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Manufacturer website: what it must contain for a technical buyer

September 2026 · Industrial marketing · Quebec City

A technical buyer who opens a manufacturer's website is looking for six things: what you make, in what dimensions, in what materials, with what certifications, in what lead time, and who to call with a specific question. Most manufacturer websites in Quebec answer none of the six. They answer a seventh question nobody asked, which is how long the company has been in business.

Understand what that buyer is doing. They are building a shortlist, alone, on a Tuesday afternoon, from eight names. They will not call all eight. They will call three. The site is not there to convince them, it is there to let them keep you. A site that cannot be qualified drops you off the list before first contact, and you will never know it happened.

The broader logic is industrial marketing. This page is not about campaigns or budget. It is about the information your site has to carry, and about the technical half, which matters far less than you have been told.

What the technical buyer looks for and never finds

The test is one sentence long. Take your own site and try to answer, using it alone, the questions a prime contractor normally asks you on the phone. If you cannot, your site is not a sales tool, it is a business card.

Capabilities, with numbers

"Precision machining" says nothing. What says something: the equipment list, the number of axes, the maximum work envelope in millimetres, the tolerances you hold routinely and the ones you hold as an exception, the materials you process and the ones you turn away. The buyer is not looking to be impressed. They are looking to find out whether their part fits in your machine.

What you refuse counts as much as what you can do. A manufacturer who writes down plainly what he does not take gets respected, and spares himself requests he would have declined anyway. Capability presented as unlimited is believed by nobody in this trade.

Certifications, with the number and the scope

A logo in the footer does not survive a supplier audit. What survives: the exact standard, the certificate number, the body that issued it, the expiry date, and above all the scope. A certification covers a named site and named activities. Head office certified while the second plant is not is common, and it is exactly what the buyer is trying to verify.

A Quebec manufacturer selling to institutional buyers or across the border already knows this: the question will not be "are you certified", it will be "for which operations and until when". A site that answers the second version saves everyone a week.

Lead times and minimum order

Two pieces of information almost nobody publishes, and everybody asks for on the first call: the typical time from purchase order to delivery, and the minimum order you accept. Publishing them costs you requests. That is the point. The ones you lose are the ones you would have declined after two calls and an estimate.

A published lead time is not a contractual commitment, and it is enough to say so. A typical lead time, with a note that shop load moves it, informs without binding you.

Photos of your plant, not of a plant

Stock photography is recognized in a second, and it takes away more than it adds. A buyer who spots a generic image concludes the rest of the page may be generic too. Your machines, your people, your parts, shot properly rather than beautifully, are worth more than a spotless factory floor bought online.

A useful photo shows scale. A part alone on white says nothing. The same part beside a hand, a pallet, or the machine that produced it answers a question the buyer was already asking.

A person, not a form

This is the most important point on the page and the one most often ignored. A technical buyer with a technical question does not fill in a form. They want a name, a title, a direct email address and a number, for someone who can answer without transferring the call.

A generic inbox is not a person. A "Contact us" form with a dropdown is not a person. What the buyer wants to know before writing is whether they will reach an estimator or the front desk. When they cannot tell, they write to the competitor who put up a name, a role and a face.

What it costs you when the information is missing

Three costs, and none of them shows up in a report.

What to demand from whoever rebuilds your site: that they ask for your equipment list and your certificates before talking about design. A supplier who shows up with mockups without having asked about your tolerances is selling an appearance. The question that ends the conversation: what technical information are you going to make us produce, and who on our side has to supply it. With no answer to that, there is no content plan, there is a graphic refresh.

The technical half, and what it does not do

Google publishes three technical requirements for a page to be eligible to appear in Search. They are short.

Googlebot isn't blocked. The page works. Has indexable content. Just because a page meets these requirements doesn't mean that a page will be indexed; indexing isn't guaranteed.Google Search technical requirements, Google Search Central

In plain terms: the page is not blocked to Google's crawler, it is served with an HTTP 200 status code, and its content is in a file type Google can read. That is all of it, and Google itself adds that meeting the three conditions does not guarantee indexing.

Two beliefs worth pulling out of the file. First, the ideal length of a title tag or a meta description. Google publishes no character limit. Its documentation asks for a descriptive and concise title, unique per page, with no keyword stuffing, and points out that the title shown in results is assembled from several sources, including your title tag, the page's visible title, your h1 elements and the anchor text of links pointing at the page. Second, the meta description is not always used. Google states that snippets are generated automatically from page content, and that it sometimes uses the meta description when that description fits the page better than the text itself.

On structured data, Google's supported list is short and worth knowing. Four types matter to a manufacturer: Organization, LocalBusiness, Breadcrumb and Product. Organization helps Google understand and disambiguate your company, and Google recommends putting it on the home page or on a single page describing the organization, not on every page of the site. LocalBusiness requires at minimum a postal address and a name. Breadcrumb needs at least two levels to be shown. Product splits in two: a specification page with no online purchase is product-snippet territory, not a merchant listing. Nobody should be promising you Shopping-style rich results on a spec page.

The trap sits right next to that. FAQ markup does not appear on Google's current list of structured data types supported for rich results. A Quebec manufacturer will not get FAQ rich results. Write a questions and answers section if it serves your readers, never because someone promised you real estate in the search results.

That leaves speed. Core Web Vitals set three thresholds, measured at the 75th percentile of page loads: LCP under 2.5 seconds, INP under 200 milliseconds, CLS under 0.1. The percentile is part of the threshold. A supplier who quotes you an LCP without saying at what percentile has told you nothing.

This technical half is deliberately the short half. It gets settled once, by someone competent, and then it stops costing you time. The information about your capabilities never gets settled by a setting.

When this does not apply

A manufacturer whose entire order book comes from three long-standing customers does not need a website that generates leads. It needs one that survives due diligence the day one of those three gets acquired.

On that day, someone at the acquirer opens the supplier list and shortens it. That is no longer a curious buyer exploring a market, it is a person looking for a reason to keep you or cut you, with a spreadsheet open beside them.

The priority list changes, and not slightly.

That is a good reason to rebuild a site. It is not the same reason, and it does not produce the same site. The marketing plan around the site changes too, because the spend is no longer there to get you found, it is there to keep you.

Sources

If you want to know what your site is telling a technical buyer right now, we can look at it together.

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