Background
This precision CNC machining company operated from a 40,000 sq ft facility in Westlake, employing 45 machinists and engineers. The company produced custom-machined aerospace components, medical device parts, and industrial equipment for clients across the Midwest. Annual revenue was approximately $8 million, generated almost entirely through trade shows, distributor relationships, and cold outreach. The company's website was a basic 5-page brochure: homepage, about, services, capabilities, and contact.
The Challenge
The website generated zero organic leads. With only 5 pages and minimal content, Google had nothing to index for the thousands of keywords that procurement managers and engineers search when sourcing precision machining services. Competitors like Protolabs and Xometry had invested heavily in content, ranking for hundreds of industrial keywords with comprehensive capability pages, material guides, and technical resources. The company's website received 89 organic visits per month, almost all branded (people searching the company name directly). Meanwhile, searches like "precision CNC machining Cleveland," "aerospace parts manufacturer Ohio," and "5-axis machining services" returned competitors exclusively.
Our Strategy
We designed a 12-month content-driven SEO strategy to transform the brochure website into a comprehensive industrial resource. The content plan targeted three keyword categories: capability keywords (what the company can do), material keywords (what materials they work with), and application keywords (what industries they serve). The Authority National SEO package provided the link building foundation, with guest posts placed on manufacturing trade publications like Modern Machine Shop, Production Machining, and regional industrial directories.
Key Actions
- Technical SEO overhaul: site speed, schema markup, crawlability
- 48 long-form technical articles targeting industrial procurement keywords
- Authority link building on manufacturing trade publications
- Material specification pages targeting engineer search queries
Execution
Month 1 focused on technical SEO: rebuilding the site architecture, implementing product/service schema markup, fixing the 4.8-second load time (reduced to 1.9 seconds), and creating a logical URL structure for the planned content. Months 2 through 12 executed the content strategy at a pace of 4 articles per month (48 total). Content types included capability pages ("5-Axis CNC Machining Services," "Swiss Screw Machining," "Wire EDM Capabilities"), material guides ("Machining Titanium: Properties, Challenges, and Best Practices," "Inconel 718 Machining Guide for Aerospace Applications"), industry pages ("Aerospace Parts Manufacturing," "Medical Device Component Machining"), and comparison content ("CNC Machining vs. 3D Printing: When to Use Each"). Each article was 1,500 to 3,000 words, written with input from the company's senior engineers to ensure technical accuracy.
Results
Indexed pages grew from 5 to 67. Organic traffic increased from 89 to 2,340 monthly visits, a 26x increase. The website began ranking on Page 1 for 34 industrial keywords, including "precision CNC machining Cleveland" (position 2), "aerospace machining Ohio" (position 3), and "custom machined parts manufacturer" (position 5). Qualified RFQ (Request for Quote) submissions grew from zero to an average of 14 per month. The sales team tracked these leads through their CRM and attributed $1.2 million in qualified pipeline value to organic search over the 12-month period. Three of those leads converted into ongoing production contracts worth a combined $480,000 in annual recurring revenue.
"We used to depend entirely on trade shows and cold calls. Now procurement managers find us on Google and send RFQs before we even know they exist. The content strategy changed our business model."
VP of Sales, Westlake Precision Machining
Key Takeaway
Cleveland manufacturers who treat their website as a brochure are leaving significant B2B revenue on the table. Procurement managers and engineers search Google for capabilities, materials, and specifications before contacting potential suppliers. The manufacturers who provide that information through comprehensive, technically accurate content capture the RFQs. Those who do not, never appear in the search results where buying decisions begin.