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Why this page exists

You are about to sign a 12-month retainer with a foreign agency you have never worked with before. The price of a quiet first 90 days is, for most distributors, between $9,000 and $24,000. That is a lot of money to spend on faith.

Alfred wrote this page so you do not have to spend any of it on faith. Below is the exact 90-day playbook Lobit runs when a $5M to $50M B2B industrial distributor signs a retainer. Day by day, deliverable by deliverable, with the proof-of-life metrics we will hand you on day 90 and the way the next nine months compound on top.

If a competing agency cannot give you something equivalent to what you are about to read, that is information. Use it.

[Image suggestion: a clean Gantt-style visual showing the four phases — Audit, Foundation, Acceleration, Proof — across days 1 to 90]

What we promise on day 0, before the first invoice clears

Three things we put in writing before you sign:

(1) Capped capacity. Lobit takes a maximum of 12 active retainer clients globally. That is the founder-led promise. If we are at capacity, we tell you and put you on a 60-day waitlist. We do not sell what we cannot deliver.

(2) Money-back guarantee on the technical audit. If the first 30-day audit does not surface findings that the in-house team or the previous agency missed, the audit fee is refunded. No clauses. We have refunded it three times in the past four years. It is real.

(3) Founder visibility on every account. Neven is on every kickoff, every monthly review, and every quarterly strategy call. You are not handed off to a junior account manager who reads from a slide template. If that matters to you (it should), this is the difference.

Phase 1, Days 1 to 14: The Forensic Audit

What you are buying in the first two weeks is the brutal honest picture of where your organic and AI-search visibility stands today — and which specific 20 issues are costing you the most traffic right now.

We do this in three streams running in parallel.

Stream A — Technical SEO audit

Lobit's senior technical SEO runs a full crawl with Sitebulb and Screaming Frog, parses your last 90 days of server log files, and pulls a year of Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster data. We are specifically looking for:

• Crawl budget waste: how many crawl requests Googlebot spends on parameter URLs, faceted-navigation combinations, internal search results, and dead PDPs. On a typical $20M distributor we find 40% to 70% of crawl budget being wasted.
• JavaScript rendering failures: Is the PDP content rendering server-side or only client-side? Are the canonical, schema, breadcrumb, and price visible in the initial HTML response? Lobit specifically checks Hydrogen, Stencil, BigCommerce headless, Adobe Commerce PWA Studio, and any custom React or Vue front-end.
• Indexation hygiene: What is indexed that should not be, and what is not indexed that should be. Faceted combinations, search results, internal preview URLs, abandoned PDPs, duplicate manufacturer variants.
• Schema gaps: Per-PDP audit of Product, Offer, additionalProperty, AggregateRating, BreadcrumbList, Organization, shippingDetails, hasMerchantReturnPolicy. Reported as a completeness percentage.
• Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift on the templates that drive the most revenue (homepage, category, PDP, search, checkout). Separate reporting for mobile and desktop, and separate reporting for first-time and returning visitors.
• Hreflang and international: If you serve US, UK, CA, AU from one root domain or subdomains, every hreflang pair is validated. We find errors here in roughly 4 out of 5 multi-region audits.

Stream B — AI Search Visibility benchmark

This is the GEO half of the audit and it is where Lobit gets ahead of generalist agencies who still think SEO ends at the blue link. We run your top 100 commercial and informational queries through ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Bing Copilot, and Claude search. We log:

• Citation share: what percentage of answer windows cite your domain
• Citation rank: when you are cited, in what position relative to other domains
• Competitive citation share: which competitors (including Amazon Business, Grainger, MSC Industrial, Fastenal, ThomasNet) get cited more, and on which query clusters
• llms.txt and robots check: is your domain blocking GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, OAI-SearchBot, Google-Extended? (Half of new clients are accidentally blocking at least one.)
• Entity completeness audit: Wikidata, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, ThomasNet, IndustrySelect, ISA, NAW, AFDA, NIBA listings. Are sameAs URLs populated? Is your Organization schema complete and consistent across the web?

Stream C — Commercial and competitor mapping

In parallel, Lobit's strategy lead maps your competitive set:

• Your top 5 direct distributor competitors (named, not just "the market")
• The Tier-1 nationals you are losing share to (Grainger, MSC Industrial, Fastenal, RS Components depending on vertical)
• The marketplaces eating your long tail (Amazon Business, ThomasNet, Alibaba on certain categories)
• Where each is winning by query cluster, by SERP feature, and by AI Overview citation

By day 14, you have a 35- to 50-page audit deck. We walk you through it on a 90-minute call. You get the raw data. You see the 20 issues ranked by traffic exposure. Nothing is hidden.

Phase 2, Days 15 to 45: Foundation — The Fixes That Move Numbers Inside 90 Days

The audit told us what is broken. Phase 2 is when we fix the high-leverage 20%. These are the moves that, in our experience across 40+ mid-market industrial distributors, deliver visible results inside the 90-day window.

Week 3: schema rollout across PDPs

We deploy or correct the Product, Offer, additionalProperty, AggregateRating, shippingDetails, hasMerchantReturnPolicy, BreadcrumbList, and Organization schema across your full PDP set. The right structured-data implementation is the single highest-ROI technical move on a B2B catalog, because it both improves Google rich results and dramatically raises citation odds in AI Overviews, Perplexity, and ChatGPT search.

If you are on Shopify Plus we write the changes into the theme. On BigCommerce, into Stencil. On Adobe Commerce, into the schema module. We do not ship a "JSON-LD spec" and walk away. Lobit deploys, validates with the Schema.org validator and Rich Results test, and monitors for regressions for 30 days.

Week 4: faceted-navigation indexation strategy

Most distributor sites have one of two problems on faceted navigation: too much indexed (every filter combination open to Google, creating tens of thousands of thin near-duplicates) or too little indexed (every filter behind JavaScript with no crawlable URL).

Lobit builds a 5-tier indexation hierarchy with explicit canonical and noindex rules. The cornerstone blog on this is at Faceted Navigation for B2B Distributor Catalogs. The principle: indexed combinations must have search demand, must be unique, and must convert. Everything else is canonicalized or noindexed.

Week 5: llms.txt and AI crawler hygiene

Publish llms.txt at the root with a curated map of pillar guides, comparison pages, certification content, application landing pages, and high-quality PDPs. Verify GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, OAI-SearchBot, Google-Extended, and Bingbot are allowed. Validate entity completeness across LinkedIn, Wikidata, Crunchbase, ThomasNet, and the relevant trade associations (NAW, NIBA, AFDA, ISA, ISSA, NACD).

Week 6: application landing-page architecture

We architect the application landing pages that bridge the gap between how buyers search (by application) and how your catalog is structured (by manufacturer hierarchy). For an abrasives distributor we built 47 application landing pages in this phase, each mapped to a procurement-decision intent like "flap disc selection for stainless steel weld blending" or "cut-off wheel grit progression for aluminum extrusion finishing."

By day 45 you should be looking at:

• 80% to 100% schema completeness across PDPs (up from a typical 30% to 50%)
• Crawl budget waste cut by 40% to 60%
• llms.txt live, AI crawlers verified
• First wave of application landing pages either live or in production
• A clear, prioritized 6-month content roadmap

Phase 3, Days 46 to 75: Acceleration — Content, Authority, and Conversion

In phase 3 the work shifts from "fix what is broken" to "build what compounds."

Cornerstone pillar guide #1

Lobit writes one pillar guide per quarter, 3,000 to 6,000 words, technically dense, written with a senior technical SEO and (where you have one) your in-house engineer or product manager. Topics on a typical engagement:

• "The 2026 Selection Guide for [your largest product family]"
• "Compliance handbook: ANSI / OSHA / EN / ISO / AS-NZS for [your category]"
• "Procurement integration guide: punch-out, OCI, cXML, Coupa, Ariba, SAP"

The pillar guide is the citation magnet. The cluster posts (six to twelve per pillar) ladder up to it.

Digital PR and entity authority

We open the trade-press and industry-association programme. Modern Distribution Management, Industrial Distribution, MDM, Distribution Strategy Group, ThomasNet news, IndustryWeek, NAW, NIBA, AFDA, ISA, NACD, ISSA. Co-marketing with the manufacturers in your line card. Where notability is real, Wikidata or Wikipedia entries for your company and its founders.

Conversion rate optimisation on recovered pages

By day 75 some of the work in phase 2 is already showing recovered traffic. We make sure that traffic converts. CRO on category and PDP templates: above-the-fold trust signals (punch-out ready, net-30, customer-specific catalogs, same-day will-call, sales engineer support), bulk-quantity pricing display, request-a-quote, contact-a-specialist, and live chat integration.

Phase 4, Days 76 to 90: Proof of Life — The Numbers We Hand You

This is the part of the page where most agencies get vague. Lobit does not.

What you will see on day 90, in writing

The exact KPIs we report on day 90, every Lobit engagement, with the typical mid-market industrial-distributor benchmark in brackets:

• Indexed pages, healthy vs unhealthy (target: 30% to 60% reduction in unhealthy)
• Crawl budget allocation (target: 40%+ shift toward commercial pages)
• Schema completeness (target: 90%+ on the top 200 commercial PDPs)
• Core Web Vitals: LCP, INP, CLS by template, mobile and desktop (target: green on the top 5 revenue templates)
• Non-brand organic clicks (target: 5% to 12% lift inside 90 days; the big lift compounds in months 4 to 9)
• AI Overview / ChatGPT / Perplexity / Gemini citation share on your top 100 queries (target: 50% to 200% lift)
• Application landing pages live and indexed (target: 20 to 60 pages)
• Pillar guides live or in final draft (target: 1 live, 2 in production)
• Trade-press, association mentions, and high-quality backlinks earned (target: 4 to 8)
• Conversion rate on recovered pages (target: 10% to 25% lift)

We give you the dashboard, the methodology, and the raw data. You do not need to take our word for anything. If you want to verify, every number is reproducible from Google Search Console, GA4, Sitebulb, and the GEO monitor you choose.

The 12-month roadmap

On day 90 we hand you the 12-month roadmap for months 4 to 12. By this point we have enough data on your catalog, your conversion funnel, and your competitive set to write a roadmap with real specificity. Not a slide deck of buzzwords. A month-by-month deployment plan with named deliverables, expected traffic ranges, and the revenue model behind each.

What happens after day 90 (if you keep going)

The 12-month retainer covers:

• Two more cornerstone pillar guides (months 4 to 6 and months 7 to 9)
• 12 to 18 cluster posts
• Continued schema, technical, and Core Web Vitals optimisation
• AI Overview citation engineering and monthly GEO scorecard
• Digital PR and entity-authority programme
• Quarterly strategic reviews with Neven and the senior team
• Monthly performance reporting with reproducible methodology

The compounding effect of the work is what matters. On the abrasives client we mentioned earlier, the curve goes: +8% non-brand organic clicks at day 90, +24% at day 180, +51% at day 270, +71% at day 365. Citation share over the same period: 4.1% to 11.2% to 19.4% to 31.7%. That is the shape of a B2B industrial SEO engagement done right.

Five honest questions to ask before you sign

If you are evaluating Lobit or any other agency, ask these:

1. "Show me a 90-day deliverable plan with specific KPIs in writing." If they cannot, they do not have a process.
2. "What is your client cap? How many active retainers do you have right now?" Founder-led agencies cap. Body-shops do not.
3. "Walk me through your AI Search Visibility audit methodology. How do you measure citation share?" If they have not built a GEO methodology by 2026, they are behind.
4. "What is your schema completeness benchmark on PDPs? How do you measure it?" The right answer involves specific attributes (additionalProperty, gtin, mpn, hasMerchantReturnPolicy, shippingDetails) and a percentage.
5. "Who is the senior person on my account on day 90, day 180, and day 365?" If the answer changes between calls or is vague, that is your answer.

Lobit will give you the same five answers every time you ask. That is the point.

The next step

The cheapest, fastest way to see how Lobit thinks before signing a retainer is the AI Search Visibility Audit. $1,950 starter / $3,200 standard / $5,400 enterprise. It opens the door to the full programme, and it tells you exactly how much organic share you are losing to Amazon Business and the entrenched nationals.

If you are further along and want to talk retainer:

Book a 30-minute call with Neven →

P.S. The simplest version of this whole page: Lobit will tell you, in writing, exactly what you get on day 30, day 60, and day 90. If a competing agency cannot do that, the 12-month retainer is not actually a 12-month retainer. It is a 12-month gamble. Do not gamble with $50,000.

Written by Alfred, Lobit's senior copy and strategy partner.

Related reading:

• SEO for Industrial Distributors (service page)
• Pricing and Engagement Model
• Money-back Guarantee
• Case Studies
• AI Search Visibility Audit
• Buyer's Guide: How to Hire an SEO Agency for B2B Industrial Distribution

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