Mahindra Farm Equipment SEO Case Study: 257% Growth in Indexed Pages and 88% More Organic Clicks
1. Introduction
Company Overview:
Mahindra Farm Equipment operates mahindrafarmequipment.co.za, the South African web presence for Mahindra’s agricultural machinery range. The site catalogues a broad equipment portfolio tractors across the 6000, 7500, 8600 and Orchard series, alongside hay and forage machinery, small square balers, baler-wrapper combinations, horizontal feed and vertical feed mixers, seeding and crop-care implements, and post-harvesting equipment. Commercially, the site is built to generate dealer and buyer action rather than transact online: its conversion paths run through demo requests, expert enquiries, dealer applications and a download centre for product literature. South Africa is the target market.
Objective:
The campaign was commissioned to grow qualified organic visibility for Mahindra’s South African equipment range specifically, to make the full product catalogue discoverable in Google, to increase organic clicks on purchase-intent equipment queries, and to grow the volume of users reaching the site’s lead-generation assets through search.
2. Background and Challenges
Initial Situation
At the June 2024 baseline, the site’s organic position was as follows:
| Metric | June 2024 Baseline |
| Indexed pages (Google Search Console) | 65 |
| Non-HTTPS URLs flagged in Search Console | ~40 |
| Clicks top five landing pages | 539 |
| Impressions top five landing pages | 20,361 |
| Clicks ten priority queries | 204 |
| Impressions ten priority queries | 1,894 |
| Organic sessions (GA4) | 182 |
| Organic users (GA4) | 153 |
Key SEO Challenges
A catalogue that Google could not see. With 65 pages indexed against a product, commercial and corporate URL inventory considerably larger than that, the majority of the site was invisible to search.
Every un-indexed product page is a page that cannot rank, cannot receive impressions, and cannot pass internal link equity.
For a manufacturer whose commercial value sits in specific model and implements pages, this was the constraint that capped everything else.
A duplicated site across two protocols. Search Console was reporting roughly 40 URLs on HTTP alongside their HTTPS equivalents.
A site served on both protocols without enforced redirects splits crawl budget across two copies of every page, fragments link signals between them, and leaves Google to choose a canonical version itself.
On a site already struggling to get pages indexed, spending crawl allocation on a duplicate HTTP set was actively counter-productive.
Visibility concentrated in a handful of head terms. June’s query data shows clicks heavily weighted toward “mahindra tractors south africa” and “mahindra tractors” largely branded, largely top-of-funnel.
Commercial modifiers that indicate genuine purchase intent were either marginal (“mahindra tractors for sale”: 5 clicks) or entirely absent (“mahindra 6060 tractor price”: 0 clicks; “small square balers for sale in south africa”: 0 clicks).
The site was being found for its brand, not for what buyers actually search when they are close to purchasing.
Deep product pages performing far below their potential. /small-square-baler/ recorded 16 clicks from 424 impressions in June.
A dedicated product page for a named piece of equipment, in a market that searches for it by name, should not be operating at that volume a symptom of the indexation and crawl issues above rather than of demand.
3. Strategy Development
Research and Analysis
The diagnostic work prioritised Google Search Console as the primary evidence source, on the reasoning that indexation is the gating factor for every other organic metric there is no value in optimising content on pages Google has not indexed, and no value in chasing rankings for a catalogue that is only one-quarter visible.
Two analyses shaped the plan:
A protocol and indexation audit. Every URL returning on HTTP was enumerated against its HTTPS equivalent, producing a complete redirect specification a URL-by-URL mapping of the ~40 affected pages rather than a blanket rule.
Working from an explicit inventory matters on a catalogue site, because a single mis-mapped product URL sends a commercial page to the wrong destination and is difficult to detect afterwards.
Query and landing-page gap analysis. June’s Search Console query and page data was reviewed to separate branded discovery from commercial intent, and to identify where impressions existed without corresponding clicks.
Queries such as “mahindra tractors prices south africa” and “mahindra tractor price” were carrying impressions with disproportionately few clicks indicating the site was surfacing for pricing intent without a well-positioned page to satisfy it.
Goal Setting
The research translated into a sequenced plan with technical remediation deliberately placed first:
- Eliminate protocol duplication resolve every HTTP URL to HTTPS, so that crawl budget is spent on one canonical version of the site.
- Expand indexation across the product catalogue move the indexed page count from a fraction of the site toward full coverage, prioritising model and implement pages that carry commercial intent.
- Convert impressions into clicks on commercial queries grow performance on pricing, “for sale” and model-specific searches rather than on branded head terms alone.
- Hold the South African market focus measure success on the target geography rather than on aggregate global traffic.
4. Execution
Technical SEO Perspective
Problem:
~40 URLs accessible on HTTP alongside their HTTPS equivalents, splitting crawl budget and canonical signals.
Action:
A complete HTTP → HTTPS mapping was produced and implemented, covering the full URL set product pages (/tractor/, /6000-series/, /7500-series/, /orchard-series/, /horizontal-feed/, /vertical-feed-mixer/, /baler-wrapper-combination-…/, /seeding-crop-care-maintenance…/, /post-harvesting/, /implements/, /hay-and-forage-machinery/),
commercial pages (/request-a-demo/, /ask-an-expert/, /become-a-dealer/, /download-centre/, /after-sales/, /contact-us/) and corporate pages (/about-us/, /our-values/, /career/, /nampo-2023/).
Rationale:
Redirect specifications were written per-URL rather than as a blanket protocol rule, so that each commercial page resolved to its correct HTTPS counterpart and no product URL was lost to a catch-all redirect.
Result:
Google Search Console’s HTTPS report moved to 0 non-HTTPS URLs with no critical issues 100% resolution with 57 HTTPS URLs recognised.
Problem:
Only 65 pages indexed, leaving most of the equipment catalogue unable to rank.
Action:
Indexation was tracked as the primary campaign KPI through Search Console’s Page Indexing report, with the protocol consolidation removing the duplicate-URL drag on crawl efficiency.
Rationale:
On a catalogue site, indexation coverage is upstream of ranking, traffic and conversion. Fixing it first means every subsequent optimisation compounds across a larger addressable page set rather than a fraction of it.
Result:
Indexed pages rose from 65 on 30 June to 232 on 30 July a 256.9% increase (calculated), taking a majority of the catalogue from invisible to eligible to rank within a single month.
5. Implementation Timeline
| SEO initiative | Implementation / evidence window |
| HTTPS audit and URL-level redirect mapping | Redirect specification covering ~40 URLs; GSC HTTPS report chart spans early April to end of June 2024 |
| HTTP → HTTPS redirect implementation | Completed within the reporting window; 0 non-HTTPS URLs confirmed in GSC |
| Indexation monitoring and expansion | Tracked continuously; GSC Page Indexing chart spans 3 May to 24 July 2024 |
| Performance reporting | Monthly, June 2024 vs July 2024 |
6. Results
Between June and July 2024, the site moved from a state where roughly three-quarters of its catalogue was invisible to Google to one where the large majority was indexed and eligible to rank.
That structural change is visible downstream: clicks and impressions grew across every one of the top five landing pages and every one of the top ten priority queries, with the sharpest growth appearing on deep product pages and purchase-intent searches rather than on branded head terms.
SEO Performance Results
SEO Results: June vs July 2024
| Metric | June 2024 | July 2024 | Improvement |
| Indexed pages (GSC) | 65 | 232 | +256.9% |
| Non-HTTPS URLs (GSC) | ~40 | 0 | 100% resolved |
| Search clicks top 5 landing pages | 539 | 850 | +57.7% |
| Search impressions top 5 landing pages | 20,361 | 29,226 | +43.5% |
| Search clicks 10 priority queries | 204 | 383 | +87.7% |
| Search impressions 10 priority queries | 1,894 | 3,751 | +98.0% |
| Commercial queries with click visibility | 8 of 10 | 10 of 10 | 2 newly acquired |
| Organic sessions (GA4) | 182 | 1,301 | +614.84% |
| Organic users (GA4) | 153 | 1,013 | +562.09% |
| Avg. engagement time per session (GA4) | 1m 19s | 1m 35s | +20.25% |
Key Performance Highlights
+614.84% Organic sessions
+562.09% Organic users
+256.9% Indexed pages
+98.0% Search impressions across 10 priority queries
+87.7% Search clicks across 10 priority queries
100% of identified non-HTTPS URLs resolved
The Biggest Wins
Indexed pages grew from 65 to 232 (+256.9%)
This is the result that made every other result possible. A page that Google has not indexed cannot appear for any query at any position it is not competing badly, it is not competing at all.
Taking the indexed count from 65 to 232 in a month did not improve the performance of existing pages; it multiplied the number of pages capable of performing.
For a manufacturer whose commercial value is distributed across dozens of individual model and implement pages, expanding the addressable page set is worth more than incremental ranking gains on the pages that were already visible.
100% resolution of non-HTTPS URLs
Serving ~40 pages on both HTTP and HTTPS meant Googlebot was spending crawl allocation discovering duplicates of pages it had already seen, while link and relevance signals were split across two versions of each URL.
Resolving this to zero consolidated those signals onto a single canonical set and freed crawl capacity which is the most plausible mechanism behind the indexation expansion occurring in the same window.
It is also the kind of fix that is invisible in a traffic report until it is done and structurally limiting until then.
Clicks on priority queries grew 87.7%, impressions grew 98.0%
Impressions roughly doubling shows Google surfacing the site for these searches far more often a visibility gain.
Clicks growing nearly as fast shows that additional visibility converted into actual visits rather than appearing at positions too low to attract them. Growth on both sides of the ratio is a stronger signal than either alone: impression growth without click growth usually indicates ranking gains that stop short of page one.
Growth concentrated in purchase-intent language
The queries that grew fastest were the commercial ones. “mahindra tractors for sale” grew clicks 200%. “mahindra tractors prices south africa” grew impressions 296.0%.
“mahindra 6060 tractor price” and “small square balers for sale in south africa” moved from zero clicks to 14 and 9 respectively visibility that did not previously exist at all.
Meanwhile the branded head term “mahindra tractors” grew a comparatively modest 61.8%.
This distribution matters commercially: a buyer searching a specific model with “price” attached is materially closer to contacting a dealer than one searching the brand name.
A deep product page grew clicks 306.25%
/small-square-baler/ went from 16 clicks to 65, with impressions up 223.35%. Growth reaching a single-product page this far from the homepage is the clearest evidence that the indexation work benefited the long tail of the catalogue rather than concentrating gains on pages that were already performing.
It also demonstrates the commercial upside of catalogue-wide indexation: specialist equipment pages serve small, high-intent audiences that generic category pages cannot capture.
7. Business Impact
Commercial discoverability. The clearest business outcome is that Mahindra’s South African equipment catalogue became findable.
Moving from 65 to 232 indexed pages converted the majority of the product range from unreachable to reachable through search and the model-specific and pricing queries that gained visibility are precisely the searches conducted by buyers evaluating a purchase.
Reduced dependency on branded discovery. In June, the site’s organic visibility rested primarily on people already searching for Mahindra by name.
By July, non-branded and model-specific commercial queries were contributing meaningfully a healthier acquisition profile, because it reaches buyers who have not yet settled on a manufacturer.
Growth in the target geography. Analytics recorded a 598.8% increase in users from South Africa, the campaign’s target market, confirming that visibility gains landed in the geography that carries commercial value rather than in incidental international traffic.
Increased engagement with lead-generation assets. Analytics recorded file downloads rising from 32 to 216 events (+575%) and form starts from 16 to 114 (+612.5%).
These are engagements with the site’s conversion paths product literature downloads and form initiations.
8. Key Takeaways
Fix indexation before optimising anything else. With only 65 pages indexed, no amount of content or on-page work on the remaining catalogue could have produced a measurable return. Sequencing technical remediation first meant later gains compounded across 232 pages rather than 65.
Protocol duplication is a silent constraint. Forty URLs served on both HTTP and HTTPS produced no visible error and no obvious traffic loss it simply capped what the site could achieve, by dividing crawl budget and canonical signals across two copies of itself. The fix produced no direct traffic of its own; it removed the ceiling.
Map redirects at URL level, not by rule. On a catalogue site, a blanket protocol redirects risks sending commercial product pages to unintended destinations. Enumerating each HTTP URL against its HTTPS equivalent before implementation is slower, and it is the reason no product page was lost in the migration.
Judge campaigns on intent distribution, not traffic totals. The most commercially meaningful result here is not the click volume it is that growth concentrated in pricing and “for sale” queries and in deep product pages, while branded head terms grew comparatively slowly. That distribution is what turns organic visibility into dealer enquiries.
Measure against the target market. Aggregate traffic growth is easy to celebrate and easy to misread. Isolating South African users confirmed the gains were commercially relevant to a business selling farm equipment in South Africa.
Work with Ashish Bedi on Organic Growth
This campaign turned a technical constraint into catalogue-wide search visibility in a single reporting cycle by diagnosing what was actually limiting the site rather than optimising around it.
If your organic search performance is flat despite ongoing investment, the cause is often structural: pages Google cannot index, crawl budget spent on duplicates, or visibility concentrated in branded terms that reach buyers too late. Ashish Bedi works with manufacturers, financial services and enterprise brands on technical SEO, indexation and crawl efficiency, search-intent-led content strategy, and organic lead generation.