Composite company profile
A family-owned custom metal fabrication company serving energy-sector OEMs — wind turbine tower components, solar racking hardware, and oil and gas process equipment. Roughly $40M in annual revenue, no in-house marketing function, sales driven entirely by existing relationships and referral-based RFPs. Buyers are plant engineers, procurement leads, and MRO directors who increasingly research new fabrication partners online before ever issuing an RFP.
The problem
The company had almost no organic visibility for the specific capability, certification, and tolerance-spec terms its buyers actually search — things like certified welding processes, specific material grades, and component types. The website functioned as a static digital brochure with no lead-capture path and no content addressing any of it. Every RFP in the pipeline came from an existing relationship; there was no new-logo pipeline sourced from the website at all.
- A keyword pull against the company’s real capabilities (certification types, materials, component categories) showed real, recurring search demand with almost no competing content — a byproduct of how few fabricators in this niche have invested in SEO at all.
- The site had basic technical debt working against it: no XML sitemap, several orphaned pages with no internal links pointing to them, and no schema markup identifying the company as a manufacturer.
- There was no quote-request or RFP-intake flow on the site — a visitor who did land on the site had no clear next step beyond a general contact form.
What our team diagnosed
1. The demand existed with almost no competition to beat. Long sales-cycle, highly technical industrial niches like this one are underserved by SEO precisely because most competitors are relationship-first and have never built content for these terms — the bar to rank was lower than in almost any consumer-facing category.
2. The gap was entirely content and infrastructure, not demand. Buyers were already searching; the company simply had nothing built to be found by them.
Strategy MV3 shipped
- Technical SEO foundation first: sitemap, indexation cleanup, and Manufacturer/LocalBusiness schema before any content work, so new pages had a clean base to rank from.
- Capability pages, one per process and certification (welding certifications, material grades, tolerance capabilities, finishing processes), each written to answer the specific technical question a procurement engineer would search.
- A quote-request flow purpose-built for RFP intake — project specs, drawings upload, and timeline — replacing the generic contact form.
- Google Business Profile optimization for the plant location, since a meaningful share of procurement research includes a local/regional fabricator search.
Implementation
Built out capability and certification pages covering the company’s full process list, stood up a technical documentation hub linking material spec sheets to the relevant capability pages, redesigned the quote-request flow, and cleaned up the site’s indexation so the new pages could actually be crawled and ranked.
Outcomes
- Organic sessions: grew from a near-zero baseline to a consistent, meaningful monthly volume within the first two quarters.
- First-ever digitally-sourced RFPs: the company received its first inbound quote requests attributable to organic search rather than an existing relationship, several months into the engagement.
- Page-1 rankings achieved on the large majority of the targeted certification and capability long-tail terms within six months, reflecting the low-competition dynamic in this niche.
Timeline
Roughly eight months from technical foundation work to the first digitally-sourced RFP; capability-page rankings began surfacing around month three as indexation cleared.
Composite testimonial
“We’d never gotten a single RFP from the website before. It sounds small, but the first one that came in cold, from a plant engineer who found us searching for exactly what we do, told us this actually works for a business like ours.”
Mark, Director of Sales
Services engaged
Starter AI retainer plus an initial technical SEO audit.
How this profile is built
This is a composite profile, assembled from patterns and outcomes we’ve seen across multiple real engagements in this space, not a single named client. Figures above are directionally representative of the scenario, not a verified result from one account.
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