A year of SEO for Heat Management, in twelve languages

Sootblowing optimisation and infrasound cleaning are not topics that millions of people search for. But the ones who do are exactly the right people: engineers who are trying to reduce steam consumption, cut downtime or extend the life of a boiler. When they find the right solution, the result is often a project that runs for years.

In a niche like that, every position in Google counts. Being on page three means not existing; being in the top ten means being on the shortlist.

We worked through the site's content and structure around what Heat Management actually sells: solutions such as optimised steam sootblowing, infrasound cleaning, operation analysis and CFD simulation, and the applications they are used for, from recovery and coal-fired boilers to marine, waste-to-energy and smoke tube boilers. Each topic got a clear place on the site, with titles and internal links that tell Google how everything fits together.

It is not quick work, but it compounds. Month by month, Google began to treat the site as an authority on boiler cleaning.

Heat Management's site is in twelve languages: Swedish, English, Danish, German, Spanish, Finnish, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Thai and Vietnamese. An engineer in São Paulo or Bangkok searches in their own language, and Google shows the pages it believes answer that search best in that language. We went through the language versions so that each one targets what people actually search for in that language and is set up correctly for Google.

The effect showed within days: impressions from Brazil went from 68 to 1,232, Thailand from 45 to 556, and Finland and Italy started to bring clicks, 10 and 8 in two weeks, compared with at most two each before.

Heat Management sells to a global market from Sweden. Search is how they meet engineers in countries far from their own office, long before a procurement starts. Twice as many clicks and a top-ten position mean that more of the people who will eventually buy a sootblowing or cleaning system find Heat Management first.

The language work multiplies that effect. The same content now works in more markets at once, without spending more on advertising.