From 144 clicks a month to 2.9K for an auto parts distributor
Anonymised case study: a UAE auto parts distributor grew from 144 to 2,900 organic clicks a month, average position 26.5 to 6.6.
Numbers from the client's own reporting
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| monthly organic clicks (144 → 2.9K) | +1,914% |
| average position, all keywords | 26.5 → 6.6 |
| total ranking keywords | 5,928 |
| clicks, first 16 months | 23.5K |
| impressions, first 16 months | 2.88M |
| monthly impressions, Jun 2024 → Nov 2025 | 7.2K → 518K |
| pages cited in AI search | 394 |
| Period | Aug 2024 – Jan 2026 |
Positions from the November 2025 ranking report; volumes are UAE monthly search volume. Click and impression figures are from the monthly Search Console reports, June 2025 to March 2026.
The situation, goals & challenges
The distributor sells the full range of parts — brakes, suspension, filters, bearings, batteries, water pumps — across the UAE, and almost none of it was reachable through search.
In June 2024, before any work started, the site took 144 organic clicks and 7,230 impressions in a month at an average position of 26.5. The category is held by international parts catalogues and marketplaces with a decade of domain history, and by classifieds that stock nothing at all.
SEO strategy for auto parts distribution
Parts retail search splits between people who know the part they need and people describing a symptom or a shape. The catalogues own the first group. The second group is far larger, almost uncontested, and ends in the same purchase — so that is where the programme started.
Rank the part name, not the part number
"Parts of a car inside", "auto parts names", "engine parts" — identification queries carry real volume and almost no commercial competition, because no catalogue bothers to answer them.
Answer the symptom
A wheel bearing is bought after a noise, a water pump after an overheat. Symptom guides catch the buyer at the moment of diagnosis and route them to the right category page.
Feed the catalogue from the guides
Every guide links into the brake, suspension, bearing or filter category it belongs to, so the informational library compounds the pages that actually sell.
Take the category head term
The homepage was structured to rank for the category itself rather than only the brand, and reached position 2 for "autoparts" in the UAE at 4,400 monthly searches.
Make a large catalogue legible
Product and organisation schema, crawl hygiene and internal linking across a wide range of parts, so the depth of the catalogue became an asset to search engines instead of a liability.
Numbers that speak louder than claims
All figures from the client's own Search Console, rank trackers and delivery workbooks, recorded on the dates shown.
Page-one positions for high-value queries
Month by month, Search Console
| Reporting month | Clicks | Impressions | Avg. position |
|---|---|---|---|
| June 2024 (baseline) | 144 | 7.2K | 26.5 |
| June 2025 | 2.22K | 305K | 18.1 |
| September 2025 | 2.34K | 324K | 13.6 |
| October 2025 | 2.82K | 363K | 8.1 |
| November 2025 | 2.90K | 518K | 6.6 |
Figures as reported in the client's Search Console each month. November 2025 was the strongest month of the engagement. The June 2024 baseline predates the engagement, which began in August 2024.
Where the site ranked, October → November 2025
| Position bracket | October | November |
|---|---|---|
| Top 3 | 37 | 39 |
| Positions 4–10 | 59 | 60 |
| Positions 11–100 | 21 | 18 |
| Not ranking | 8 | 8 |
Tracked commercial set. Movement out of 11–100 is keywords climbing into the top ten.
Visibility inside AI search
| Surface | Cited pages |
|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 182 |
| Google AI Mode | 134 |
| Google AI Overviews | 125 |
| Gemini | 51 |
| All surfaces, deduplicated | 394 |
Measured March 2026. The guide library turned out to be exactly what assistants quote when someone asks what a part is called or why it fails. Per-surface counts add up to more than the total because a page quoted by two assistants is counted once in each.
What we delivered
- Monthly organic clicks from 144 to 2,900 — twenty times the pre-engagement baseline
- Monthly impressions from 7,230 to 518,000
- Average position across the tracked set from 26.5 to 6.6
- 39 keywords in the top three, and the homepage at position 2 for the category head term
- 394 pages cited across four AI surfaces
How it unfolded
A note on this engagement
The figures on this page cover the period from August 2024 to January 2026, the peak of the programme. From early January 2026 the category entered one of the longest stretches of search volatility in recent years, followed by Google's March 2026 spam and core updates, which moved rankings on more than half of all websites and cost many sites 20–35% of their traffic. The same weeks brought a sharp demand shock in the UAE market. Through that period the product catalogue on the site was not being updated, which removes the freshness and depth advantage the content programme had been built on, and the engagement ended. Search traffic has since settled below the November 2025 peak while the site retains 5,928 ranking keywords and a substantial AI citation footprint. We publish this case study on the results achieved during the engagement, and are happy to walk through the full reporting history, including the decline, on request.
The verdict: strategic SEO transforms businesses
A parts catalogue that nobody could find became the answer to the question buyers actually ask, which is what the part is called and why it failed. The lesson in the second half of this story is the one worth paying attention to: organic visibility is a position you hold, not a result you bank.
Kanwal Shahzad is a founder, strategist and AI enthusiast with 20 years of experience spanning finance, digital marketing and AI. She started her journey at EY, then spent a decade building Digidot into one of the region's pioneering AI-powered agencies. Today she leads two companies, including aisfy.ai at DIFC AI Campus — governance-first AI infrastructure designed to embed compliance, ethics and resilience at the core of business growth.
Services used: Web Development · SEO Dubai · AEO & GEO · Sector: Automotive · All case studies
