The complete guide to getting an Indian manufacturing business found online

This is the long version. Everything below appears in shorter pieces elsewhere on this site, and this puts it in the order you would actually do it. It assumes a real business with a real product range and a website somebody built years ago.

Nothing here needs an agency. Most of it needs a decision and a few weeks of unglamorous work.

Part one: understand what you are competing for

The first mistake is aiming at the wrong search. Ranking for pipe manufacturer is close to impossible and mostly worthless, because that phrase is dominated by directories and the traffic it sends is students and competitors.

Indian B2B buying searches are long, specific and geographic. They contain a size, a grade, a standard and a city, because that is what is in the buyer’s head. We go into this at length in the words your buyers actually type, and the short version is that the winnable searches are the ones nobody has answered.

Build your list from three free places. Your own enquiry emails, because the words a buyer uses in the first email are the words they typed half an hour earlier. Google’s own autocomplete and its People also ask panel. And Google Search Console, which shows the actual queries already reaching you. Most companies have never opened the third one.

Part two: publish what you already know

This is the largest single piece of work and the one that moves the most. Everything your company knows currently lives in three places: a PDF catalogue, the heads of your sales team, and nowhere.

A search engine can read none of those. Neither can an AI assistant, for the same reason. Google’s own SEO starter guide puts readable, useful content at the centre of everything, and everything else in this article is downstream of it.

The unit of publishing is one page per product or service. Not one page listing forty products. Forty pages can rank for forty specific searches; one page ranks badly for one. The nine fields that belong on each of those pages are set out in how to write a product page, and the shape of the work when your range is trapped in a PDF is in the catalogue that exists only as a PDF.

For a range of two hundred products this is roughly a fortnight of careful work. Most of that time goes on checking the data is still correct, which is worth doing regardless.

Part three: answer the question first

There is a habit in Indian business writing of establishing credentials before answering anything. Founded in 1978, ISO certified, a leading name, and then eventually the answer.

Search engines lift direct answers into the box above the results, and AI assistants extract passages. Both need the answer to exist near the top of a section. Google’s guidance on how snippets are generated is explicit that it draws from the page content itself, so a page whose answer sits in paragraph four gives it nothing to lift.

The structure is: heading asks the buyer’s question, first sentence answers it, second sentence qualifies it, everything else supports. Credentials do not disappear, they move to where somebody checking you out will look for them.

Part four: make the page fast enough to survive a 4G connection

Page weight is the single number most likely to explain a site that feels broken. Open the network panel on most Indian sites built before 2015 and the home page transfers between six and twelve megabytes, almost all of it photographs uploaded at camera resolution.

Google measures three things it calls Core Web Vitals: how fast the main content appears (LCP), whether the layout jumps while loading (CLS), and how quickly the page responds to a tap (INP). Test yours free at PageSpeed Insights and read the mobile tab, not desktop, because Google ranks using the mobile version of your site.

Three changes fix most of it. Resize and convert photographs to WebP, which typically removes ninety percent of the bytes with no visible difference. Declare width and height on every image so the browser reserves space and the layout stops jumping. And delete the tracking scripts and chat widgets that accumulated over the years, which on one site we looked at meant four separate analytics tools, three installed by vendors who had left.

Part five: let machines understand the page

Schema markup is labelling in your page code that visitors never see. Its only job is to remove guesswork about what the page describes. Google’s introduction to structured data covers the mechanics, and the vocabulary itself lives at schema.org, where Product and FAQPage are the two types worth having first.

Check what you currently have with the Rich Results Test. Most dated sites come back with nothing, which is useful to know. Adding it is a day or two of developer work, not a monthly retainer.

One rule. Only mark up what is genuinely on the page. Review markup for reviews that do not exist is covered by Google’s spam policies and the penalty is losing rich results entirely. We go through the types worth having in schema markup explained without the code.

Part six: the plumbing that quietly decides everything

Three files and one setting do more damage when wrong than anything else on this list.

• robots.txt. One wrong line removes your whole site from search. Google’s robots.txt documentation explains the syntax. Check yours after any rebuild.
• The sitemap. A list of every page you want indexed, submitted through Search Console. Google explains how to build one. It should contain only real, indexable pages.
• Canonical tags. When several addresses show the same content, one is declared the real one. Without it the credit for a page splits three ways and none of them rank. See Google on consolidating duplicate URLs.
• Redirects during a rebuild. Every old address must point to its new equivalent. This is how you keep the position you already earned, and it is the vendor’s job to get right.

Part seven: be findable where you actually are

Indian B2B search is geographic. If your site never contains the word Coimbatore, you cannot appear for searches containing it, whatever else is true about you. Name the cities you serve as text, not inside a map embed and not inside an image.

Then claim your Google Business Profile. It is free, it takes an afternoon, and for a business with a physical location it frequently produces more calls than the website. Most listings we see are about a third complete. The detail is in getting your business onto Google Maps, and the cluster specific version of all this is on the locations pages.

Part eight: be legible to AI assistants

A growing share of buyers ask an assistant before they open a search engine. Three or four companies get named and you never learn whether you were one of them.

The good news is that almost everything that makes you legible to an assistant is on this list already. Text rather than images, specifics with numbers, stated locations, one page per thing, answers near the top. The genuinely new parts are covered in how AI assistants decide whether to mention your business and in what generative engine optimisation actually is.

One cheap addition is an llms.txt file, a plain summary of your business at the root of the site, written for machines. It is not an official standard and nothing is obliged to read it. It costs an hour.

Part nine: certifications, said properly

Buyers check certifications before price. Most Indian sites show them as logos, which anybody can paste. A number a buyer can verify is worth far more than a picture.

Publish the standard, the number, the scope and the validity. Whether that is a BIS standard, an FSSAI licence, NABL accreditation for a laboratory, or GOTS and OEKO TEX for textiles, the same rule holds. Specifics are quotable, logos are not.

Part ten: measure, then decide

Write down today’s numbers before changing anything. Page weight, load time on mobile, indexed page count, monthly enquiries. Five minutes of work, and without it you will never know what the money bought. The full method is in how to tell whether your website is actually working.

Then expect an honest timeline. Technical fixes show within days. New pages get indexed over three to eight weeks. Competitive terms take a quarter or more. Anybody promising position one for a generic term is guessing, and we say so plainly on the questions page.

The order to do it in

If you do nothing else, do these four, in this sequence.

• Test your enquiry form from a phone on mobile data. Silent form failure is the most expensive fault we find and it shows up nowhere.
• Make the phone number tappable text rather than an image.
• Compress the images on the home page. Usually the largest single speed gain available.
• Publish your range as pages. The big one, and the one that keeps paying.

That is about a week for the first three and a few weeks for the fourth. Measure afterwards and decide about a rebuild with evidence rather than a feeling. Sometimes the honest answer is that no rebuild is needed, which is one of the decisions on the comparisons page, which we cover in when not to rebuild.

Written by Sameer Gaikwad, founder of Buildgin. Thirty three years in electrical power systems across global MNCs, now applying the same condition monitoring habit to websites.