Industrial equipment · 9,400 part numbers · 6 markets
A spare parts catalogue nobody could find
9,400 part numbers behind a login, in a PDF, in one language. Technicians were buying the equivalent part from a distributor because the manufacturer own site did not rank for its own part numbers.
The situation
A manufacturer of packaging machinery. Machines are sold at a thin margin and the aftermarket carries the business, which is the normal shape of this industry.
The parts catalogue existed as a login gated PDF per machine family. A maintenance technician with a stopped line at two in the morning searches the number stamped on the broken part. The manufacturer site returned nothing at all. Three distributors and a marketplace returned everything.
What made it hard
- Prices are contract specific and cannot be public. The page has to be useful without a price on it.
- The ERP is the source of truth for part data and was not going to be replaced or restructured for a website.
- The distributor network must not be undercut. The site generates a quote request, never a sale.
- Six languages, and the German and Italian technical terms for the same component are not translations of each other. A technician searches the word used in their own service manual.
How we built it
01
Find out what they actually search
Weeks 1 to 2
Real search demand for part numbers, machine names, and the symptom phrases technicians type when they do not know the part number yet. This decides what gets a generated page and what gets a hand written one.
You getA demand map: 3,100 of the 9,400 numbers had measurable monthly search volume, and 40 machine level pages were worth writing by hand.
02
One page per part, generated from the ERP
Weeks 3 to 7
A nightly export becomes a static page per part: the number, its supersessions, the machines it fits, the drawing, the technical fields, and the two neighbouring parts on the exploded view. Nobody maintains these pages by hand, because nobody would.
You get9,400 pages, built and deployed in under four minutes from a cold start.
03
Make the page answer the two in the morning question
Weeks 8 to 10
The supersession chain as real redirects, so a number discontinued in 2011 lands on the part that replaced it. Machine compatibility as links rather than a paragraph. A quote form that already knows the part number and asks for the machine serial.
You getQuote form live, with three fields for the technician to fill in.
04
The six languages
Weeks 11 to 14
Translated by the technicians in each market, seeded from the German and Italian service manuals, not by a translation agency working from a glossary. hreflang across six locales with reciprocal alternates in both directions.
You getSix locales live, zero orphan alternates, validated against the built sitemap.
05
Measure the right thing
Ongoing
Not sessions. Quote requests that carry a part number, and the share of those that name a machine still under a service contract. That second number is the one that tells the aftermarket manager whether this is working.
You getOne dashboard the aftermarket manager reads on a Monday, and nothing else.
What it runs on
A static site, because 9,400 pages that change once a night should not need a database at request time.
- Nightly ERP export over SFTP, one CSV, validated before it is trusted
- Astro static build, deployed to a global edge network
- Structured data per part, including the machines it is a spare part for
- IndexNow plus sitemap submission on every build that changes a page
- A small Node service that posts the quote request into their existing CRM
- Server log analysis instead of a third party analytics script
What changed
- 9,400
- part pages generated nightly, built in under 4 minutes
- 3,100
- part numbers with real search demand, all now with a page
- ×4.6
- quote requests carrying a part number, six months on
- 6
- languages, translated by technicians in each market
The biggest gain was not search ranking. It was that the supersession chain finally existed in one place. A technician searching a number that was discontinued in 2011 now lands on the part that replaced it, which the PDF could never do.
The internal sales team started using the public pages instead of the PDF within a month. That is the clearest signal we got that the pages were right, and nobody planned it.