Manufacturer Website Rebuild Generates 6x More RFQs
A Fort Smith metal fabrication company had a website from 2014 that was actively losing them business. Our SEO-first rebuild turned their site into a lead generation machine.
The Challenge
What this business was facing.
This Fort Smith-based custom metal fabrication company had a website built in 2014 that loaded in 8.4 seconds, was not mobile-responsive, and contained only 6 pages of thin content. Procurement managers at target companies were bouncing within seconds. The site generated fewer than 4 RFQ (Request for Quote) submissions per month despite the company handling $12M in annual revenue. Competitors with modern websites and strong organic presence were winning contracts that should have been theirs based on capability and pricing alone.
Our Approach
What we did, step by step.
- 1
Conducted keyword research across all fabrication service categories. CNC machining, structural steel, custom welding, sheet metal, identifying 240+ search queries their target procurement managers were using.
- 2
Designed an SEO-first site architecture with dedicated pages for each fabrication capability, material type, and industry application, creating 38 indexed pages from the original 6.
- 3
Built a performance-optimized WordPress site targeting sub-2-second load times with optimized images (WebP format with lazy loading), minimal JavaScript, and a CDN configuration suited to the Fort Smith area.
- 4
Implemented comprehensive schema markup for local business, manufacturing processes, and product/service specifications to capture rich search results.
- 5
Created an RFQ system with capability-specific form fields that routed to the appropriate estimator based on fabrication type, reducing response time from 72 hours to under 8 hours.
The Results
Documented outcomes.
RFQ form submissions increased from 4 per month to 25 per month within 6 months of launch, a 520% increase in qualified sales inquiries.
Page load time decreased from 8.4 seconds to 1.6 seconds, passing all Core Web Vitals benchmarks and reducing bounce rate from 78% to 31%.
Organic keyword rankings grew from 45 to over 380, with first-page positions for 67 fabrication-specific search terms.
Mobile traffic increased from 12% to 44% of total traffic as the responsive design captured procurement managers searching from manufacturing floors.
The site generated an estimated $1.8M in new contract value in its first year, based on the company's average RFQ-to-contract conversion rate.
"We had no idea how much business our old website was costing us. Within two months of the new site launching, we had more quote requests than we had received in the entire previous year."
, Owner. River Valley Metal Fabrication Company
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