Website Strategy for Engineering Companies

When heads of engineering companies start talking about big changes to their website, they often start from something that sounds like:

1. “Our website is getting stale” or
2. “Our website needs to be optimized for SEO”.

Website getting stale

If the look and feel of your site are dated compared to what you see on other websites, maybe you do want a website overhaul. If it’s been ~8-10 years, there’s a good chance it does look dated. However, you may be assuming something that you shouldn’t. While overhauling a website so that it’s faster or more aesthetically pleasing might be an important piece of the puzzle, this alone is probably not going to accomplish what you want out of your website. There may be two phases in order: (1) a website overhaul and then (2) starting to create content to accomplish longer term goals.

Optimizing for SEO

Attempting to “optimize for SEO” is an unrealistic and outdated view of organic search. It implies that you can just change some keywords on your pages and all of the sudden readers will arrive and leads will start flowing in. They won’t. This is not how SEO works.

This framing can be limiting and point you in the wrong direction. Instead of focusing on what you think you need done to your website, focus on what you’re hoping to get out of your website, then go from there.

Primary purpose of a website for an engineering services company

In my view, there are two main high-level goals for your website:

1. Lead generation.
2. Validation for potential customers and customers.

These goals translate into two primary categories of content:

1. Content that teaches your audience / potential customers / customers by providing insights, tips, and suggestions.
2. Content that shows your audience / potential customers / customers that you have a pretty solid handle on what you do.

Functionally speaking this mainly translates into:

1. articles,
2. case studies,
3. landing pages,
4. and a few supporting pages like you’re about page, contact page, homepage, and FAQ page.

The main aspects of this content that you have direct control of are:

1. The quality of this content.
2. The organization and interconnections of that content.

You also have indirect influence over other sites or platforms pointing to that content.

Where engineering companies tend to go wrong when it comes to website strategy

Viewing your website like a project to be completed

I get it. With a brain that loves structure, this makes sense.

However, you should be updating your website regularly with new / updated content.

If you treat these website updates like a project, chances are you’ll either add too much project management bloat, or, even worse, you’ll start to focus on turning the crank on activities instead of doing what you think makes sense in the moment.

If you want something to rally around, then I’d suggest you focus on your niche(s). How should they be built up, strengthened, and refined?

Engineers tend to want to force determinism on something that’s not deterministic

What do I mean?

I mean engineers, by their nature and profession, live in a world of determinism.

If given a solid set of requirements that you agree to, chances are, you can create the system / hardware / software that you set out to create. You can create requirements, architect, derive, and plan your way to an understanding of the final product before you even start implementing.

That’s great for engineering. Not so much for your website.

Your website is for marketing and sales purposes. That means that it involves:

1. Complex human behavior
2. Partially observable information
3. A dynamic environment (the market)

This is not deterministic in nature. It’s experimental in nature. What you’re essentially trying to do is make capitalism work for your company. That’s no small feat.

Your website is a (rough) set of experiments.

If you can accept this as reality, you’ll be happier. It does help that you can measure some things along the way to gather feedback from the market.

Brochure style sites

This is starting to change, but there are still many heads of engineering companies out there that view their site essentially as a digital brochure. This isn’t a completely incorrect mental model. Part of your website is sort of like a brochure. For example, I agree that you do want to list your capabilities. However, that’s just a smaller piece of your website. Many potential customers expect more out of a site.

Write and they will come

Think that if you just write about the things you know about, potential customers will come knocking on your door?
They won’t.

Why?

Well, to get people to read your stuff, two things have to happen:

1. They need to be aware that your content exists (more on this topic in a bit).
2. They need to be interested in what you have to say.

For some small fraction of those people to want to consider working with you, they have to:

1. Have a need in the first place.
2. Trust you can help them.

You should certainly write about some of the things you know about, but certain things, and with a specific intent.

You’re not writing with the goal of attracting DIYers. You’re writing with the goal of attracting potential customers. There’s a fair amount of nuance to doing this well.

Okay, so how are people going to get to your website?

If a website falls in the internet and no one reads it, does the website exist?

Well, it does, but it’s not very useful.

Point is, you need to get people to your website for it to have a chance of doing anything useful. Seems obvious, but somehow that reality is lost on a lot of companies.

So how do you get people to your website?

There are lots of ways that people get to websites:

1. Search engines
2. AI chatbots
3. LinkedIn
4. Email
5. Other websites
6. Word of mouth

There are a couple others that come to mind, but they’re so uncommon for engineering companies that it’s not worth getting into.

But then how do you get the right people to your website?

You provide insights about the things they care about.

Seem straightforward? It is. But it’s not easy. Keep this front of mind. It gets lost in the noise quickly.

Gaining trust in the eyes of visitors and search engines – E-E-A-T & domain authority

E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust) is a construct to help you think about what search engines want you to focus on conveying for your website visitors. This construct is very important for reminding anyone involved in website content creation to pay attention to the visitor / potential customer.

Domain authority scores are rough quantified proxies for how much search engines trust your domain. They’re both useful and useless.

Without context, they do almost nothing for you. You need to understand what niche(s) you’re playing in and how to translate these concepts into metrics that you can use as clues that you’re on the right path. This takes time and patience.

A few miscellaneous tips on what not to do with your website:

1. Don’t use abstract images. Engineers want as close to real as possible.
2. Don’t be salesy. Give opinions. Share insights and information. Don’t sell. Don’t be pushy.
3. Don’t interrupt with email registration or chatbot popups. Most people don’t like them.
4. Don’t create mediocre content just to “play the marketing game”. You need to provide useful insights.

A few miscellaneous tips on what to do with your website:

1. Add structure to your content.
2. Modularize your content.
3. Use white space.
4. Make sure it’s very easy for a non-developer to be able to add new content to your site.

Information gain is becoming more important

The concept of information gain is simple. It essentially means adding new information to a dataset. In this case the dataset is the information (your content) indexed by search engines. Your content needs to contain new information in it relative to what search engines already know about.

The reason this has become more important is the advent of generative AI (e.g. ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, etc.). Generative text-based AI has made it so what used to potentially be a good idea for a basic informational article may no longer be worth creating. That’s because AI can just do it for the user / reader on the fly. It still might be worth creating a similar article, but instead of just covering the logical subtopics, it may be more important to include:

1. Uncommon perspectives / opinions
2. Unique experiences
3. Stories / anecdotes
4. New data

Case studies