Powder metal and sintered component manufacturing, Lafayette, TN
From page 3 to the number 1 result, state by state, for Volunteer Sintered Products, a powder metal manufacturer in Lafayette, Tennessee
Volunteer Sintered Products is a multi-million dollar manufacturer that has been pressing and sintering metal parts in Lafayette, Tennessee since 1981. The capability was never the problem. The presentation was. We rebuilt the website around media we shot on their own floor, built genuinely differentiated state-by-state pages so buyers outside Tennessee could find them, put them in the directory their buyers already use, and rebuilt LinkedIn. Within two months of the expanded budget, a new industrial contract came in from a buyer who said he found them on Google.
By Tanner Herring · Published September 1, 2026
- Client
- Volunteer Sintered Products, Inc.
- Trade
- Powder metal and sintered component manufacturing
- Market
- Lafayette, Tennessee, selling nationally
- Founded
- 1981, family founded, now led by the founder's son
- Certification
- ISO 9001:2015
- Services
- Website rebuild, on-site video and photo production, professionalized presentation deck, SEO and content, state-by-state landing pages, IQS Directory profile, LinkedIn rebuild and automation, local search hygiene, review generation system
- Contacts
- Scott, owner. Rosa, president of operations.
- Headline result
- Client raised monthly spend 233%, and a new industrial contract came in attributed directly to Google search
The situation
The first conversation happened outside the building, by chance. Two weeks later we sat down for a full discovery with Scott, the owner, and a week after that we had scoped a small set of starter initiatives that would not put a manufacturer's budget at risk before anything had been proven.
What became obvious quickly is that the presentation did not match the capability. A 45 year, ISO 9001:2015 certified manufacturer with 15 to 20 customers holding six and seven figure contracts was represented online by a site that undersold the operation, stock photography sitting next to untreated phone photos, and effectively no chance that a buyer searching for a powder metal supplier would ever land on them.
The pipeline was flat. Not collapsing, flat. For a shop that wins on contract value rather than lead count, flat is the dangerous state, because one customer leaving is a real hole and nothing new is coming in behind it.
Every decision in the early phase ran through Scott. Day to day communication now runs through Rosa, the president of operations, which is how the ongoing work gets scheduled, approved, and reviewed.
What we found
We looked at every public surface the way a sourcing engineer or purchasing manager evaluating a supplier would.
- The website undersold the operation, reading like a brochure rather than an engineering partner with 45 years of tooling knowledge
- No authentic media, stock photography mixed with untreated phone photos of the actual floor
- No discoverability for the category, a buyer searching for a powder metal supplier had almost no path to them
- LinkedIn company page stale and incomplete, with nothing publishing
- Thin review presence for a business whose buyers do due diligence before a first call
- Citation and NAP inconsistency across the local listings that feed search
- The annual client review was still running as a paper document, so response rates were low and nothing was captured
What we did
Website rebuild and authentic media production
The rebuild positioned them as an engineering partner rather than a brochure shop, and the media production ran alongside it so the site was built around real footage instead of having photos dropped into a finished layout. Our team spent a full day on site: Scott mic'd and interviewed on camera, slow motion machine footage of the presses and the sintering furnace, a short promo video, and a full photo library. Every image on the site is real, and it is theirs.
The platform move to WordPress, rebuilt at our cost
The first site we built for Volunteer Sintered Products was on Squarespace. It was a real improvement over what they had, and it did the job it was built to do. But as our agency grew and our search work got more serious, it became clear that Squarespace was going to cap what the site could become. The location cluster architecture, the content depth, the technical control, and the structured data work that came later all needed a platform built for that kind of scale. WordPress was.
We could have quoted a migration and charged for the rebuild. Instead we called Scott, told him plainly that there was a better platform for where his business was headed, and told him we would rebuild the entire site on WordPress on our dime. Nothing added to his invoice, nothing renegotiated. He greatly respected the transparency and the willingness to eat the cost to be the best we could be for him, and that call is a large part of why the relationship is what it is now.
It was also the right call technically. Almost every result further down this page, the ten state cluster, the roughly 60 location pages, the AI Overview visibility, depends on a platform that could carry that structure. The Squarespace site could not have.
Professionalized presentation deck
Scott's team was walking into buyer meetings without a document that matched the operation. We built a full presentation deck alongside the website and the media production, using the same photography, the same positioning, and the same engineering-partner language, so the story a buyer hears in a meeting is the story they find when they look the company up afterward. Capabilities, tolerances, markets served, the ISO 9001:2015 certification, and the plant itself, all in one leave-behind.
SEO on a lean budget and local search hygiene
SEO began at $600 per month, which is a deliberately small commitment for a manufacturer this size. Consistent blog publishing, on-page optimization, and structure aimed at AI search surfaces as well as classic results. Running at the same time: citation cleanup, NAP consistency across listings, and Google Business Profile posts and photography, because the local signal has to be clean before anything national has a foundation to sit on.
State-by-state landing pages and IQS Directory placement
Powder metal buyers prefer a supplier near their own operation, so we built pages by state. Each one was written to be genuinely differentiated rather than a template with a place name swapped in, which is the line between a useful page and a thin doorway page that gets a site penalized. At the same time we placed a full profile on the IQS Directory, because being where the buyers are already looking beats fighting for one head term.
LinkedIn rebuild plus blog auto-posting
We rebuilt the company page and set the blog to auto-post to it. This was done at no cost, as a good-faith investment in a client we intended to work with for a long time.
Review generation system
Templates for the ask, the request embedded directly into the annual client review, and automation that fires at project close. The paper client review form moved to a digital job form, and the response rate moved with it.
None of the photography or video on the new site is stock. Our media team spent the day inside the Lebanon plant with VSP's leadership and press operators, capturing the machines, the crew, and the actual production floor so the website looks like the company buyers will visit.
Built at the same time as the website and the media shoot: a professionalized presentation deck VSP uses in buyer meetings, built on the same photography and the same engineering-partner positioning as the site.
The short-form promo we produced from that shoot. It is the piece VSP uses on the website, on LinkedIn, and in sales conversations to show a buyer the plant and the people before a first visit.
The rebuilt vspmetals.com: a manufacturer-grade site with market pages, a sintered metal engineering hub, quote request forms on every service page, real plant photography, ISO 9001 proof, and an Insights library that gives search engines something to index every month.
Before and after, verified frame by frame
The old site was not broken. It was thin, and it hid the things a purchasing manager checks before shortlisting a supplier. Every change below was confirmed against the pre-project site rather than described from memory.
| Section | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Header and navigation | Navigation sat directly on a low contrast hero photo with no header bar and no contact strip | Dedicated header bar with a persistent phone, email, and social contact strip |
| Hero | Generic hero image with one line of framing copy | Two-tone headline with supporting copy and a clear promise above the fold |
| Primary call to action | Low contrast outline button | Solid filled button carrying real visual weight |
| Value proposition | One dense paragraph | Three scannable statements: expertise, solutions approach, client collaboration |
| Trust logo strip | Flat logo row with no section framing | Trusted By Top Companies heading with consistent spacing |
| Product video | Unlabeled, with a generic unrelated stock thumbnail | Headlined See How We Do It with an on-brand thumbnail from our own shoot |
| Performance metrics | Not present | Stat bar: 99.17% on-time delivery, 9.4M parts shipped, 104% production efficiency, 99.78% quality |
| Vision and mission | Not present | Dedicated Our Vision and Our Mission section |
| Why choose us | Not present | Five-point section paired with real team photography |
| Solution cards | Stacked orange blocks with small thumbnails | Horizontal three-card grid with full-bleed photography and consistent typography |
| Markets We Empower | Cards inconsistently grouped | All four market categories in one clean grid |
| Certifications | Not present, despite the company holding ANAB and ISO 9001 accreditation | Trusted Experience section with company history and the ANAB and ISO 9001 badge |
| Contact path | Headline and a single Call Today button | Embedded map, NAP block, message form, and a Most Popular Questions FAQ |
| Footer | Single row with six flat links, logo, address, contact | Three-column footer (Company, Services, Connect) with newsletter capture and legal links |
One market page cannot rank for ten states
Powder metal buyers search the way regional manufacturers do, by service plus state or service plus metro. A single national solutions page has no path to rank for sintered metal parts Kentucky or powder metal engineering Alabama. So we built the geography out deliberately, as content clusters rather than one-off pages, with ten target states chosen from VSP's manufacturing footprint and actual buyer geography.
10
Target states
~6
Pages per cluster
~60
New location pages
Target states
- Kentucky
- North Carolina
- South Carolina
- Georgia
- Florida
- Alabama
- Mississippi
- Arkansas
- Texas
- Louisiana
| URL pattern | Page type |
|---|---|
| /powder-metal-solutions-[state]/ | Powder Metal Solutions |
| /sintered-metal-solutions-[state]/ | Sintered Metal Solutions |
| /powder-metal-engineering-[state]/ | Powder Metal Engineering |
| /sintered-metal-engineering-[state]/ | Sintered Metal Engineering |
| /powder-metal-parts-[state]/ | Powder Metal Parts |
| /sintered-metal-parts-[state]/ | Sintered Metal Parts |
The search work was built around how powder metal buyers actually search, which is by capability and by proximity, not by brand name.
- State-by-state pages were written to be genuinely differentiated, because buyers prefer a supplier near their operation and because thin, duplicated location pages are penalized rather than rewarded.
- The IQS Directory profile put VSP in the place industrial buyers already go, instead of only competing for one national head term.
- Content and on-page structure were written for AI answer surfaces as well as classic results, since a growing share of supplier research now starts in a chat window.
- The out-of-state Arizona client and the hose reel manufacturer both arrived through search rather than through a referral, which is the outcome the whole structure was built for.
Search Console clicks and impressions for the period are being added to this page as screenshots, and the results table will be updated with them rather than rewritten around them.
Results
| Metric | Before | After | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Third-party rank tracking, 160 keywords, September 2025 to August 2026 | |||
| Average tracked keyword position | 31.12 | 11.13, a 64% improvement | Third-party rank tracking dashboard, 12 month window |
| Keywords in the top 100 | 30 | 37, up 23% | Third-party rank tracking dashboard |
| Unranked keywords | 23 | 18, down 22% | Third-party rank tracking dashboard |
| Keywords that moved up | Baseline at tracking start | 44 up against 25 down | Third-party rank tracking dashboard |
| Google Search Console, organic performance, 6 month compare | |||
| Organic clicks | 217 | 305, up 40.6% | Google Search Console compare view |
| Impressions | 11.2K | 26.8K, up 139% | Google Search Console compare view |
| Average position | 20.8 | 17.6, a 3.2 position gain | Google Search Console compare view |
| Google Search Console, AI search visibility, 3 month compare | |||
| Google AI Overview impressions | 99 | 1,000, roughly ten times | Google Search Console Generative AI features report |
| Google Analytics 4, traffic quality | |||
| Google organic sessions | Not meaningfully tracked before the rebuild | 371, 32.8% of all traffic | GA4 source and medium report |
| Google organic engagement rate | No baseline | 64.69%, the highest of any channel | GA4 source and medium report, site average 45.09% |
| Referral sessions from industrial directories and LinkedIn | 0 | 16 from ThomasNet, 16 from LinkedIn, 8 from IQS Directory | GA4 source and medium report |
| AI assistant referrals | 0 | 5 sessions from ChatGPT at a 100% engagement rate | GA4 source and medium report |
| Manual SERP verification, weekly checks, March to August 2026 | |||
| Location plus service keywords at position 1 | 0 | Dozens across five or more states | Manual weekly SERP checks, independent of any tracking tool. Includes powder metallurgy process North Carolina (12 to 1), powder metal components North Carolina (7 to 1), powder metal solutions North Carolina (4 to 1), sintered metal parts Georgia (3 to 1), sintered metal parts North Carolina (3 to 1). |
| Head term powder metal solutions | Unranked on page one | Position 1 | Manual SERP verification |
| Site and content footprint | |||
| Live pages on the site | Core service pages only | Core pages plus roughly 60 location pages | Site build, ten state clusters at six pages each |
| Target states covered | 0 | 10 | Location cluster architecture |
| Business outcomes, client reported | |||
| Monthly marketing investment | $600 | $2,000, a 233% increase | Client decision after early results |
| New industrial contract | None in the pipeline | One signed within two months of the expanded budget | Buyer email attributing discovery to Google search |
| Out-of-state client acquired | None | One in Arizona, 1,800 miles away | State-by-state landing page strategy |
| IQS Directory leads | 0 | 9 in the first two months live | Directory profile reporting |
| Customers closed through LinkedIn | 0 | Multiple | Client reported |
| Client review response rate | Paper form, low response | 200% increase | Paper to digital form conversion |
| Total customer countWorth flagging | Around 15 | 20 | Client reported. This business wins on contract value, not lead volume, so the count is not the number to watch. |
| Monthly reporting snapshots | |||
| Average Google position, first reported month (Sept 2025) | 23.2 | 11.8 | Google Search Console, month over month comparison |
| Google clicks per month, Sept 2025 to July 2026 | 32 | 59 | Google Search Console, July 2026 monthly report |
| Google impressions per month, Sept 2025 to July 2026 | 300 | 4,630 | Google Search Console, July 2026 monthly report |
| LinkedIn page visitors, first 7 days after the rebuild | Baseline before rebuild | 10, a 900% increase | LinkedIn page analytics screenshot |
| LinkedIn search appearances, first 7 days | Baseline before rebuild | 17, a 54.5% increase | LinkedIn page analytics screenshot |
| LinkedIn post impressions, first 7 days | Nothing publishing | 560 | LinkedIn page analytics screenshot |
Every figure above is grouped by the source it came from rather than blended into one number, so each row can be traced back. Rank tracking covers 160 keywords over a 12 month window, September 2025 to August 2026, with 45 terms still pending as the newest location pages mature. Search Console figures are the platform's own compare views, and the monthly snapshot rows are the individual reports we sent the client, including the September 2025 month where position improved sharply while clicks and impressions dipped during a Google update. The falling CTR and the slight top 3 dip are included on purpose: impressions grew far faster than clicks because roughly 60 new location pages entered the index at once, which lowers CTR by arithmetic rather than by performance. GA4 covers traffic quality, and manual SERP checks were run weekly by hand, independent of any tool. Context matters on the raw counts. Powder metal and sintered components is a very niche industrial category, and the total monthly search volume for a service like this is small, so click counts will never look like a consumer or home service business. Business outcome rows are client reported. The contract win is attributed by the buyer himself, in writing, rather than by a tracking tool.
For a manufacturer with high contract values and low customer counts, the math is not the same as it is for a home service business, and it is worth spelling out.
- $2,000 per month is $24,000 a year, against contracts that run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
- The goal was never hundreds of leads. It was being findable by the few buyers who represent transformational revenue.
- One contract from one buyer who found them on Google covers years of the investment, which is exactly why the client raised the budget instead of waiting for a lead volume chart to move.
"I found you guys by good old fashioned Google search."
What we would do differently
We would push for the expanded budget sooner, given how quickly the state-by-state pages produced, and we would start the review generation system at kickoff rather than after the site was finished. Reviews compound, so the months we waited are months we do not get back.
The long tail is landed. Head terms are next.
The location cluster architecture is doing what it was built to do: dozens of state plus service searches now belong to Volunteer Sintered Products outright, and the site finally presents the credibility a 45 year, ISO accredited manufacturer should. The next phase is building the authority those roughly 60 pages have earned back up into the high volume head terms still sitting on page 3 to 6, rounding out the remaining location clusters, and expanding the FAQ and structured data footprint that is already pulling the brand into Google AI Overviews.
Bottom line
- Volunteer Sintered Products, Inc. of Lafayette, Tennessee is a family founded, ISO 9001:2015 certified powder metal manufacturer that has been in business since 1981 and was invisible to the buyers searching for exactly what it makes.
- Hard Labor Marketing rebuilt the website around video and photography our team shot on their own production floor, with no stock imagery anywhere on the site.
- When it became clear that Squarespace would cap what the site could become, Hard Labor Marketing rebuilt Volunteer Sintered Products on WordPress at our own cost rather than charging for the migration, because the location cluster work that followed required a platform that could carry it.
- We built state-by-state landing pages written to be genuinely differentiated, because powder metal buyers prefer a supplier near their operation, and placed a full IQS Directory profile where those buyers already look.
- SEO started at $600 per month. After early results, the client raised monthly investment to $2,000, a 233% increase.
- Within two months of that expanded budget, a new industrial contract came in from a buyer who wrote that he found them by good old fashioned Google search.
- The IQS Directory profile produced 9 leads in its first two months live, and the state page strategy landed a client in Arizona, 1,800 miles from Lafayette.
- Total customer count still sits in the same 15 to 20 range, which is the honest number here, because this business grows on contract value rather than lead volume.
Are the right buyers able to find you at all?
Book a 30-minute discovery call and we will walk you through exactly what we built for Volunteer Sintered Products at powdermetalvsp.com and what the equivalent looks like for your operation.
Book a discovery call