How to find the searches that come before a quote request

When I open an industrial client’s Search Console for the first time, I sort the queries by clicks and skip the top of the list. It is nearly always the company’s own name, a misspelling of it and a broad phrase that brings visits and no RFQs.

The rows I want sit further down, with a handful of impressions a month: a part number, a gearbox brand followed by “repair”, a material and a thickness. Those are buyers with a job to place. Engineers search in specs and problems, not in your brand language.

Industrial searches are small in volume and high in value: ten searches a month for the right part can be worth more than ten thousand for a buzzword. Here is how I find them, in six steps.

Step 1: export 16 months of Search Console queries

Search Console lists the searches where Google has shown your site, with impressions, clicks and position. Its Performance report keeps 16 months of data (Google, 2018), enough to see a full year of your buyers’ calendar. The default view shows only three months, and in a niche market that hides most of what you need.

Go to Performance, then Search results, set the range to 16 months and export the Queries table. Then filter by each important product page and export its queries too.

The export button stops at 1,000 rows; the Looker Studio connector and the Search Console API go up to 50,000 rows per day (Google Search Central, 2022).

What good looks like: one sheet of every query, with the ones in positions 8 to 30 highlighted. Google already links you to those topics, and a better page can lift you onto page one.

Common mistake: reading only the top rows. Sort by impressions and read the rows with 5 or 10. And know the limit: to protect privacy, Google omits queries not typed by more than a few dozen people over two to three months. Many good industrial searches fall below that line.

Step 2: take the words from sales emails and RFQs

Search Console only shows searches you already appear for. Sales and service hold the rest. An RFQ is the most honest keyword research you will get, because nobody writes one for fun.

Ask sales for the last 30 RFQs and the service manager for the questions customers ask most on the phone. Copy out, word for word:

• Part numbers and models with the brand: “Lufkin”, “Falk”, “Fanuc R-2000iC”.
• Materials and grades: “1.4404”, “AISI 316L”, “6082-T6”.
• Sizes, tolerances and standards: “10 mm”, “±0.01 mm”, “EN 1090”, “ATEX”.
• The problem in the customer’s words: “leaking”, “running hot”, “vibrates at full speed”.

Keep the buyers’ spelling, not your catalogue’s. Bulgarian buyers write “неръждавейка” for stainless steel, not the textbook “неръждаема стомана”, mix Latin and Cyrillic in searches such as “CNC струг”, and buyers abroad search in German or Romanian. Each version is a separate search. If you run Google Ads, the search terms report is a third source.

What good looks like: 50 to 150 phrases in the buyer’s words, each tagged with its source. Common mistake: asking the owner or marketing to brainstorm keywords. They write “complex metalworking solutions”. Engineers type “laser cutting stainless 10 mm”.

Step 3: sort searches into problem, solution or supplier

The question is how close the person typing is to an RFQ. Buyers move from problem to solution to supplier, mostly before calling anyone, as I describe in how industrial buyers build a shortlist.

Use the words as cues. Symptoms and “how to” mean problem. A process, machine type or service with a spec means solution. A town, “dealer”, “supplier”, “manufacturer” or “price” means supplier. If in doubt, step 4 decides. The goal is one pile on every row.

Problem searches still have a job: they bring in people who will soon need a supplier. In Texas, a plain guide, “What are centrifugal pumps used for”, became the site’s second biggest landing page after the homepage. But a guide is a door. The RFQ arrives on a capability page.

Common mistake: paying for the problem pile. When I audited ITCE’s Google Ads account, 49.5% of search-term spend (€664) went on searches that would never become leads, such as free courses. More in Google Ads for industrial companies.

Step 4: check the results page before writing

Google has already decided what most people typing a search want, and the first page of results shows it. Supplier and product pages mean a buying search. Wikipedia, YouTube and forums mean research, where a sales page will struggle however good it is.

Use a private window, search from the country you sell in and in its language, and check the 20 to 40 searches that matter most. Note:

What good looks like: each search marked buying or research. Common mistake: checking from the office browser, logged in. Your history can flatter your own site, and English results say nothing about a market that searches in Bulgarian.

Steps 5 and 6: one page per search, best margin first

Google ranks pages, not companies. Each buying search needs one page whose title and heading match it. When two of your pages compete for one term, usually neither ranks as well as one strong page would.

Group close variants first: if two searches show mostly the same top ten, they share a page. To find existing conflicts, filter Search Console by a query and open the Pages tab. Two of your URLs collecting impressions for one search should be merged or given different jobs.

What goes on the page itself, from the spec table to an RFQ form that accepts drawings, is in capability pages that win RFQs.

Common mistake: one page per town. “Laser cutting Sofia”, “Plovdiv” and “Varna” with the same text is what Google’s spam policies call doorway abuse: pages targeted at specific cities that funnel visitors to one place (Google Search Central, 2026). Name a town only where you have a workshop, warehouse or service team.

Then set the order by margin, not volume. Ten searches a month from people who need a gearbox overhaul are worth more than a thousand from students reading about gearboxes.

Ask sales what margin an average order brings in each product line, and whether you can take more of that work. Pick the top one or two lines and write their first three to five pages before anything else.

Common mistake: trusting keyword tools. On the industrial projects I work on, they often show no volume for the part numbers and brand-plus-repair searches that bring RFQs, because the numbers are too small to measure. Search Console and your RFQ folder are better evidence.

What it looked like for a repair company in Texas

An industrial repair company in Texas, specialising in gearboxes and pumps, is my clearest example of this method at work. Its buyers are plant engineers who often search with the nameplate in front of them, so I built brand and model pages for Falk, Western, Philadelphia Gear and Lufkin gearboxes.

The four searches where it reached #1 on Google all came from the solution pile: “gearbox overhaul”, “industrial gearbox repair”, “gear hobbing services” and “gearbox repair services”. In all, 29 keywords reached Google’s top 10, and the pump guide covered the problem pile.

Leads went from 234 to 800 and the conversion rate from 15.6% to 24.5%, so more of the visitors were the right ones. The honest read: bounce rate rose slightly, from 59.7% to 63.3%, and I also cut server response time from 1.00s to 0.38s that year, so the keywords do not get all the credit.

What to do this week

1. Export 16 months of Search Console queries, site-wide and per main product page.
2. Copy the part numbers, materials, standards and problems from your last 30 RFQs.
3. Sort the searches for your best-margin product line into problem, solution and supplier.
4. Check its 20 best solution and supplier searches in a private window: buying or research.
5. Give each buying search one URL, and list the missing pages and the pairs that compete.

When the pages go live, judge them by RFQs, not visits. Tracking every RFQ back to the search shows how.

If you would rather I do the research with you, book a call below.