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Long term WordPress support and AI search visibility for an industrial drives distributor.

SDS Drives is the world's largest certified distributor of Parker SSD products, supplying industrial motor control and automation equipment to manufacturers including Ford, Dyson, Cadbury and Smurfit Kappa.

Established in 1996, the company sells and supports AC drives, DC drives, servo drives, motors and control components, backed by an engineering team with more than a century of combined experience. Appeal Digital has supported the SDS Drives website since 2020.

Challenge.

Selling drives online is harder than selling almost anything else online, and the problem does not stop once the site is live.

  1. Half a million SKUs on a site that could not carry them. The previous custom built website was buckling under the weight of the product database. Thirty second load times were not unusual, which for a technical buyer checking availability is the end of the visit.
  2. A catalogue nobody could realistically navigate. With over 500,000 possible SKU permutations, presenting a product list was never going to work. Engineers do not browse for a drive. They specify one, and the site had to support that.
  3. Evolving buyer behaviours. The new site launched into a version of the web that no longer exists. AI has changed how customers find suppliers and products and a website left alone after launch quietly depreciates.

Solution.

Business Central wired into the storefront. Microsoft Dynamics and Business Central were integrated directly with WooCommerce, so product data, stock levels, leads and sales stay synchronised between the ERP and the website. No duplicated records, no manual reconciliation, and stock that customers can trust. For a distributor at this scale, that integration is the difference between an online shop and an actual sales channel.

A configurator instead of a catalogue. We built a Drive Configurator that lets customers select their specifications and build the drive they need. Half a million permutations collapse into a guided path that mirrors how engineers already think about the problem.

Six years of iterative improvement. The launch was the beginning of the engagement, not the end of it. Since 2020 the site has been continuously supported and upgraded: performance, platform, security, usability and functionality, improved in steps as the web has changed rather than left to age into a rebuild.

Restructured for AI driven search. The most recent phase has focused on visibility inside LLM based search and Google's AI Mode. That has meant restructuring content so it answers the questions technical buyers actually ask, and developing the site so that content can be understood, extracted and cited by AI systems.

CLIENT FEEDBACK

Vina Panchal

Managing Director

“Appeal consistently deliver what we need and more. We value having their ongoing expertise so we remain relevant in the ever changing online space.”

Result.

The most recent work speaks for itself. Citations of SDS Drives in Google's AI Mode for key terms are up 149%, putting the business in front of buyers at the point where AI is now shaping the shortlist rather than after it has been drawn up.

Underneath that, the site does what it was built to do. It is a core revenue stream, it generates inbound enquiries from engineers who arrive already specified, and the Business Central integration means every one of those transactions lands in the business systems correctly.

The wider point is the six years. SDS Drives has not needed a rebuild because the website has been improved continuously instead. One team, one point of contact, no surprises.

149
%

increase in citations for key terms since AI mode launched

500
k

SKU permutations handled through the Drive Configurator

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