The twelve things a buyer checks before he shortlists you.
Procurement does not read your website the way you do. It arrives with a specification, looks for four or five specific things, and leaves if it cannot find them. This is that list, in the order it usually happens.
- ✓Fabrication and structural steel
- ✓PEB and roofing
- ✓CNC and precision machining
- ✓Solar EPC and industrial equipment
If you sell to procurement teams rather than to consumers, all twelve apply.
Twelve checks, in the order a buyer makes them.
This is not a design opinion. It is the sequence a purchase manager works through when he is deciding which three suppliers to contact. Worth running against your own site before a buyer does.
Your certifications, on a page a buyer can find
ISO 9001, ISO 3834, EN 1090, CE, IBR, ASME — whichever you hold. Most fabricators have them and put them on the site as a row of logo images with no text, or on a PDF nobody opens. A buyer searching your site for ‘3834’ finds nothing, and neither does Google.
What you can actually produce
Tonnage per month, plant area, maximum span, crane capacity, machine list. Procurement shortlists on capacity before anyone picks up a phone. If it is not stated, you are compared on price alone.
Completed projects, with names or at least sectors
Three projects with photographs and a line about what each involved. Stock images are recognisable as stock, and they work against you.
A way to send you a drawing
One of the most common gaps we see. A buyer with a DWG or a PDF specification has nowhere to put it, so he sends it to whoever does have somewhere. A file upload on an enquiry form is a small piece of work and it changes who you hear from.
Your product range as pages, not one PDF
A catalogue trapped inside a PDF is invisible to Google and awkward on a phone. Every product family deserves a page that can be found, linked and shared.
Something that tells an overseas buyer you export
An export page, your IEC, the countries you have shipped to. If you have just taken an Import Export Code, your website is about to be judged by people who have never heard of you.
Real photographs of your own plant
Taken on a phone, in daylight, of your actual shop floor. They outperform any stock image and they are free.
A named human being
A person, a designation and a direct line. Procurement calls people, not enquiry forms.
A site that opens in under three seconds on a phone
Site engineers and purchase managers look you up on mobile data, often from a plant with poor signal. Every second past three roughly doubles the number who give up.
No ‘Not secure’ warning
If your site still runs on http, Chrome puts a warning in front of it before anyone reads a word. It is a free fix and it is a bad first impression.
The same phone number as your Google listing
When the listing and the website disagree, Google trusts neither and your local ranking suffers. It also means one of the two numbers is going unanswered.
Email that reaches the inbox, not the spam folder
This is the one nobody checks. If your domain has no SPF or DMARC record, the quotations you send are landing in junk folders and you will never know. It costs nothing to fix and it may be costing you orders right now.
Want this as a one-page PDF?
Printable, so you can work through it with whoever looks after your site.
Or let us run all twelve for you.
The free audit measures each of these on your own site, screenshots what it finds, and puts a figure against what it is costing you — alongside about thirty technical checks a buyer never sees but Google does. Forty-eight hours, no obligation, and it includes an honest verdict — sometimes that verdict is that your site is fine.