It shows them to people, but so low down that nobody clicks — because the pages say almost nothing about the product, some of the category pages point Google at dead links, and the blog, where all of CSG's traffic is, never sends anyone to the catalog.
| Clicks from Google | Times shown in Google | Average position | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Whole site | 6,954 | 1.31 million | 11 |
| All 257 product pages together | 47 | 7,383 | 16 |
| The 69 products launched May–June (ITW Nexus buckles + BUMAX) | 1 | 145 | – |
| BUMAX product line | 0 | 431 | 27 |
Plain words: out of every 100 clicks CSG gets from Google, fewer than 1 lands on a product page. The blog gets 83 of them.
| Page group | Clicks |
|---|---|
| Whole site | 6,954 |
| Product pages | 47 |
Here's what that looks like from Google's side of the screen.
The blog is a busy shop window on the high street — 5,763 people walked in last quarter. The catalog is a back room with the lights off: no signs from the shop floor point to it, the shelves have labels but no spec sheets, and three of the doors are marked "this way" to rooms that don't exist. Google is the customer standing at the window. It can see the back room exists; it has no reason to walk in.
Fix them in this order — most of the damage sits at the top of the list.
Every one of the 257 product pages is under 300 words (typical: 179). None has a spec table, a datasheet PDF, a price, a lead time, or Google's "Product" markup.
An engineer searching "bumax 88 hex bolt" wants sizes, grades, standards, strength. Google ranks the page that answers that. A page that doesn't answer it is ranked below the ones that do — every time.
/products/gt/gtzp/ — title "GTZP | CSG", 149 words, and its first sentence is word-for-word the same as /products/gt/gt-zip-line/. The page that ranks #1 for "compression limiters" (spirol.com) has 3,316 words, 2 spec tables, 7 PDFs and a quote form.
Change the product template once (spec table, datasheet link, short "when to use this" paragraph, quote form), then fill it in — new products first.
Template in weeks 3–4; the 69 new products and 15 near-page-1 products filled by week 6.
The live pages for the ITW Nexus buckle categories tell Google "the real version of me is at /products/itw-nexus/…" — and three of those addresses return "page not found". They are still listed in the sitemap.
Google trusts that note. It drops the live page and finds nothing at the address it was sent to. Result: the 23-product "specialty buckles" category has NO page in Google at all (checked today with URL Inspection: both addresses "not on Google").
/products/specialty-buckles/ (works, 23 products) → says its real address is /products/itw-nexus/specialty-buckles/ → that is a 404. Same for cam-buckles and sr-buckles. /products/itw-nexus/gt/ redirects to a single product instead of the category.
Pick one address per category, make it point to itself, redirect the other, fix the sitemap. One developer, one day.
Week 1. Do this before anything else — nothing else for the buckle launch can work until it's done.
Ten products exist twice (the second copy ends in "-2"). BUMAX exists three times over: January pages under /stainless/, February pages under /bumax/, and the June re-adds.
Google has to guess which copy is the real one and splits whatever credit the product has between them. Three weak pages instead of one decent one.
BUMAX Lock is at /products/stainless/bumax-lock/ AND /products/bumax/bumax-lock-2/. BUMAX 88 is at /products/bumax/bumax-88/ (position 40) AND /products/stainless/bumax-88-109/. Google Search Console already flags some of these as "Duplicate — Google chose a different canonical".
Keep one page per product (the one with the better title), redirect the rest to it.
Week 1–2.
273 blog posts bring in 83% of all clicks. Only 11 of them link to any product or category. 254 of the 257 products get zero links from the blog; all 69 new products get zero.
Links inside the site are how Google learns which pages matter. The blog is the only part of CSG's site with authority, and it keeps all of it to itself.
/bumax-fasteners/ (the BUMAX landing page) is CSG's best BUMAX page — 23 clicks, shown 4,937 times, position 8.6, and it ranks #4–6 on Google for "bumax bolts" — yet it links to zero BUMAX products. The thread-engagement post was shown 46,082 times and links to no product.
Add links from the top 30 blog posts to the matching category and 2–3 products; make /bumax-fasteners/ link to every BUMAX grade and product.
Weeks 2–4 (the BUMAX hub links can be done in an afternoon in week 1).
The new pages are named after part numbers and brand names. The brand searches are tiny and already owned by the brand's own website; the big searches are for the product TYPE, and those land on CSG category pages with 45–70 words.
You can't win "bumax 88" from bumax-fasteners.com (it holds 5 of the top 10). But "threaded inserts" (5,400 searches a month in the US) currently lands on a CSG category page with 57 words and no description at all.
"bumax 88" = 70 searches/month, CSG absent from the top 20. "itw nexus buckles" = 40/month, na.itwnexus.com is #1. "military buckles" brings up belt buckles — wrong meaning. Meanwhile: rivet nuts 3,400/month, side release buckle 500, cobra buckle 1,100, cam buckle 400 — no CSG page targets any of them. Half of the BUMAX impressions CSG gets are German searches ("bumax schrauben").
Turn the 40 category pages into proper buyer pages (what it is, how to choose, sizes/materials table, industries, quote form) aimed at the product-type searches; position CSG as "US stocking distributor of BUMAX / ITW Nexus", not as a copy of the brand site.
7 priority categories in weeks 3–6 (threaded inserts, rivet nuts, clinch nuts, compression limiters, military & tactical hardware, BUMAX, structural fasteners); the rest by week 12.
No product page has a quote form, a price, stock status or a lead time. The only button is the site-wide "Request a Quote" in the header.
The few engineers who do arrive have to leave the page to ask anything, and because the native form isn't counted as a key event in GA4 (found in July), CSG can't even see which pages produce leads.
spirol.com, jhpfasteners.com and ezlok.com all have the quote/sample form ON the product page.
Put a short RFQ form (part, quantity, material, drawing upload) on every product and category page; count it in GA4.
Form in the template in weeks 3–4; GA4 key event in week 1 (10 minutes).
CSG's Ahrefs Domain Rating is 20; the sites beating its product pages are 30–38. Link growth over the last six months (+370 sites) is mostly directories and paid-link sellers Ahrefs flags as spam — they don't help. What helps: being listed on the brand owners' "where to buy" pages (BUMAX, ITW Nexus, Bollhoff, Sherex) and a few industry links pointing at CATEGORY pages. Weeks 7–12.
Here's how CSG answers each one today.
| Question | Answer today | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Do people search for this? | Yesfor product types; barely for brand names | threaded inserts 5,400/mo; "bumax 88" 70/mo |
| Does Google have the page? | Mostlyyes for products; NO for the buckle categories | 742 pages indexed; specialty-buckles category not on Google |
| Does the page deserve to rank? | No | 179 words, no specs, copied sentences |
| Does it rank? | Lowpage 2–3 | products average position 16; BUMAX 27 |
| Do people click? | No | 189 of 212 shown product pages got 0 clicks |
| Can they enquire on the page? | No | 0 of 257 pages have a form |
The chain breaks at "does the page deserve to rank." Everything before it is fine or fixable in a day; everything after it follows from it.
Each phase has a way to check it worked before moving to the next.
These don't need the template rebuild — they need a rewrite.
| Page | Shown | Position | Clicks | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| /products/ (catalog hub) | 1,460 | 13 | 2 | keyword-led title + description |
| /products/structural-fasteners/ | 393 | 8.2 | 0 | title "Structural Fasteners – A325/A490/F3125 bolts, US stock" + description |
| /products/bolts-screws/raised-countersunk-head-screw-with-phillips/ | 287 | 9.8 | 0 | spec line in title + description |
| /products/washers/spherical-washers/ | 1,279 | 22.8 | 3 | add sizes/standards; "spherical washers" alone was shown 485 times |
| /bumax-fasteners/ | 4,937 | 8.6 | 23 | link to every BUMAX product (afternoon's work) |
| /products/compression-limiters/ | 46 | 48.6 | 0 | the BLOG ranks #7 for this term with 1,328 impressions — link it to the category and build the category page |
Everything above uses only these words.