42% More Leads for Coates Through Stronger Search Presence

About Coates

Coates is one of Australia’s leading equipment hire and solutions businesses, supporting customers across construction, infrastructure, engineering, industrial projects and more.

That scale is a strength, but it also makes search visibility challenging. A customer might be looking for one very specific piece of equipment, might need expert advice, or they might simply want to know where their nearest Coates branch is.

That is a lot of search territory to cover.

So for Coates, strong digital visibility meant being useful and easy to find across thousands of different customer needs, categories and locations.

The challenge

When we began working with Coates, the business already had significant scale and brand recognition. The opportunity was to make sure its digital presence reflected that position.

First, we needed a clearer view of performance

With activity spanning multiple channels and customer journeys, it was important for both teams to have a consistent understanding of what was driving customer enquiries. Better decisions start with a better view of what is happening, so measurement was one of the first pieces we focused on.

Search was a much bigger opportunity than a handful of keywords

Coates operates across a huge range of equipment categories and locations. Success was never going to come from chasing a small group of high-volume terms. We needed to strengthen Coates’ presence across a much broader range of relevant searches while continuing to compete against established brands.

And search itself was changing

Local search was becoming more important for customers looking for nearby branches and equipment. At the same time, AI platforms were starting to introduce entirely new ways for people to discover businesses. So the strategy needed to work for search today, without ignoring where search was heading next.

Our Approach

Our work with Coates focused on making the different parts of search work together, rather than treating every channel as its own little island

1. Creating a clearer picture

We started by improving measurement and building a stronger shared view of digital performance.

Instead of looking at channel metrics in isolation, we focused on the bigger question: how was digital activity contributing to genuine customer engagement and lead generation?

That gave both teams a better foundation for deciding what to prioritise, where to invest and when to adjust course.

2. Building search around real customer demand

Across paid and organic search, we deliberately took a longer view.

Paid search played an important role in capturing high intent demand from people actively looking for Coates’ products and services.

Organic search was about steadily increasing the number of relevant searches where Coates could be found and strengthening that visibility over time.

One captured demand that already existed. The other helped Coates earn a bigger share of future discovery. Working together, they gave the brand a much broader search presence.

3. Giving organic search time to do its job

SEO is rarely a story of instant gratification. Early in the partnership, organic traffic and lead volumes remained relatively stable even as rankings and visibility were improving underneath them.

It would have been easy to react to every short term movement, but we kept our focus on the longer term trend.

Ultimately, Coates’ organic visibility score increased from 20.5 in February 2024 to 47.1 by April 2025, more than doubling in just over a year.

During the same period, another 85 tracked keywords entered Google’s top 10, an increase of almost 80%.

4. Expanding where Coates could be discovered

We treated local search as part of the wider search ecosystem, helping strengthen the visibility of Coates locations for customers searching nearby.

We also began monitoring an emerging source of discovery: referrals from AI platforms.

The volumes were still relatively small, but the behaviour was worth watching. Early data showed that visitors arriving through these platforms were converting at a notably higher rate than visitors from traditional organic search.

For us, that was another reason to think about search as an evolving customer behaviour.

Final Thoughts

There’s a useful lesson in the Coates story: good search performance compounds.

The early work was about getting the fundamentals right and steadily improving where and how Coates appeared when customers went looking.

Rankings improved before leads did. Visibility grew before the commercial impact became obvious. The team stayed focused on the bigger picture, and over time those improvements began stacking up.

Now the search landscape is changing again. Customers are still using Google, but discovery is starting to happen through local results and AI search.

Coates is already seeing the first signs of that shift, cementing their presence and visibility across the rapidly transforming digital landscape.