Case Study: Industrial Distribution Search

A distributor whose catalogue was effectively invisible to search and unreadable to AI assistants, rebuilt around the way engineers actually specify parts.

The situation

A components distributor with a deep technical catalogue and the problem that comes with it: buyers search by specification, and the site was organised by supplier.

An engineer looking for a fastener in a specific material, grade and finish had no page to land on. The information existed, spread across a product database and a set of PDF datasheets, and none of it was structured in a way a search engine could rank or an assistant could quote.

What was done

Rebuilt the category structure around specification. Pages organised by what buyers search for: material, grade, standard and finish, rather than by which supplier the line came from.
Made the specifications readable. The technical data that lived in PDFs and images was brought into the page as structured markup, so it could be indexed and extracted rather than only downloaded.
Built the commercial layer. Category and application pages for the queries that carry buying intent, each one answering a specification question in extractable form.
Ran a continuing content programme. Technical articles aimed at the questions engineers ask before specifying, each linked to the category page that answers it commercially.

Results

363,055 search impressions in 90 days
19,256 distinct queries earning impressions
366 URLs earning search traffic
1,300 clicks in the same period

Figures are from the connected Search Console property for the 90 days ending 25 August 2026. The number worth attention is not the click total but the query count: 19,256 distinct queries across 366 URLs is a catalogue being found on the long tail of specification search, which is exactly what the restructuring was for.

What transfers to other businesses

The transferable lesson is that a technical catalogue is usually the most valuable and least readable asset a distributor owns. The specifications engineers search for already exist, locked in documents nothing can parse. Making them readable is a structural job, not a content job, and it is where the return concentrates.

Related services

Client names are not published on this site. Sectors are described instead, and every figure above is taken from the connected analytics property or from a count of work delivered.

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