Launching a new website for a manufacturing company

A manufacturer launching its first proper website, or replacing a brochure site with a new one, faces a different job from a software company launching a product. The buyers are engineers, purchase managers and distributors, the questions they ask are specific, and many of them put those questions to a search engine or an AI assistant before they speak to a salesperson. The site has to answer those questions in plain text from the first day, because whatever is on the pages when crawlers first arrive is what search engines and assistants have to work with.

This guide splits the work into what must exist at launch, what can follow in the first few months, and how to get the first pages found. If the new site replaces an old one, read it alongside the website relaunch runbook, which covers redirects and the switchover itself.

What has to exist on launch day?

On launch day the site needs the pages that answer a buyer's first questions, and the technical setup that lets search engines read them. Everything in the list below is either something buyers ask before they enquire or something crawlers need in order to index the site.

Product pages with specifications in HTML

One page per product or product family, each carrying the specifications buyers compare: sizes, grades, standards met, tolerances, materials, pressure or load ratings, finishes, packaging. Put them in an HTML table on the page, not only inside a PDF catalogue or an image. A PDF can stay as a download for buyers who want it. The page text is what gets indexed and quoted. SEOtop10 explains why AI assistants struggle with PDF catalogues in more detail.

Capabilities

A page describing processes, machinery and what the plant can do: in-house testing, machining, heat treatment, finishing, custom sizes, batch sizes. Buyers searching for a supplier who can do a particular process use these words, and a capabilities page is where they match.

Approvals and certifications

ISO certifications, product approvals, inspection agency approvals, export registrations and customer approvals where you are allowed to name them, each written as text with the certificate number or scope where relevant. A strip of logos with no text beside it tells a buyer little and gives a crawler nothing to read.

A quote route on every product page

A buyer reading a product page should be able to ask for a quote from that page, with the product name carried into the form so sales knows what was being read. Keep the form short: name, company, email or phone, product, quantity, and a message box. A separate contact page is still needed, but it should not be the only route.

An About page with location and capacity

The company's legal name, the year established, the address of the plant, installed capacity in the units your industry uses, number of employees if you are willing to state it, and the industries and countries you supply. These are the facts an AI assistant needs to place the company correctly, and the ones a buyer checks before shortlisting.

The technical setup

• Search Console verified. A Domain property verified by DNS covers every protocol and subdomain variant. Google's verification help notes that the DNS record should stay in place after verification succeeds.
• Bing Webmaster Tools set up. Bing lets you import verified sites and their sitemaps from Search Console, and imported sites are treated as verified.
• An XML sitemap. Listing every page you want found, with absolute URLs, declared in robots.txt and submitted in Search Console.
• A robots.txt that blocks only what you intend. Read it on launch day. A disallow left over from development stops everything else on this list from working.
• Organization structured data. Name, website, logo, address, telephone and profiles elsewhere. Google's Organization markup documentation recommends placing it on the home page or on a single page that describes the organisation, and lists no required properties, so add the ones you can state accurately.
• A link from the Google Business Profile. If the company has a Business Profile, set its website field to the new site on launch day. Do the same on the LinkedIn company page and on any trade directory listing you control.

What can wait until after launch?

Anything that adds depth rather than answering a first question can wait a few months. Launching with a complete product range and a thin blog is better than delaying launch to fill a blog.

What should not wait is anything a buyer would look for and fail to find. If sales is asked about minimum order quantities, lead times or export packing on most calls, that information belongs on the site at launch, even as a short paragraph.

How do the first pages get found?

The first pages get found through links and a submitted sitemap. Google's SEO starter guide says Google primarily finds pages through links from pages it has already crawled, so a new site with few links pointing at it leans heavily on its sitemap, which Google describes as a hint rather than a guarantee of crawling.

Start with the sitemap and the key pages. Submit the sitemap in Search Console on launch day. Then use the URL Inspection tool to request indexing for the homepage and the main product family pages. Google's guidance on asking Google to recrawl URLs says there is a quota for individual URLs, that crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, and that requesting the same URL repeatedly does not get it crawled faster. Use the quota on the pages that matter and leave the rest to the sitemap.

Then build the links you already control. Every profile the company has elsewhere is a link a crawler can follow and a buyer can click: the Business Profile, LinkedIn, IndiaMART or TradeIndia listings, industry association member directories, distributor and dealer websites, and the email signature of every salesperson. Ask distributors who list your products to link to the matching product page rather than to the homepage.

Check progress after a week by searching Google for your domain with the site: operator, and by reading the page indexing report in Search Console. A product page reported as crawled but not indexed often has too little text of its own or closely duplicates another page. A leftover noindex shows up under its own reason in the same report, so read that list too.

A short launch-day check for a new manufacturer site

1. Every product family has a page with specifications in an HTML table.
2. Every product page has a quote button that opens a form carrying the product name.
3. A test enquiry from each form reaches the sales inbox, from a phone and from a desktop.
4. The About page states the plant location, year established and capacity in text.
5. Approvals are listed as text, with scope or certificate numbers where relevant.
6. robots.txt has no leftover disallow, and no page carries a stray noindex.
7. The sitemap lists every page, is declared in robots.txt and is submitted in Search Console.
8. The site is verified in Search Console and imported into Bing Webmaster Tools.
9. Organization markup is on the home page and the company name matches the Business Profile exactly.
10. Analytics records enquiry submissions as conversions.

For a fuller list of the questions industrial buyers bring to a supplier's website, and how each one maps to a page, see EbizIndia's guide to the questions buyers ask a manufacturer's website. The wider context of treating the new site as a launch rather than a handover is in a website relaunch is a launch.