001, IATF, welding qualifications |
| Contact and enquiry | Named people, a phone number, a form with an attachment | Who to call, where to send a drawing |
Three notes on what gets confused most often. An industry page is not a duplicate of a process page, because it answers a different question. A page per machine is unnecessary, a page per process is essential. And a signpost with no content, meaning a page with six tiles and no text, will not gain a foothold in search.
What about AI search
There is a lot of fear about AI in marketing right now, so here is a figure from the same research, because it calms it down.
So in technical decisions AI is not the deciding factor yet, and treating it as a new channel would be premature. The practical consequence is different from what people expect: the content that gets you into AI answers is exactly the content you need for engineers anyway. Parameters as text, not as an image. A page of its own for every thing. Numbers with a source and a date. Questions and answers that can be quoted.
Do the site properly for engineers and readiness for AI search comes as a by product. Build it for AI and forget the engineers, and you will interest neither.
What engineers do trust is worth noting too: 66 per cent of them consider a product review most valuable when an independent source published it. Your own website should not be the only place where anything can be found out about you.
The checklist
Go through your site in this order. It is also the order in which to fill the gaps, because the items at the top decide whether anybody reaches the ones at the bottom.
- 1A page for every product or technology, not one Products page with bullet points. Search engines and engineers both look for a specific thing, not for a signpost.
- 2Parameters as text in a table, with from and to ranges and a revision date. No tables as images and no parameters that exist only inside a PDF.
- 3Capacity and technology as numbers: machines, envelopes, tolerances, materials, batch sizes, usual lead time.
- 4A ballpark price in at least one form: a range, a worked example, a minimum order value or a calculator.
- 5Certificates on their own page, downloadable, with number, issuing body and validity.
- 6Three case studies with a result, linked from the pages of the technologies they belong to.
- 7The name, role, phone number and email of the person who answers technical questions.
- 8An enquiry form with three or four fields and the option to attach a drawing.
- 9A second language with its own URLs if you export, including material designations by standard.
- 10Speed on a phone. Without it nobody reaches the nine points above.
Frequently asked questions
What should a manufacturer's website contain?
A page for every product or technology with parameters in a text table, capacity and tolerances given as numbers, datasheets and drawings to download, a ballpark price or at least a range, certificates with validity dates, three case studies with results, a named contact person and an enquiry form of three fields with the option to attach a drawing.
Do we have to publish prices when we work to order?
Not a price list, but an order of magnitude. Without a ballpark figure a buyer cannot build the list of suppliers to send an enquiry to, and price per unit is among the main criteria for selecting a new supplier. A range for a standard product, a worked example, a minimum order value or a calculator is enough.
Is a PDF catalogue enough?
It is not, because a search engine cannot read a PDF the way it reads a page, an engineer searches it slowly for their size, and on a phone it usually will not open at all. A PDF should be a download alongside the parameters, not the only place they exist.
Why publish datasheets when competitors will see them?
Because competitors will find your parameters anyway, while customers will not find them without you. In research among technical buyers the datasheet is the highest rated content type of all, at 79 per cent. Hiding parameters shuts out the customer, not the competition.
Where should certificates live on the site?
On a dedicated page, downloadable as PDFs, with certificate number, issuing body and validity date, linked from the menu rather than only from the footer. A buyer needs them so the quality department on their side can approve you, and a logo in the footer will not do that.
How many languages does an exporter's website need?
As many as the markets you want to trade in, but with separate URLs per language and with the vocabulary of the trade rather than machine translation. For materials and dimensions use designations by standard: an engineer searches for S355J2, not for structural steel.
How fast do we have to answer an enquiry?
Buyer surveys put the expectation at one working day, and the worst option is no reply at all. If you know a detailed quote will take a week, send a confirmation by the next day stating when the quote will arrive.
Is a shop floor video worth making?
Yes, and ideally in two places. Seventy per cent of technical buyers watch work related video on YouTube, but 46 per cent also watch on the supplier's own website, so it belongs on both. Two minutes at the machine with subtitles beats an image spot.
Summary
- Sixty per cent of the decision happens online before an engineer or a buyer approaches anybody. In Europe that holds exactly as it does globally.
- The site has to serve two different visitors: the engineer who needs to verify a parameter and the buyer who needs a price, a lead time and documents.
- The datasheet is the highest rated content type of all. It belongs on its own page as text, not inside a PDF catalogue.
- State capacity, tolerances, materials and batch sizes as numbers. A general claim about a modern machine park convinces nobody.
- A ballpark price need not be a price list. A range, a worked example or a minimum order value is enough to get you on the buyer's list.
- Downloadable certificates with validity dates, three case studies with results and a named person with a phone number do what a logo in the footer never will.
Want your own site checked against this
Send me your website address and what you make. I will go through it against this list and tell you what to add first and what is pointless in your case. I spent years walking around production plants and industrial sites as a safety engineer, so I know how a company like yours works on the inside, not just how it should look in a photo.
Send a no obligation enquiry or take a look at the case studies.