Nowadays, specifiers researching products for a new building don’t have manufacturers at the top of their list to contact. Instead, they head to Google to compare similar products and increasingly, they ask AI tools to act as their source of expertise and work out the differences between two specs before they’ve even spoken to a sales rep. By the time they call, the buyer has usually narrowed down their choices to two or three products.
That should be great news for manufacturers of building products and materials because the answers buyers are looking for already exist. Not many industries have this much genuine technical depth to draw on: fire ratings, thermal performance, compliance data, installation instructions, years of engineering expertise sitting in the heads of the people who design and test these items.
The problem is, hardly any of it is built to be found. In a market where the decision is nearly made before a manufacturer even knows someone’s out there looking, having a proper digital presence isn’t a nice-to-have anymore. It’s the thing that decides whether you’re even in the running. Julaine Speight, co-owner and marketing director of First Internet, has written the following guest article…
Where the expertise gets stuck
The same pattern crops up across most manufacturers’ websites. The technical detail is there, but it’s buried in static PDFs that search engines struggle to read and AI tools can’t summarise. Product pages speak in marketing language rather than answering the actual compliance or performance question a specifier has. Worse still, a lot of the best knowledge and expertise never makes it online at all. It lives with technical managers and product engineers and only gets passed on when an enquiry becomes a phone call.
This isn’t really a content problem, it’s a findability problem. And findability comes down to SEO and GEO more than people realise. A search engine can only rank what it can crawl and understand. A PDF with no proper text behind it, a site with poor metadata and pages that were never built with search in mind all fall behind a competitor’s site that’s simply easier for Google, or now an AI tool, to read. The truth is, it doesn’t matter how good the product or expertise is.
What buyers are asking
Before a manufacturer hears from a prospect, they’ve already asked a handful of questions: does this meet a specific regulation, how does it stack up against a competitor, what’s involved in installing or maintaining it, has it actually been used successfully on a similar project? There’s nothing complex here. These are specific, answerable questions. The answers just need to be somewhere a buyer, or an AI assistant, can actually reach.
Too often, the real answer only exists in a PDF built for print, or in a technical specialist’s head who isn’t part of the digital conversation at all. A buyer who can’t find a clear answer won’t wait around, they’ll go to whoever’s website did answer it or draw their own conclusion from whatever happened to rank, which isn’t always the most reliable source.
Turning knowledge into something people can find
The fix isn’t a rebrand or a bigger marketing budget. It’s treating the technical expertise you already have as content to be published and kept up-to-date, rather than something that only gets handed over once a lead is through the door. That means turning spec sheets and brochures into web content that answers real buyer questions, written in a way a search engine and an AI system can actually parse. It means taking the knowledge and expertise sitting with your engineers and turning it into FAQs, comparisons and guidance that lives online permanently, not buried in someone’s inbox.
This is where a strong digital presence and a solid SEO strategy really earn their keep. They’re not bolted on afterwards; they’re an integral tool that helps decide whether any of this gets seen at all. That means writing pages around the terms buyers actually search for rather than internal jargon and getting the technical basics right.
You need a clean site structure, fast load times and structured data that helps search engines and AI tools understand what a page is about. Then it’s a case of keeping content current instead of publishing it once and forgetting about it. A manufacturer with brilliant products but a weak digital presence is, in practical terms, invisible to the buyers doing their early research.
Get this right and it changes when a manufacturer enters the buying process. Instead of getting a call once the shortlist’s already set or missing out entirely, manufacturers with a strong digital presence get pulled into the conversation while the shortlist is still being built, because they’re the ones who actually answered the question, possessed the expertise and were trusted by a search engine enough to rank.
Manufacturing expertise doesn’t count for much if nobody can find it. The businesses that figure this out first won’t necessarily know more than everyone else. They’ll just be the ones buyers can actually find.
