Explosion-Proof Camera SEO

An explosion-proof camera manufacturer had its entire product range on one page, and two URLs carried every search visit the site received. By the end of the engagement 274 pages were earning organic traffic and monthly organic sessions had gone from 84 to 970.

The Whole Catalog Lived on a Single Page

The company sells hazardous-area cameras into oil and gas, petrochemical and industrial sites. Every model, every series and every accessory was described on one URL, and the detail buyers actually search for sat underneath it in downloadable spec sheets and certificates.

That's the most common architecture problem in industrial marketing. It isn't a content problem, because the content existed. The company knew its products in detail. There was just nowhere for a search engine to send somebody who wanted one specific model.

Two URLs Carried the Entire Site

We track 342 keywords for this account. Here is where the site sat when we started:

Pages Earning Organic Search Traffic

The keywords that did rank were trending down. Bing and DuckDuckGo returned the site for nothing at all, which usually means a technical fault.

The Spec Data Was the Opportunity

Of those 342 keywords, 34 are camera model numbers. Buyers search those directly, often a competitor's model number while hunting for an equivalent, and they're the best-qualified searches in the category. A single page listing every model cannot rank for any of them.

The proposal made one structural recommendation: break the combined page into a page per product, with a navigation and URL structure that matched the product categories. Everything else followed from that one decision.

What We Changed

• A Page Per Model, and a Page Per Series
  Ratings, area classification, certifications and applications published on the page as well as in the documents.
• A URL Structure That Matched the Catalog
  Series pages above model pages, so the hierarchy was legible to a crawler and to a buyer.
• Product Markup on Every Model Page
  Structured data carrying the model identifier, the ratings and availability, so a listing could show as a rich result.
• The Indexing Fault in Bing and DuckDuckGo
  Diagnosed and corrected.
• Explanatory Content for the Earlier Searches
  What makes a camera explosion-proof, how a rating differs from intrinsic safety, what the classifications mean.
• Hosting, and the Interface Work
  the structure needed to be built on.

The Indexing Fix Showed up in a Week

The site went from no presence at all in Bing to 13 keywords in the top 10, and from nothing in DuckDuckGo to 12, inside a single week.

Nothing about that required content or links. The pages already deserved to rank there and were not eligible to. It's worth checking on any industrial site that has never looked past Google, because the fault is usually cheap to fix and completely invisible until somebody goes looking for it.

The Product Pages Landed All at Once

The build took a few months and the effect arrived in a single week. Keywords in the Google top 10 went from 14 to 78, and keywords at position 1 from 2 to 31.

That's what model-number demand looks like when it finally has somewhere to land. The searches were always there. The catalog just couldn't be reached one product at a time.

Structured Data so the Model Pages Could Earn Rich Results

A page per model only pays off if Google can read what is on it. We marked up every model page with product data covering the identifier, the ratings and availability, which is what lets a listing show as a rich result instead of an ordinary text link.

On a model-number search that matters more than usual. Somebody typing a part number already knows what they want, so a listing that shows the detail in the result wins the click before the buyer has opened anything.

Number One for the Target Keyword Within the First Month

The main keyword for the category had been held all along by the company that invented the network camera and leads the global network video market. Within the first month, our client took it from them.

Being smaller helps more than industrial companies expect here. A specialist catalog covering one hazardous-area category can be more specific, and more completely specific, than a general manufacturer where explosion-proof is one line among hundreds.

What It Produced

Inquiries followed. The first month of the engagement produced one web form submission. The first full year produced 90, an average of seven or eight per month. Call tracking added later recorded a further 81 calls in a single year, a channel the company had no measurement of before.

What Transfers to Other Industrial Catalogs

Nearly every part of this repeats elsewhere, because industrial catalogs fail the same way. A company with a real catalog usually has more spec data than its competitors, keeps most of it in PDFs alone and presents the range on a page too broad to rank for any single item in it.

The work is getting that spec data onto pages that match how the buyer searches, which is by model, by rating, by process and by application rather than by brand. Where the catalog is deep, it's the highest-return work available in industrial marketing, and it compounds because every product page is another entry point.

The same approach runs across energy and oil and gas, industrial equipment and manufacturing. The search side is set out under SEO, and the structural work under technical SEO.

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