A trucking equipment manufacturer with zero page-one rankings
A manufacturer with no page-one rankings whatsoever in a niche where the buyers are specific and the search volume is low but valuable.
- Placements
- 26
- Average publisher DR
- 41
- Campaign length
- 7 months
- Sector
- Industrial and trucking equipment
Domain authority
Organic keywords
Page one rankings
Monthly organic traffic
Referring domains
| Metric | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Domain authority | 15 | 47 | +213% |
| Organic keywords | 89 | 687 | +672% |
| Page one rankings | 0 | 31 | new |
| Monthly organic traffic | 523 | 3,712 | +610% |
| Referring domains | 28 | 96 | +243% |
Measured over 7 months. Percentages are calculated from the two columns beside them rather than written in, so they cannot drift apart from the figures.
Where they started
DA 15, 89 organic keywords, 523 visits a month, and not one page-one ranking. In a category where the total addressable search is small, that is the difference between a pipeline and nothing.
Their competitors were not doing anything clever. They had simply been around longer and picked up trade links along the way.
What we did
Trade press and industry publications almost exclusively. Fleet, haulage and equipment titles, where the readership is the actual buyer.
Lower volume than a consumer campaign, higher relevance per placement. In a niche this specific, twenty of the right links beats a hundred of the wrong ones and costs less.
How it ended, and the caveat
From no page-one presence to 31 rankings in seven months, and direct enquiries from buyers who had previously found competitors first.
Worth noting that low-competition industrial niches move faster than most. The same spend in a consumer category would not have produced these numbers.
What the campaign actually was
Mix
Almost entirely guest posts on trade and haulage press
Pace
Three to four a month across seven months
What went wrong along the way
No campaign runs clean. These are the parts that cost time, and they are worth reading because they are the parts most likely to happen to you too.
- The inventory in this niche is genuinely thin. We exhausted the obviously relevant trade publications by month four and had to widen into adjacent logistics and fleet-management titles, which worked but took longer to source.
- One placement went live with the wrong target URL because the client changed their site structure mid-campaign and did not tell us. We got it corrected, but a redirect would have handled it silently if they had put one in.
- Cost per placement ran higher than a consumer campaign would. Specialist trade press knows what its audience is worth.
What to take from it
Low search volume is not low value
The total addressable search here is tiny. It is also entirely composed of people who buy industrial equipment, which makes each visit worth many times a consumer click.
Going from zero is the easy part
They had no page-one rankings at all, so the first thirty placements produced dramatic-looking percentages. Sustaining that from a higher base is a much harder and more expensive job.
Thin niches need wider targeting
Plan for the relevant inventory running out. Adjacent categories are usually the answer, and they need identifying before you need them.
The other two
An eco-friendly manufacturer nobody could find
Good product, decent site, almost no authority. Eight months of placements on genuinely relevant publishers moved them from invisible to page one on the terms that actually sell.
B2B SaaSA B2B SaaS product competing against much bigger budgets
28 placements averaging DR 50 or better, all inside the SaaS and B2B software space, over six months.
Have a look at the list
Every site with its price, nothing to fill in first, and nothing to pay unless a link actually goes live. 365 days of cover on every placement.
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