A twelve month content plan for a manufacturing business

Most content plans assume a marketing department. This one assumes a sales person, a plant head and an owner who all already have full jobs. The hours below are real and the order matters.

Month one: the four things that are bleeding

Before publishing anything new, stop the losses. Test the enquiry form from a phone on mobile data. Make the phone number tappable text. Compress the home page images. Check Search Console for how many pages are actually indexed.

About six hours, mostly somebody else’s. The full list is in the technical checklist.

Months two and three: the range

This is the big one and everything else depends on it. Every product or service you want found gets its own page, with specification as text rather than as a picture of a table.

Work in batches. Twenty products at a time, highest margin first, not alphabetically. For each one you need name as buyers say it, one line on what it is, specification, standards with numbers, application, minimum order, lead time, a real photograph, and one enquiry action. The template is in how to write a product page.

Roughly a fortnight of concentrated work for two hundred products, most of it verifying the data is still correct. Whoever knows the products needs to be available for questions two or three hours a week.

Month four: geography and trust

Name every city and region you serve, as text on a page, not inside a map. If you have branches, one page each with its own address and phone number. Then claim and complete your Google Business Profile, one listing per location.

Publish certifications properly at the same time. Standard, number, scope, validity. A BIS standard number or an FSSAI licence number is worth more than any logo.

Two working days, plus waiting for Google’s verification postcard.

Months five to eight: the questions

Now write. The source material is free and already exists: the questions your sales team answers every week. Ask whoever answers the phone for twenty of them.

One page per question. Heading asks it in the buyer’s words, first sentence answers it. Google’s guidance on how snippets are generated is a reminder that the answer has to actually be on the page for anything to lift it.

Good ones in almost every trade: which grade suits which application, what drives the price, what to measure before ordering, how long delivery takes to which regions, what goes wrong when specification is guessed, and what your certifications actually cover.

One page a fortnight, around two hours each including approval. That is eight to ten pages across four months, and it is sustainable in a way that a burst of thirty is not.

Months nine and ten: proof

Not testimonials. Evidence. Photographs of your actual plant and product, which beat stock images by a distance, as argued in photographs of your own plant. A description of your quality process. Your machine list with capacities. What your lab can measure.

If you have customer permission, an anonymised description of a job you did and what was difficult about it. Anonymised is fine and honest. We label our own worked examples as constructed for the same reason.

Three or four days, mostly photography and getting sign off.

Months eleven and twelve: review and repeat

Pull the numbers. Indexed pages, impressions and queries in Search Console, enquiries and how people said they found you. Compare against the baseline you wrote down in month one. Method in how to tell whether your website is working.

Then ask an assistant the four questions your buyers would ask and see whether you get named, which is the exercise in how to check what an AI assistant says about your business.

Half a day. Then start again at the questions, because that list never runs out.

What not to do

• A blog for the sake of a blog. Ten pages answering real buyer questions beat a hundred posts about industry trends.
• Publishing everything at once. Twenty pages in one week and then silence looks exactly like what it is.
• Writing for your industry association. Write for the buyer, in the words the buyer uses.
• Buying links. A risk with no upside worth having, and covered by Google’s spam policies.
• Waiting for perfect. A page with the specification and a phone photograph beats a perfect page that ships next year.

The honest total

Across twelve months this is roughly six to eight weeks of somebody’s working time, concentrated in months two and three. That is the real cost, and it is the line most vendors leave out of the quotation, which is why quotes vary so wildly. We go through that in what a website should cost in India.

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.