40% Year-over-Year Organic Traffic Growth for a Leading Southeast Material Handling Provider
- SEO/GEO/AEO
Industry
Manufacturing & Industrial
Platform
SEO
Region
United States
About the Client
Machinery & Material Handling Solutions
Thompson Lift Truck is a leading provider of material handling solutions across the Southeast US. Founded in Birmingham, Alabama, the company supplies new and used forklifts, parts and service to businesses in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky. It is an authorised dealer for leading brands including Crown Lift Truck, Hyundai, Combilift, Kalmar and Shuttlewagon, and it is committed to giving every client the right equipment and support for their needs.
With a growing depot network across seven states, Thompson Lift Truck needed a search presence that could match its physical reach. It needed to be found by buyers in new markets and to hold its ground in the markets it already served.
Clients Challenges
Thompson Lift Truck was well established offline, but it faced a fast-changing digital landscape and growing competition in search. The brief brought together several intersecting challenges:
- Expanding into new markets: The business wanted to reach buyers in regions where it had little organic visibility.
- Strengthening existing markets: Each depot served its own local customer base, and the website needed to show up for searches in every one of those areas.
- Refreshing keyword targeting: The site’s keyword focus needed revisiting so it reflected how customers actually search for forklifts, rentals, parts and service.
- Keeping the site technically sound: A large catalogue of equipment and location pages needed ongoing technical maintenance to perform well in search.
- Building authority in a competitive sector: Ranking against national and regional competitors meant growing the site’s domain authority.
- Aligning organic and paid search: SEO had to work alongside the company’s PPC campaigns so the business stayed competitive across the whole results page.
Ultimately, the challenge was to make Thompson Lift Truck as easy to find online as it is to reach in person, in every market it serves.ed up to its name, one that told clients, in every touchpoint, that their brand would be delivered on time.
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Project Goals
What We Set Out to Deliver
Thompson Lift Truck needed a fresh SEO strategy that would expand its reach and strengthen its existing presence. The brief brought together several intersecting goals:
- Rebuild keyword targeting around a mix of short-tail and long-tail search terms relevant to the business
- Create localised content at state and metro level for each of Thompson Lift Truck’s depot areas
- Carry out ongoing technical health reviews and implement technical and on-page optimisations
- Optimise on-page content around keyword topics, adding content and structured data where gaps were found
- Build high-quality, contextual backlinks to grow domain authority and rankings
- Improve search engine signposting so search engines could clearly understand and surface the site’s key pages
Key Outcomes
Organic Visibility +25% Year-over-Year
We refreshed keyword targeting and built localised content for each of Thompson Lift Truck’s markets. Together, these grew the brand’s organic visibility by 25% year over year and put it in front of a much wider audience across the Southeast.
Keyword Impressions +333% since project start
We targeted a balanced mix of short-tail and long-tail search terms, backed by on-page and technical optimisation. Since the project began, keyword impressions have grown by 333%, so Thompson Lift Truck now appears prominently for the searches that matter most to its business.
Organic Web Traffic +40% vs. previous year
More visibility turned into more visits. Organic sessions grew 40% compared with the previous year, bringing more qualified traffic to the site and more opportunities to convert visitors into customers.
Website Impressions +97% globally in 6 months
Within six months, the site’s global impressions almost doubled. Thompson Lift Truck also won a featured snippet for a localised Nashville search term and recorded its highest-ever number of queries ranking in positions 1–3.
Why a Localisation-Led SEO Strategy
In material handling, most buyers search close to home. They want forklifts, rentals and service from someone who can actually reach them. A generic, national SEO approach would have left Thompson Lift Truck competing for broad terms while missing the local searches most likely to convert. So we built the strategy around the company’s depot footprint. We created state and metro-level content that answers local intent, and we backed it with sharper keyword targeting, ongoing technical work and authority-building links. This gave Thompson Lift Truck a scalable model: each new market can be served by the same localised framework, and each existing market gets stronger as content and authority grow.
