Case study
Manufacturing SEO Case Study: Doubling a Site That Already Ranked
This manufacturing SEO case study is the least dramatic chart in the portfolio and the most useful one. Traffic roughly doubled across the year to April 2024, finishing at 13,600 organic visits a month. Two times, not three times, and no hockey stick.
It is here because of where it started. Every other engagement on this site began from a low base: a few thousand visits, a young domain, a thin link profile. This one began with about 1,000 referring domains and a domain rating of 53, the top of the range in this set. The site was established, it was ranking, and it had stopped moving.
That is a harder problem than it looks, and it is the position most Australian manufacturers, fabricators and industrial suppliers are actually in when they call.
- $990
- Entry price, published in full
- 30 days
- Notice to leave. No lock-in
- 1pm to 6pm
- AEST, senior-led, contactable
- Organic traffic
- 13,600a month
- Keywords
- 8,100ranking
- Top three
- 456positions
- Referring domains
- 1,000
- Domain rating
- 53
- Traffic value
- $14,100a month
The starting number, not the multiple
A percentage gain flatters whoever is quoting it. Tripling a site on 3,000 visits a month is a smaller piece of work than doubling one already on 6,800, because on the small site the easy wins are still unclaimed. On the established site they were taken years ago, and every further gain has to be pulled off a page somebody else currently holds.
| Engagement | Roughly started at | Finished at | The headline multiple |
|---|---|---|---|
| Remodelling and renovation | 3,000 a month | 9,700 a month | about three times |
| Car rental services | 5,000 a month | 17,000 a month | about three times |
| This manufacturer | 6,800 a month | 13,600 a month | about two times |
Read the middle column, not the right one. The renovation site tripled and still finished with less traffic than this manufacturer did after merely doubling. The multiple that sounds worse describes the larger result.
So when a proposal shows you a 400 per cent increase, ask what the starting number was. Four hundred per cent of nothing is nothing, and anyone who will not give you the first figure is relying on you not asking.
Nothing was broken, which is why it had stalled
This is the closest thing in the portfolio to a mature business trading for years: a website that worked, a business ranking for its own name and a decent slice of its category, growth quietly stopped.
That is a common position and the hardest one to sell work into, because there is no fire to point at. The site loads, the phone rings, the pages look fine. Growth then comes from three places, none of them visible from the home page.
The positions between four and fifteen
Pages already ranking, already relevant, already indexed, sitting just under the fold of page one or just off it. Moving one from position eight to position three does more for traffic than publishing something new, and costs less, because the hard part is done.
The searches with no page at all
An established site is usually built around what the business sells, not around what buyers type. Sizes, materials, tolerances, standards, failure modes, replacement parts and comparison terms often have no page anywhere on the site.
A decade of accumulated edits
Ten years of staff changes, plugin additions, a redesign or two and a migration nobody documented leaves duplicated templates, orphaned pages, competing URLs and internal links pointing at things that moved. That is what a technical SEO pass exists to find.
The first is where the early traffic in a year like this usually comes from, the second is where most of it comes from later, and the third is what stops both from working.
456 in the top three, and about a dollar a visit
8,100 ranking keywords with 456 of them in the top three positions. That is roughly one in eighteen, a strong ratio, and consistent with an established domain that has been winning terms slowly for years rather than one that has just arrived.
The traffic value is $14,100 a month against 13,600 visits. Divide one by the other and you get about $1.04 a visit. That is solidly commercial. It sits level with the renovation engagement at about a dollar, under the $1.83 on the car rental site, and several times the sixteen cents on the parenting content site.
Traffic value is Ahrefs' estimate of what those same visits would cost to buy through Google Ads. It is not revenue, earnings or income, and nobody on this site has supplied those figures.
A dollar a visit is what business to business manufacturing search looks like, and it behaves much like trade search. Fewer people are searching, each one is worth considerably more, and the gap between the first search and the purchase order is long.
The long research window cuts one way
For an Australian manufacturer, fabricator or industrial supplier, this is the part that transfers.
The person specifying a component is reading for months before anyone raises a purchase order. They are checking dimensions, comparing materials, looking for a standard, working out whether a part can be made locally and at what lead time. By the time a request for quotation arrives, most of the decision has happened in a browser tab you were either in or absent from.
That long window is an advantage for search and a disadvantage for advertising. A search result you own answers the same question every day for years at no extra cost per reader. An ad is paid for on every one of those months of reading, and most of those clicks come from somebody who will not buy for a long time, if at all.
The trade off is that the traffic looks unqualified week to week. An engineer reading a specification page is not filling in a form that afternoon. What matters is whether your page is the one they remember when the specification gets written, which is the argument made on the SEO for small business page for any long sales cycle.
What this does not show
The market here is 78.1 per cent United States, on WordPress. That is the single biggest limit on what you should read into it.
None of this was local search. There was no Google Business Profile, no map pack position, no suburb targeting and no review work, so the chart says nothing about whether you can be found by somebody searching for a fabricator in their own city. If your buyers find you that way, the evidence is on the city and trade pages, not here.
The client is not named. They hired a freelancer and never agreed to be a public reference. And the $14,100 is an advertising cost estimate, as above, not money anybody banked.
What this costs
A single site manufacturer with one product line usually sits on Local at $990 a month. A business with several product categories, a distributor network or export markets generally needs Growth at $1,990, and a site with a decade of structural debt often starts on Authority at $3,490, because the cleanup and the content cannot be run one after the other. All of it is on the SEO pricing page, with no lock-in and 30 days notice.
Do the sums on your own margin. Growth is $23,880 a year. If your gross margin on a typical order is $8,000, three extra orders a year clears it at $24,000 and the fourth is profit. If your margin per order is $2,000, you need twelve, which is a much less comfortable claim and might mean the smaller tier or nothing at all.
Questions
Questions we get asked
Straight answers, including the uncomfortable ones. Anything else goes to the person who does the work.
Ask your own questionOur site is fifteen years old and still ranks. Why change anything?
Often you should not. The case for work is a position that has been static for a couple of years while the category grew, or competitors appearing for terms you used to own. If neither is true, keep your money.
Doubling sounds worse than the tripling on your other pages.
It finished with more traffic than the site that tripled. That is the whole point of publishing this one. Ask for the starting number every time somebody quotes you a multiple, including us.
Is $14,100 a month what the client earned?
No. It is what those visits would cost through Google Ads, which is a measure of how commercial the search terms are and nothing else.
Can you fix the positions between four and fifteen and leave the rest?
Sometimes, and it is the cheapest place to start. It is also finite. Once those pages have gone as far as they will go, further growth needs pages that do not exist yet, so treat it as the first quarter rather than the plan.
We sell through distributors, so nobody buys on our site. Does search still pay?
It changes what you measure. The value is being the specified brand before the order reaches your distributor, so the outcomes are enquiries, drawing downloads and dealer referrals rather than a checkout. Agree that before the work starts.
Free, by hand, no obligation
Get a free check on the pages you already have
Four fields: your website, your main competitor, the suburbs you service, and your email. Within two business days a senior person spends 30 to 45 minutes on it by hand and sends back three real findings, one of them something you can fix yourself without paying us anything.
On an older site the first thing checked is what already ranks in positions four to fifteen, because that is where the cheapest gain usually hides. No automated PDF, no obligation, no sales call unless you ask.
- Turnaround
- Two business days
- Follow-up
- No sales call unless you ask
What clients say
In their own words
Upwork reviews, reproduced unedited apart from the spelling of Arbaz’s name.
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