Getting found by fleet operators, not just EV enthusiasts

The problem

Search demand around electric vehicles is dominated by consumers, journalists and students. A campaign optimised for traffic will find all of them and almost none of the procurement manager at a state transport corporation evaluating a 200-bus tender.

Worse, the two audiences ask different questions in different language. A consumer asks about top speed and charging time. A fleet buyer asks about cost per kilometre over an eight-year service life, range degradation under full passenger load in summer heat, depot charging infrastructure requirements, and what happens to residual value. If your content answers the first set, you are invisible to the people who sign purchase orders.

What we did

Rebuilt the content architecture around procurement questions

We worked with EKA's sales team to document the questions that actually come up in commercial conversations — not keyword research, but the real objections and unknowns that stall a deal. That became the content map.

• Total cost of ownership explained with the variables a fleet operator controls
• Range behaviour under load, gradient and temperature — stated honestly, including limits
• Depot and charging infrastructure planning, including what the operator must provide
• Service network, parts availability and uptime expectations
• Category-specific content: municipal bus procurement differs from private logistics

Being candid about limitations turned out to be a competitive advantage. Fleet buyers are experienced and sceptical; a specification page that acknowledges a constraint reads as more trustworthy than one claiming universal superiority.

Answer engine optimisation alongside traditional SEO

A growing share of early-stage research now happens inside AI assistants that synthesise an answer without the buyer visiting a site. To be present in that answer, content has to be structured as retrievable, verifiable claims rather than marketing prose.

• Specifications marked up as structured data, consistent across every model
• Factual claims written to be quotable in isolation, with clear attribution
• Entity clarity so the company, product range and category relationships are unambiguous
• Comparison content that holds up when extracted out of page context

Paid media aimed at a committee, not a click

Commercial vehicle procurement involves several people over several months. Paid campaigns optimised for a single conversion event fundamentally mismodel that.

• Account structure segmented by vehicle category and buyer type, not by keyword volume
• Enquiry quality scored on fleet size and buyer role, feeding back into bidding
• Aggressive negative keyword hygiene to exclude consumer and student traffic
• Retargeting sequenced to the research stage rather than repeating the same ad
• The three separate enquiry routes unified so sales saw one queue with full context

Outcome

The programme shifted the mix rather than just the volume — fewer total enquiries that looked impressive on a dashboard, more enquiries from people with fleet authority and a live requirement. Sales conversations started further along, because the buyer had already found honest answers to the total-cost questions instead of having to extract them on a call.

The compounding effect: because we had also built the web platform, content and technical changes shipped in days rather than through a vendor handoff — and enquiry tracking reached from the first ad click through to the sales outcome.