Case Study · Growth Engineering
Kansas Castings
How I took a 30-year iron foundry from invisible to ranking in Google's AI Overview — and built the lead pipeline behind it.
- Google AI Overview ranked within 1 week
- Real inbound RFQ direct revenue generated
- 100% inbox cold-email deliverability
- 11 pages rebuilt with full schema
The challenge
Kansas Castings is a 30-year-old American iron foundry that pours specialty high-chrome white iron. The product was excellent; the web presence wasn't. The site was thin and unranked, there was no inbound pipeline, and the company was effectively invisible for the exact searches its buyers run — phrases like "white iron castings supplier." The brief: turn the site into something that finds customers.
What I built
Technical SEO & content
I rebuilt the site end-to-end through the WordPress REST API and Python scripts — rewriting titles, meta, and on-page copy across all 11 pages, and fixing a site-wide missing-H1 problem at the template level. Every page got accurate, buyer-intent content instead of filler.
Structured data
I shipped a full JSON-LD schema stack — Organization, LocalBusiness, Product, and FAQ markup — so search engines (and AI answer engines) could actually understand what the foundry makes, where, and for whom. This is the layer that made the AI Overview placement possible.
Lead capture
I built a custom RFQ quote form with server-side handling, email routing, and a database backup of every submission — debugging a hosting WAF quirk and SMTP authentication along the way so quotes actually land in the owner's inbox.
Cold-outbound system
Beyond inbound, I stood up a full outbound engine: a dedicated sending domain on Google Workspace with DKIM/SPF/DMARC and a warm-up schedule, Apollo.io for targeted prospecting by vertical, and Smartlead running multi-step sequences — reaching 100% inbox placement in deliverability testing.
Results
Within a week of launch, Kansas Castings surfaced in Google's AI Overview for a high-intent buyer query — alongside far larger national foundries. The SEO work produced a real inbound RFQ: direct revenue, not a vanity metric. The outbound system gave the owner a repeatable way to reach new buyers on top of the inbound the site now generates.