WooCommerce SEO for Powerpoint Engineering

We have worked with Powerpoint Engineering since 2010, looking after their eCommerce SEO across a portfolio of WooCommerce sites.

We have had the pleasure of working in what are considered non-sexy industries for many years. These include companies in engineering, construction, fabrication, stone suppliers and quarries, timber suppliers, cladding, substation safety, and bicycle manufacturers.

Project goals

Understanding the client’s products is the main goal at the start of all projects. Understanding the client’s target market and growth goals is a very close second. The questions we worked through at the start of the engagement were:

• Are the products and services local, national or international?
• Are they distributors and/or selling to end-users?
• Will they sell from their website, or is this lead generation?
• Will the websites be multi-lingual?
• Do they run conferences or attend trade shows?

Due to the technical nature of this business, the team has developed a tolerance for all of our questions. Even with some engineering knowledge from a mechanical engineering apprenticeship a long time ago, the career change happened soon after, so close product understanding had to be rebuilt from scratch.

The main problems sat in the content layer:

• Content that was the same on more than one website
• Manufacturer’s product descriptions reused verbatim across the estate
• More than ten WooCommerce sites all competing for similar terms

All of these issues led to parts of the sites being filtered by Google and not appearing in search results. Recruiting and keeping writers who can produce high-quality product or service descriptions, repeatedly, without leaning on the same sentences, is hard work. Technical writers are also expensive to retain.

When we first met, Powerpoint already had an in-house marketing and web development team, with well designed and good-looking websites. The websites were underperforming due to a lack of knowledge of search optimisation for Google.

The starting picture across the estate looked like this:

• Strong design and brand, weak organic visibility
• Duplicate content across more than ten sites
• Manufacturer descriptions copied straight onto product pages
• No structured tracking tying website changes to business outcomes
• An internal team keen to learn, but without an SEO playbook

That gave us a clear runway: fix the content base, train the team, then scale link building and tracking on top.

SEO project tasks

The programme of work has been built around five core streams:

• In-house training
• Website reviews
• Content reviews and keyword research
• On-site SEO
• Off-site SEO, including eCommerce link building

Content review and keyword research

These two were completed together because they inform each other. A clear understanding of the client’s business is essential to good keyword research.

The main problems sat in product content: the same copy reused on more than one website, and manufacturer’s product descriptions used as-is. Both led to pages being filtered out of Google’s results. The duplicate content across the websites (more than ten) is now approaching an acceptable level.

Keyword research has also informed the blog content calendar and sharing on LinkedIn, where their audience can be found.

Link building

Link building is required for any website to rank highly in Google’s search results. With engineering websites we have two problems: creating good content for guest posts, and the availability of target websites. This area is not like travel SEO or accountancy SEO where there are many more options.

On the plus side, these sectors tend to be less competitive and therefore need fewer links to rank. As the company runs more than ten websites using WordPress and WooCommerce, we aimed to have each guest post placement link to two sites. This has helped to manage the cost, as link building is a long term task.

Training

Powerpoint have their own in-house marketing and web development team. Our first few training sessions helped the internal team understand how their roles intersected with SEO. Creating written SEO processes and plans, directed at writers, marketing managers and web developers, has worked better than an overview SEO cheat sheet.

Tracking

It can seem tedious to track changes to the website. If you are just adding a new product or updating a services page, it is easier to just do it and get on with other work. However, setting up sheets to track changes meant we could tie website and business outcomes back to specific changes. We now also use a website audit tracker.

The traffic from Google has kept increasing year on year across the estate.

Headline outcomes from the engagement:

• Sites under management: twelve WooCommerce websites currently under active SEO management
• Duplicate content: reduced from more than ten sites’ worth to an acceptable level
• Link efficiency: each guest post placement engineered to link to two of the client’s sites
• Team capability: internal marketing and web development team equipped with written SEO processes
• Tracking discipline: sheets and a website audit tracker tying every change back to business outcomes
• AI-assisted workflows: the last two years have lifted content quality and let us turn supplier PDF files into usable product descriptions at speed

Growth has taken off again on the back of the AI-assisted content work.

Engineering, electrical supply and industrial eCommerce are not glamorous niches, and that is exactly the point. The same patterns we saw at Powerpoint show up across most technical eCommerce estates:

• Multiple sibling sites built on WooCommerce, all leaning on the same manufacturer copy
• Strong internal teams who own design and development, but have no SEO playbook
• Duplicate content quietly filtering pages out of Google
• Smaller link-building universes than B2C niches, which rewards a portfolio-level strategy

The lesson from fifteen-plus years on this account is that boring industries reward patient, structured SEO. Clean up duplicate content, train the in-house team so changes stick, build links that serve more than one property at a time, and track every change against business outcomes. Less competitive sectors need fewer links to rank, so a disciplined programme compounds fast once the foundations are in place.

If you run a WooCommerce estate in engineering, construction, electrical supply or any other technical niche, the playbook in this case study is directly transferable.