B2B precision engineering
Buyers find the capability page before they find a competitor
A precision engineering firm with a decade-old website that said what it made in a sentence and left the buyer to guess the rest.
The situation
A capabilities list for buyers who search for specifics
The firm had been making precision components for other manufacturers for a long time, and its website dated from 2014 and had barely been touched since. Its capabilities sat on one page, a sentence for each process, laid out like a shopping list: machining, fabrication, finishing, assembly. A visitor could see what the firm did. They could not see how well, in what materials or to what standard.
So when a procurement team searched for a specific process, the pages that came up belonged to competitors who had written those pages. Sales still took calls, but many began by asking whether the firm did something it had done for years, from people who had not yet been given a reason to believe it.
The firm also had a handful of pages that ranked, modestly, and a rebuild always carries the risk of losing exactly those. Any plan had to protect them before it improved anything else.
How the people on the other side search
The design engineer
Types a process, a material and a tolerance, often in the same search, and wants to know within a paragraph whether the firm can hold what the drawing asks.
The buyer
Types a process and a place, or the name of a capability the firm could supply from start to finish, and wants a shortlist.
The procurement manager
Checks certifications, capacity and lead times, and wants a named person to ring before putting the firm on an approved list.
What we did
Fewer, better pages, and a careful move
Gave every core process its own page
Each process now has a page written for engineers and procurement: the materials worked, the tolerances the firm holds, the sizes and volumes it handles, the standards the work is checked against and the industries it goes into. The detail came from conversations with the people on the shop floor, since they know which questions customers ask before anyone in the office does.
Wrote for the person who forwards the page
Procurement rarely decides alone. A page that explains what the firm does, how it checks its work and who to speak to is one a buyer can send to a colleague without adding an apology. We wrote every page with that second reader in mind.
Made the request for a quote arrive complete
The quote form invites drawings and specifications as attachments and asks for quantities and delivery needs up front, so a request lands with enough in it to price. Sales stopped spending the first call collecting what the form could have asked.
Moved across without losing what already ranked
Before anything was rebuilt we recorded every page already earning visits and every link pointing at the site. The new site kept each page that ranked, and redirects send the rest to their closest equivalent, so years of standing were carried over rather than thrown away.
The migration plan is the one Dev Malhotra sets out in Redesigning your website without losing your rankings.
What changed
Better enquiries before more enquiries
Each core process now has its own page written for engineers and procurement, with the tolerances and materials they search for.
Sales gets fewer 'do you do this?' calls and more requests for quotes with drawings attached.
The rebuild kept every page that already ranked, with redirects for the rest.
Business-to-business search moves at the pace of purchasing, so the first sign of a page working is usually a different kind of enquiry. The drawing attached to the request, and the engineer who has already read how the firm checks its work, tell you more than a graph does.
Keep reading
More on writing for buyers who sign the order
- The serviceM4 corridor B2B SEOContent-led search for firms that sell to firms
- The townReadingThe western anchor of the M4 corridor, and a very busy search market.
- From SoundingsSEO for engineering and B2B firms on the M4 corridorWhy capability pages beat a capabilities list, how engineers and procurement search differently, and how to write pages they'll forward to a colleague.
- From SoundingsRedesigning your website without losing your rankingsA plain-English migration plan: what to record before you touch anything, how redirects work, and the week-one checks that catch problems early.
- More sectorsWho we build forThe restaurants, venues, clinics, firms and trades we work with most.
About this study
This is an anonymised composite drawn from the kinds of B2B projects the studio takes on, with the details changed and no client named. The work page explains how we handle that, and real case studies will replace this one as clients agree to be named.
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