From overlooked to shortlisted: rebuilding search and AI visibility for a B2B manufacturing SaaS company
A solid product with decent word of mouth, contributing almost nothing to pipeline from organic search. Targeting late-stage comparison language put the company on the shortlist, human and machine alike.
- Client
- Production and inventory management software for mid-size manufacturers
- Timeframe
- 8 months, against a 9 to 12 month sales cycle
- Services
- Technical audit, comparison keyword mapping, content build, entity schema and AI visibility tracking
- Top metrics
- +467% organic demo requests, 9 of 14 comparison keywords in the top 5, cited in 7 of 12 AI queries
The Situation
The client built production and inventory management software for mid-size manufacturers, the kind of company running three shifts and still tracking stock on spreadsheets. The product was solid and word of mouth was decent. Organic search contributed almost nothing to the pipeline.
This is a category where buyers now research comparisons on Google and increasingly ask an AI tool to shortlist vendors before a sales call ever happens. Being absent from that shortlist wasn't a traffic problem. It was a pipeline problem with a nine to twelve month sales cycle attached to it.
The Challenge
The site had been built around broad awareness terms instead of the comparison and alternative-to language buyers actually use late in their evaluation. There was no consistent entity data for search engines or AI systems to confirm who the company was, and technical debt, thin page speed, a buried site structure, was limiting how much of the site got crawled at all.
Across twelve tracked category queries, competitors were named in the AI answer and the company was named in none of them.
What we did
Site Audit
We ran a full technical audit, fixing page speed issues and a site structure that had been burying the pages that mattered most to a buyer close to a decision.
Keyword Mapping
We mapped the exact comparison and alternative-to terms manufacturing buyers search late in their evaluation, and scored them ahead of broader awareness terms given the length of the sales cycle.
Content Build
We built comparison pages, alternative-to pages, and use-case pages written to answer directly in the first two sentences, matching how both a skimming buyer and an AI model would use them.
On-Page SEO
Organization and Software Application schema went live to give search engines and AI tools a consistent record of who the company was, and we set up a monthly check across ChatGPT, AI Overviews, and Perplexity against the twelve category queries the audit had flagged.
The Results
Increase in organic demo requests, from 6 to 34 a month
Bottom-funnel comparison keywords now ranking in the top 5, up from 1
AI category queries now citing the client, up from zero
Increase in overall organic sessions, the least important number here but the one that made the others possible
What We Learnt
B2B SEO on a sales cycle this long is rarely about ranking for more terms. The gap between a company that gets shortlisted and one that gets overlooked is almost always about being unambiguous: to Google, to an AI model, and to a buyer skimming a comparison page at 11pm before a decision.
An AI tool citing a vendor by name is doing the shortlisting work a buyer used to do themselves. Showing up in that answer took the same clarity the buyer needed, just delivered to a different reader first.
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