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If you’re in the forklift business, you know the importance of attracting new leads on a regular basis. If you’ve taken the time to look into the different marketing channels available, you also know that the Internet is the best way to market your business.

However, generating leads online is no longer as easy as it used to be. In the past, having a professional website was enough to make a heavy equipment company stand out. But now that a website is a prerequisite to owning any of business, it can be difficult to stand out among the many other forklift dealers that consumers have to choose from.

The best way to reach customers is by showing up where they’re already looking—search engine results pages.

When a potential lead types “forklift dealers” into a search engines like Google, your business should appear in a high position in order to get the most clicks. The best way to ensure a high position is search engine optimization, or SEO. On this page, we’ll discuss how forklift dealers can optimize their sites, and a few tips to help you get started.

If you’d like to speak with an SEO specialist before reading on, you can reach us at 888-601-5359.

SEO tips for forklift dealers

The starting point for any forklift dealer who wants to increase their online presence is a quality website. Your website is your home online, and it’s one of the first places that potential clients will look for information about your company. If you know that your current site needs some work (outside of SEO), web design can help to improve it.

Once you have a well-designed site, you’re well on your way to SEO. But if you’re just getting started, or simply haven’t updated your strategy in a while, it can be difficult to figure out where to begin. Here are a few SEO tips specific to forklift dealers:

1. Optimize your pages for long-tail keywords

One of the first steps of optimizing any site is choosing a few industry-related keywords and incorporating them into the copy, titles, headers, and other elements. These keywords, like, “forklift dealer,” describe what your business does, but are often too broad to attract the people who are likely to become customers.

That’s why long-tail keywords are so important. For instance, if you’re a forklift dealer based in St. Louis, you might optimize your homepage for, “forklift dealer in St. Louis, MO.” Although this phrase gets far fewer searches per month than, “forklift dealer,” the people who do search for it are much more likely to contact you than those who actually want a business located in Florida or California.

As you optimize, keep in mind that you should never “stuff” a page with keywords. They should be woven naturally throughout the content, and you should only use them where they’re relevant. Using keywords awkwardly will only confuse your readers, and if you do it too much, you can damage your chances of ranking well in search engine results pages.

2. Include keywords in your titles and headers

In addition to your body copy, you should also try to include relevant keywords in your titles and headers. However, the same rule with keyword stuffing still applies—you should never do it.

3. Optimize your images

Have an image of a forklift that you’re selling? Optimize the picture by naming it as thoroughly as possible. Since search engine crawlers can’t process images like human eyes, this will help them understand what the image means to searchers.

For example, consider an image of a forklift called the XYZ Yellow Stone Model. Rather than choosing an image name such as IMAGE3452.jpg, choose a name like “XYZ-Yellow-Stone-Model.jpg.” As tedious as it may seem, it will help bots crawl your site, and will also make your site accessible to those whose browsers cannot load your images.

4. Make sure your site has a fast loading time

Is your site very slow when loading pages? The slower it is, the more it can hurt your SEO. Speed up your site by compressing images, removing sliders/carousels and ensuring that any videos you have are loading properly.

Website visitors will typically become frustrated with your website after 4 seconds of waiting for a page to load. After that, there is potential that they could bounce from your website to find another source of the information they’re looking for.

5. Regularly add pages to your website

Search engines prefer sites with “fresh” content, and one of the simplest ways to keep your site updated is with a blog. Blog posts don’t have to be long to be useful to readers—they just have to be interesting and informative.

Write about what you think your audience will want to know, and also consider using formats other than text. Videos embedded into blog posts are a great way to break up the rhythm of posting on your pages, and infographics are a great way to explain complex topics.

Blogs are also one of the easiest mediums to share on social media. All you need is a link, and you’ll have friends and followers clicking to your website to read your blog.

6. Be active on social media

It’s a smart move for all forklift dealers to have profiles on at least one or two of the major social networks. Most companies are expected to have a presence on Facebook, and usually Twitter as well.

While keeping up with social media takes some effort, it can help with SEO.

For example, if you talk about your latest blog post on Facebook and you get three “shares” from your followers, their followers might choose to check it out as well. This will drive traffic to your site, which is never a bad thing.

Though the number of followers you have may seem like an important number, you shouldn’t worry too much about it. You should definitely set a goal of how many followers you’d like to have, and stick to it so that you’re always working to attract more followers.

At the same time, if you have 500 active followers who are regularly reading, liking, and commenting on your posts, that’s better than having 5000 followers who ignore you.


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How WebFX can help

SEO is the best way to ensure that prospective customers can find you online, so it’s essential for businesses in every industry. However, creating and maintaining an effective strategy can be a time-consuming process.

If you’re in the forklift dealing business and would like to improve your site’s SEO, don’t hesitate to contact us! Our talented team of Internet marketers is more than happy to assist you in creating a strategy that will attract leads and help you start generating revenue online.

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