Utility energética B2B: 5,2x más leads cualificados para venta desde búsqueda orgánica
- +31%Organic impressions YoY
- +24.4%Average ranking position improvement
- −15%Bounce rate vs prior year
- +52%Paid search conversions
A publicly-listed German energy utility supplying electricity and natural gas to industrial customers, plus a portfolio of B2B energy partners. The brief was both organic and paid search, but organic was the harder, slower, more interesting half of the job. Inside a highly-regulated category, with an enormous internal stakeholder map, and a website architecture inherited from years of mergers and rebrands.
The starting point: not a technical problem, a coordination problem
Energy utilities serving industrial customers have very specific demands of performance marketing. Long deliberation cycles, procurement-led decisions, regulated language, contract-heavy buying. We were brought in to lift organic traffic and qualified leads — but quickly learned the technical fixes were the easy part. The actual constraint was internal: getting changes approved and deployed inside a regulated, listed organisation moves at the pace of the slowest stakeholder, not the fastest SEO recommendation.
The discovery: “Rome wasn’t built in a day”
A familiar idea inside any large enterprise — less familiar to the agile, smaller agencies that partner with them. Lifting organic for this utility required more than metadata clean-up, mobile-friendliness fixes and Core Web Vitals remediation. It required patience and relationship-building as much as technical SEO skill.
We weren’t initially briefed to advise on content changes or on-page optimisation. But any good B2B SEO partner knows technical correctness alone doesn’t move the chart — good content and a strong user experience do. So we expanded the scope of the conversation, slowly, through trust earned issue by issue.
The reality: regulated, listed, careful
It sounds simple. A few changes to a website and the metrics improve. In a listed Goliath of this size, in a regulated industry where even the right kind of customer communication can sometimes be considered wrong, the stakeholders are cautious, the systems and processes are rigid, and change takes time.
Through patient, consistent collaboration with many internal stakeholders — many of whom were themselves implementing or optimising systems and guiding the business through digital transformation — changes began to land. Slowly at first, then in a steadier rhythm as the relationship strengthened.
The mechanic: organic and paid, running as one
Alongside the SEO programme we ran a B2B performance-marketing strategy that combined paid search on Google Ads and Bing Ads with paid LinkedIn and Xing campaigns — the channels procurement decision-makers in German industrial buying actually use. Our cross-channel analysis showed a measurable overlap of at least 5% between paid and organic search at the conversion layer. We still believe a successful search strategy combines both organic and paid effort, deliberately, not as competing budgets.
- Technical SEO (metadata, mobile-friendliness, Core Web Vitals, schema, internal linking)
- Content and on-page optimisation, brought in scope as the relationship developed
- Paid search on Google Ads & Bing Ads, with B2B-specific bid and audience strategy
- Paid LinkedIn and Xing campaigns targeting industrial procurement and energy buyers
- Joined-up analytics so the overlap between paid and organic was visible and managed, not guessed at
The result: chart-moving, slowly, then steadily
- +31% organic impressions YoY — visibility built deliberately, in the queries that matter.
- +24.4% average ranking position — a structural lift, not a spike.
- −15% bounce rate — the on-page work was matching landing pages to intent.
- +42% pages per session and +67% average session duration — visitors finding what they came for.
- +52% paid search conversions — the paid programme compounding alongside organic, not cannibalising it.
“We can only speak positively about working with pmax. They took over Google Ads, Bing and LinkedIn ads, and ran combined cross-channel campaigns alongside that. We’re a pure-B2B energy supplier, so not a simple environment. Philipp ran a very deliberate audience analysis and we were able to generate some very interesting leads. The collaboration was a pleasure. Even when things got hot, he was always reachable and delivered — including spontaneous ideas — in a way that more than satisfied us.”
— Marketing lead, B2B energy supplier (Germany)Being a good partner means wearing many hats — many that don’t fit, many you’re not used to, many that frankly are somebody else’s hat. It means taking the call at 5:30pm on a Friday, holding a one-hour discussion on something you weren’t briefed for, and understanding that people inside large organisations often need to clear many hurdles to move anything forward. Patience, understanding, and the steady building of good relationships. That’s what makes the chart move when the brief is “rank this regulated, listed, complex business”.