VP of Sales, Ontario industrial manufacturing supplier (precision components, ~80 employees)

An Ontario precision-components manufacturer was getting most of its inbound leads from trade-show contacts and existing-account expansion. We ran an 8-month program rebuilding the product taxonomy, fixing technical SEO debt, and shipping intent-matched B2B content to capture US OEM engineer searches researching component suppliers.

Service & engagement

The challenge

The manufacturer had a 12-year-old website with ~400 product pages organised by an internal SKU structure that made no sense to external buyers. URLs were /products?id=SKU-4827 patterns; canonical tags were missing; faceted navigation generated thousands of duplicate pages. The product photography was mostly low-resolution, schema markup was nonexistent, and the entire site was indexed but ranked for almost nothing commercial. The internal team had no SEO expertise and the existing IT vendor had no SEO scope.

Approach

1. 1
   Ran a 5-week diagnostic covering technical foundation, product taxonomy, schema, and competitive landscape against the top US-based components suppliers.
2. 2
   Rebuilt the product taxonomy from internal SKU structure to buyer-facing categories (precision shafts, custom-machined housings, gear assemblies, etc.) with descriptive URLs and proper canonical structure.
3. 3
   Implemented Product schema (with Manufacturer, Brand, gtin where available, and material specifications) across 380 surviving product pages, plus full Organization schema with industry-specific properties (knowsAbout, member of relevant industry associations).
4. 4
   Cleaned up faceted navigation — robots.txt blocks on filter combinations that produced no unique value, canonical tags pointing to parent categories where appropriate.
5. 5
   Published 14 B2B intent articles over months 4–8 covering OEM-engineer-specific queries (selecting precision shaft tolerances, sourcing ITAR-compliant components from Canada, materials selection for cryogenic applications) — each technically rigorous, written or co-authored by senior engineers on staff.
6. 6
   Set up Search Console + GA4 with proper conversion tracking on RFQ form submissions, treating RFQ-volume from organic as the North Star metric.

Outcomes

Reflection

Industrial B2B is one of the most under-served SEO categories in Canada — most manufacturers have decades-old websites built by their IT vendor with zero SEO consideration. A clean technical rebuild plus rigorous Product schema plus 14 well-written intent articles can produce outsize returns because the competition is so thin. The hardest part of the engagement was getting senior engineers' time for content review; once we set the workflow, the rest compounded.