Turning a Complex Catalogue into a 600% Conversion Boost

The Client

John Guest are the original inventors of push-fit plumbing technology and the name behind the well-known Speedfit brand. With manufacturing roots in the UK going back to 1961, it now has a global customer base. The company has built a reputation for quality, reliability, and innovation, producing world-class push-fit products for a wide range of industries, including plumbing, telecoms, automotive and agriculture.

John Guest came to us with a clear goal: bring together their multiple regional websites, create a consistent experience across markets, and unite the John Guest and Speedfit brands under one smart, search-friendly platform that delivered results as a global sales tool.

The Challenge

A new website that simply looked good was not enough for John Guest. The manufacturing SEO strategy needed to be able to handle the weight of a complex, global operation. Their old platform had served its time and was no longer delivering results at the level they needed. The new site needed to built with SEO baked in to the foundations.

One of the biggest challenges was bringing together a patchwork of regional websites. Each had its own setup, product ranges, and content in different languages. Our job was to ensure the website remained search-friendly while still giving each country the flexibility to manage and tailor its own content locally.

At the same time, the site needed to work much harder from a commercial perspective. We needed to improve search performance, streamline the user journey and turn the online catalogue into a well-oiled sales enablement tool.

Traffic and conversions would be the key metrics indicating success.

By achieving these objectives, John Guest would have a future-ready website that customers could easily find, explore and interact with, no matter where in the world they were browsing from.

How We Delivered

With SEO baked in from the very start, we worked closely with Milestone Creative and Pivale to make sure every element of the new site was built to perform. This process included looking at everything from technical SEO and keyword mapping to international setup and analytics. It was a full end-to-end project designed to give John Guest the digital platform they needed to sustain and grow their customer base.

Laying strong SEO foundations

We kicked things off by working with the design team to ensure the site looked great and played nicely with search engines. Sufficient space was allocated for SEO content without compromising design, something that’s often easier said than done!

We also worked with the Drupal developers at Pivale to guide technical SEO from the ground up: setting up clean menu structures, site maps and canonical links, optimising images and caching. These tasks all added up to a site that’s easy for users to navigate and for search engines to crawl and index.

Keyword research and content optimisation

Before we structured a single page, we mapped out exactly what people were searching for. Using tools like SEMrush and Google Keyword Planner, alongside input from the John Guest team, we created a keyword strategy built around real user intent.

Once the structure was locked in, we made sure every page was fully optimised for its assigned keyword, from meta tags and headers to keyword use, image SEO, internal links, and much more! More than just rankings, this was about helping users find what they need fast.

Smarter site structure

With both the John Guest and Speedfit brands and a huge product range, the site structure needed to do a lot of heavy lifting. We helped design a clear, logical hierarchy that funnelled users towards the right product areas while keeping key pages visible in the main navigation. This tactic ensures users can move easily from landing pages to product details, with no dead ends or confusing paths! The end result is a site that flows logically and helps users convert with less friction.

Localised content, global reach

John Guest operates worldwide, with regional differences in language, product range and messaging. We worked with the developers to find the best way to support that complexity without sacrificing usability or search performance.

Instead of geo-redirects, we recommended a language and location selector at the root domain, paired with hreflang tags to guide search engines. These tools give users a clear route to their regional site and help John Guest stay in control of how content is served globally.

Smooth site migration

When it came time to launch, we made sure the transition from the old site to the new one didn’t come with any SEO setbacks. By putting in place a full redirect strategy, we could ensure the site kept its hard-earned rankings and search visibility.

Every old URL was mapped to its new home, so nothing got lost along the way, and users didn’t run into roadblocks. No nasty surprises, just a clean handover to a better-built platform.

Insightful tracking and reporting

A site this powerful needs analytics that do more than count clicks. We set up tracking to monitor not just who was visiting but key user actions like contact form submissions and downloads, helping the team understand what was driving engagement. Everything was set up to reflect the structure of the site, with data broken down by location and brand.

Monthly reports gave the John Guest team a clear, actionable view of what was working and where they could go next. No noise, just the metrics that matter.