Symptoms you may be seeing
- Your sales team sends the catalogue and company profile on every first call.The facts live in PDFs and in people's heads, not on pages a buyer can open and forward.
The moment it matters
A buyer at a site office searches for your product on his phone, over mobile data, to check one dimension before a meeting.
What the buyer sees
A product page with a photograph, two lines of description and a button: "Download catalogue (38 MB)". The catalogue opens after a long wait, and the table he needs is on page 27, set in small type.
Many catalogues are exported from design software as pictures of pages. A person can read them. Search engines and assistants see an image.
What it costs you
The buyer who needs one figure does not download 38 MB on a site visit. He looks at the next supplier.
A PDF can rank on Google, but it carries no quote route, no menu and none of your company's context, and an AI assistant looking for "which manufacturers make this size" usually draws on web pages first.
What the buyer is asking at this point
"Do you have CAD or BIM files we can use in our design?"
He is checkingWhether his designer can place your product straight into the layout, which tends to keep it in the specification.
A good answerDWG or DXF drawings, STEP models for components and equipment, and BIM objects for building products, downloadable from the product page and matching the current datasheet.
"Do you have a datasheet I can forward to my consultant?"
He is checkingWhether he can pass your product on without rewriting it himself.
A good answerA short, dated, text-based datasheet per product or family, one tap from the product page.
"Do you have a company profile I can file?"
He is checkingPaperwork for his vendor file.
A good answerA dated company profile, downloadable from the about page, with the same facts as the website.
"Do you have installation guides or drawings?"
He is checkingWhether his site team can work without calling you.
A good answerInstallation guides, fixing details and drawings, downloadable from the product page.
All 62 questions industrial buyers ask, with good answers →
Check your own website in two minutes
- Pick three facts from your catalogue: a size range, a grade and a standard. Can each be found, written as text, on the product page itself?
- Open your catalogue PDF and try to select a line of text. If you cannot, the PDF is made of pictures.
- Look at the file size. Anything over a few megabytes is slow on mobile data.
What good looks like
- Every fact a buyer needs appears on the product page, as text.
- The PDF becomes the extra, for forwarding: a short datasheet per product or family, dated, with selectable text.
- The figures on the page and in the PDF come from the same sheet and agree.
How this gets put right
This problem rarely comes alone. It usually shares a cause with others on this list: a website written once, years ago, without the facts the plant and the sales team hold. Patching one page at a time seldom changes what a buyer concludes.
The AI Search Visibility Blueprint shows how far your own site has this and every related problem, how Google and the AI assistants read it today, and what to correct in what order. A Website Transformation rebuilds the site from your own documents so the whole set is put right together, and measures what moves each month.
Written by Arun Agrawal, founder of EbizIndia and author of Before the Buyer Calls, a free guide to what industrial buyers check on a supplier's website.