24.76% more organic traffic and 47.69% more leads, in the slow season
Specialty paint manufacturer, 70 years in business, 300+ coatings.
Results
| Metric | Aug to Nov 2023 | Dec 2023 to Mar 2024 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Organic sessions | 13,029 | 16,255 | +24.76% |
| Organic users | 10,748 | 13,559 | +26.15% |
| New organic users | 10,559 | 13,426 | +27.15% |
| Engaged organic sessions | 8,457 | 10,616 | +25.53% |
| Tracked leads | 65 | 96 | +47.69% |
Source: GA4 Traffic acquisition report, filtered to Organic Search. Periods compared: August to November 2023 and December 2023 to March 2024. Tracked leads are website calls, contact form submissions, product requests and studio class requests that GA4 attributed to organic search.
The catalogue did not match how buyers search
The client is a 70-year-old business that makes specialty coatings: epoxies, Venetian plaster, anti-graffiti coatings, and fire retardant coatings among more than 300 products. Most of its customers are contractors and specifiers, with a smaller retail audience that books the company’s studio classes. For a paint manufacturer selling to trade buyers, the site had a structural mismatch.
It was organised around the internal product catalogue. Buyers search a different way. A contractor looking for “anti-graffiti coating specifications” or “fire retardant coating for steel” starts from the job in front of them, the surface and the result they need, and only later gets to a product name. Competitors had pages built around those searches. This client did not.
Technical problems sat underneath the content gap. Large product images slowed page load across the WooCommerce catalogue. Google was crawling product variants, cart pages, and internal search URLs alongside the pages that needed to rank. Several coating categories that buyers search for had no landing page at all.
What changed
Work started in August 2023. Technical fixes and indexation came first, then site structure, product content, and link building, the same order I follow on manufacturing sites.
Page speed
Product images were the main source of load delay. I traced the delay and worked with the client’s developer to put the catalogue behind a CDN and compress images across it.
Crawl and indexation
Google was crawling and indexing product variants, cart pages, and internal search results alongside the pages that needed to rank, and none of those URLs had any reason to appear in search. Google’s crawling guidance recommends removing duplicate content so crawling focuses on unique pages. I identified which URL types to exclude and specified the indexation changes for the developer to implement.
Structured data
Standard WooCommerce product markup does not cover the attributes coating buyers filter on, such as cure time, coverage rate, VOC content, and application temperature range. I defined the structured data requirements and worked with the developer to implement them across the relevant product types.
New landing pages
I mapped search demand against the coating categories and defined a dedicated landing page for each gap: wall textures, Venetian and acrylic plaster, architectural and faux finishes, metallic wall and furniture paint, anti-graffiti coatings, fire retardant coatings, liquid rubber, and metal paints. Each page targets one product or application. A broad category page tries to rank for everything and usually ranks for none of it.
Content direction
Existing product pages listed specifications but gave buyers little help deciding whether a coating suited their project. I wrote content briefs around how buyers narrow their choice: the substrate, the environment the coating goes into, and the performance it has to deliver. A content writer worked from those briefs to update product and category pages, and I set the search targets for titles and meta descriptions on the main product and category pages.
Link building
I planned a monthly link building campaign pointed at the pages we needed to rank. Placements came from construction, architecture, and commercial property sites, inside related editorial content rather than directory listings.
What the numbers show
Organic traffic grew 24.76% between the two periods. Tracked leads grew 47.69%, nearly twice as fast.
The extra visitors were more likely to get in touch than the ones before them. From August to November 2023, the site produced about 5 leads for every 1,000 organic visits. From December to March, it produced about 6. Engagement held steady at around 65%, so the new traffic was as engaged as the old.
I put that down to page fit. More visitors landed on a page built around the job they had searched for, and more of them called, requested a product, or booked a studio class.
Why the timing matters
December to March is this client’s slow season, when enquiries usually ease off. Traffic and leads both grew through it.
Growth in a busy month can come from the season alone. Growth in a quiet month is much harder to explain away.
The baseline works in the client’s favour too. Work started in August 2023, so the August to November figures already include the first technical fixes. If anything, the table understates the full effect.
For a paint manufacturer, or any B2B manufacturer with a large catalogue, the first question is whether your pages match the way buyers search. I map that before anything else, and how I work sets out the order from there. If you want me to look at your catalogue, book a consult.
Scope
SEO strategy and implementation oversight across technical SEO, catalogue architecture, product content, structured data, and link building.
Covered
- Page-speed diagnosis and CDN and image optimisation requirements.
- Crawl and indexation analysis across product variants, cart pages, and internal search URLs.
- Structured data requirements for product-specific attributes.
- Search-demand mapping and new product and application landing-page architecture.
- Content briefs and search targeting for product and category pages.
- Monthly link-building strategy targeting priority commercial pages.
Not covered
- Hands-on development implementation of CDN, image compression, indexation, and structured-data changes. The client's developer implemented these from my requirements.
- Writing the updated product and category copy. A content writer worked from my briefs and search targets.