One domain, two languages and a technical catalogue buyers can now find

Anderman & Company is a family-owned British industrial distributor, founded in 1947. Anderman Ceramics supplies technical and refractory ceramics across 12 advanced materials, including alumina, zirconia, silicon carbide and boron nitride. Anderman Power Services supports high-voltage equipment manufacturers serving the UK and European electricity transmission and distribution sectors. Customers span more than 75 countries, with stock held in Kidderminster and near Orléans in France.

Webshape was engaged to bring the company’s websites together into one bilingual site at anderman.com, built for search, easy to maintain and ready for AI search. The English site went live on 20 July 2026 and the French site in early September 2026. The work has since moved onto a monthly SEO and content retainer.

Anderman’s catalogue and technical content sat mostly on earthwaterfire.com, an e-commerce-style portal first created in 1999, with a French equivalent on earthwaterfire.fr and other legacy addresses. People searched for “Anderman”, but the content lived on “earthwaterfire”. Years of backlinks and authority were split across several sites instead of building up on one.

The old platform was dated and hard to keep consistent, with no proper structure for two languages and none of the machine-readable signals AI search assistants rely on. Before launch, the domain appeared for just 82 non-brand searches, almost all between positions 20 and 60 with no clicks, and many of those were misspellings of the company name.

For an engineer specifying a ceramic part, the route from a material to the right product, datasheet and enquiry wasn’t as clear as it should be.

• Domains consolidated without losing equity. A 145-redirect migration mapped earthwaterfire.com and earthwaterfire.fr onto anderman.com: 301 (permanent) redirects for equivalent pages, and 307 (temporary) redirects where content was still being rewritten. Orphaned PDFs and datasheets route to a dedicated datasheet enquiry page, and legacy image URLs were redirected one by one. Google states that permanent redirects don’t lose PageRank, so years of authority carried across rather than starting again (Google Search Central: Redirects and Google Search).
• Two languages, one domain. English is the main version, with French under /fr/: custom French URLs, a French sitemap and hreflang tags, so both markets build authority on one domain. The translations engine is Webshape’s own, and can take more languages later.
• Materials first. All 12 materials have their own reference page with key properties, the products made from them, grades, applications and FAQs. A filterable materials library sits alongside a sortable materials comparison table.
• A catalogue that links up. 17 product categories and 12 industry pages cross-link to the materials they use, so a buyer can start from a material, a product or their industry.
• Enquiries at every step. Product pages end with a short enquiry form, and material and industry pages end with a direct route to a materials engineer. Gated technical content swaps the article for an enquiry form, then reveals it once the form is sent. An on-site AI assistant answers technical questions and captures enquiries.
• Ready for AI search. A hand-built llms.txt file (the format proposed by Jeremy Howard in September 2024: llmstxt.org) gives language models a map of the site’s key content. Crawler rules explicitly allow AI search bots (GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended) while blocking bad bots. Organisation and multi-office schema markup describes the business and its offices.
• Measured properly. GA4, cookieless Umami analytics and the Webshape lead tracker, with events for enquiries and AI assistant conversions.

In matched 31-day windows either side of the 20 July launch, clicks from Google rose 207% (72 to 221) and impressions rose 891% (2,501 to 24,793). The site now appears for 993 non-brand search terms, up from 82. Nine of the top 10 non-brand keywords didn’t appear in Google at all before launch, including “custom ceramic parts”, “cordierite” and “ceramic insulators”. In the US, anderman.com ranked position 2 for “custom ceramic parts” in both DataForSEO and Ubersuggest (late August 2026).

The material and product pages are doing the selling. In the first six weeks, 16 contact form enquiries came in from sectors including power generation, automotive, aerospace, steel and nuclear, with alumina mentioned in over half of them. AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Claude sent 20 sessions in the first month: a channel the old site received nothing from.

Next: the French site went live in early September 2026 and has no reporting yet. We’ll add French results and 90-day English figures once the data is in. The monthly retainer now focuses on deeper materials pages, industry and application pages, and expert articles reviewed by Anderman’s product team.