Where they started
A mid-size 3PL that had won every account through a broker, a referral, or a cold RFP list, never through their website. The site had a services page, a fleet photo, and a contact form, and it ranked for their own company name and almost nothing else. When we pulled the queries that actually precede a tender, they weren’t in any keyword tool’s “high volume” view: things like “reefer freight Laredo to Chicago”, “food-grade 3PL Midwest”, “warehousing with C-TPAT certification”. The kind of search a logistics manager runs the week they’re building an RFP shortlist. Their whole category buys this way, and none of them blog about it, so the SERPs were thin directory pages and competitors who’d also never bothered.
What we did
- Built one page per lane and commodity buyers actually search. Origin-destination lanes, temperature and hazmat classes, industries served. Each got its own page written the way a shipper describes the job, not the way a marketer describes the company. This is what put the site in front of the query that starts a tender.
- Wrote the trust content procurement checks before they invite you. Certifications (C-TPAT, SmartWay, food-grade), fleet composition, coverage maps, on-time and claims data: the boxes a buyer ticks before a carrier makes the shortlist. Ranking gets you seen; this is what got them invited.
- Earned 30 links from places a logistics buyer recognizes. Trade press, a supply-chain association, a regional business journal. Modest DR movement, 33 to 38. But the credibility is what let the lane pages hold their rankings against older domains.
- Tagged the RFP form so organic invitations became countable. We wired the tender-request form to attribution so “where did this RFP come from” had an answer. Once organic showed up in that report every month, it stopped being a marketing line item and became a pipeline channel.
The traffic chart is the least important thing on this page: a slow climb from 2.1k to 5.8k over eleven months. What changed is that RFP invitations from organic went from zero to a steady handful a month, each one a contract worth more than a year of most companies’ entire traffic.