Northern Hydraulics had a real business and a website that worked against it. They carried ~8,500 SKUs across 150+ categories and sold to people who knew exactly what thread and pressure rating they needed. The site was Magento 1: slow, past end-of-life, and impossible to extend. Category pages took seconds to load. Most product pages had a part number and almost no usable copy.
The buyers were already searching. They just weren’t finding Northern Hydraulics. Manufacturers and a handful of larger distributors owned the category terms, and the answer engines were starting to cite those same names. Inbound sat at 1,840 qualified leads a month and had been flat for a year. They didn’t want five vendors and a project manager to coordinate them. They wanted one team to own the number.