Sundrax: 2–4 contracts a week from organic search in a Smart City B2B niche

Sundrax LTD (London) manufactures control systems for urban and architectural lighting — a narrow Smart City B2B niche where a deal takes months to mature and buyers number in the hundreds, not millions. I joined streetlighting.sundrax.com when Next.js development had been running for over six months — and Google had been watching the construction site the whole time: the project was never closed to robots, so test pages, duplicates and empty sections had made it into the index.

First, resuscitation

Before any talk of growth, the bleeding had to stop. Cleaning the junk out of the index created a second problem — mass 404s eating the crawl budget and the search engine's trust. I set up correct redirects and error handling, then wrote and shipped a technical spec for Next.js: server-side rendering, meta tags, Schema.org markup for the products. The foundation stopped crumbling — now something could be built on it.

PPC as reconnaissance for SEO

Waiting for organic data in a niche with this deal cycle means losing a year. I launched Google Ads not for leads but for data: within weeks, paid traffic showed which "Smart Street Lighting" queries convert and which bring onlookers. Landing pages were optimised on real buyer behaviour — long before organic traffic could have produced the same statistics.

Authority you cannot buy with links

In an engineering B2B niche, decisions are made by specialists — they need expertise, not "texts for the search engine". The bet was E-E-A-T: an expert blog, a series of niche podcasts placed on trusted platforms including Apple Podcasts, our own Google Group, and a live presence on industry forums and directories. Every element worked twice: reach inside the community, and natural, authoritative backlinks.

The result: November 2023 — February 2025

• Technical errors eliminated completely; indexation of the Next.js site is stable.
• Domain Rating grew from 31 to 56.
• Organic search became a sales channel: a steady 2–4 signed contracts a week — from organic alone, ads not counted.

For a B2B manufacturer with a long deal cycle, this is what SEO is for: not rankings for their own sake, but a predictable flow of contracts from search. If your site was built with no thought for search engines — it is treatable: resuscitation first, then data, then authority.

Maxim Safianov

I work at the intersection of technical SEO and software engineering: helping sites stay visible for classic search and AI answers alike, and building the Python tooling that automates it.