Acting as Fractional SEO Director for a global industrial automotive supplier

🌎 United States

🛠 Enterprise / B2B industrial

🎯 Fractional SEO Director,

📊 Ongoing quarterly reporting

+61%

growth in AI search citations across core product and parts queries

+24%

non-brand organic traffic to parts & equipment pages, US-led

+18%

growth in parts-related organic revenue across tracked markets

The situation

An enterprise industrial brand with real demand, but a website actively working against it

This engagement was with a global manufacturer and dealer of heavy construction, agricultural, and industrial equipment, with a significant parts and rental business sitting alongside new and used equipment sales. The brand had genuine market authority and strong offline relationships, but its website was carrying years of unresolved technical debt: heavy reliance on manufacturer-supplied product data syndicated identically across hundreds of competing dealer sites, inconsistent hreflang implementation across US, Canadian, UK, Irish, and South American markets, and a site architecture that was actively limiting Google's ability to crawl and prioritise commercial pages.

I was brought in initially for a focused technical SEO engagement, and the relationship expanded into a full Fractional SEO Director role — owning strategy, technical scoping, content direction, and performance reporting across the full portfolio, working directly alongside in-house marketing, regional stakeholders, and the development team responsible for implementation.

Scope of work

Embedded SEO leadership, not an outsourced project

✓ SEO strategy & roadmap ownership across 4 regions

✓ Technical SEO scoping & QA

✓ Product family & parts page content direction

✓ Keyword & non-brand visibility analysis

✓ Internal linking architecture guidance

✓ Schema & structured data strategy

✓ Hreflang & international SEO management

✓ Canonical tag auditing & resolution

✓ Redirect mapping & 404 governance

✓ Core Web Vitals & rendering diagnostics

✓ AI search / LLM visibility tracking & strategy

✓ Quarterly reporting & stakeholder presentation

Working directly with development, content, analytics, and regional business stakeholders, with full ownership of the technical ticket backlog feeding into the company's internal sprint process.

Diagnosing the real problem

The site wasn't under-optimised. It was structurally fighting itself.

Manufacturer-syndicated content duplicated across hundreds of competing dealer sites

Core product family pages were built from the same manufacturer-supplied API content used by every other dealer globally, meaning the brand's own pages were structurally unable to differentiate or rank against direct competitors using identical copy.

71% of indexed pages generating zero organic clicks

A full crawl and Search Console audit showed the majority of indexed URLs were dead weight — consuming crawl budget that should have been prioritising the parts, used equipment, and rental pages actually driving commercial value.

Broken hreflang implementation across five markets

No consistent href link attribution between the US, Canada and UK market sites, meaning Google was regularly serving the wrong regional page to users and diluting ranking signals that should have been consolidated per market.

Canonical tag conflicts on used equipment listings

A platform-level bug was causing used equipment and parts listing pages to canonicalise incorrectly, splitting ranking signals across near-duplicate URLs instead of consolidating authority onto a single indexable version.

Zero structured data strategy for AI search discovery

No schema implementation designed for how AI platforms actually extract product, parts, and specification data — meaning the brand had no deliberate presence in the AI Overviews and LLM-generated answers increasingly appearing for equipment and parts queries.