A 13-branch plumbing, HVAC & industrial supplier's site, rebuilt so each branch shows up when a contractor searches nearby.
Northwest Pipe Fittings has supplied plumbing, HVAC, irrigation, and industrial contractors across the Upper Midwest since 1953 — 13 branches, five states, and more than 130 supplier brands on the shelf. Their own line is "if you can't find it at NWP, you can't find it locally" — which meant the site had to prove that branch by branch, not just claim it once on a homepage.
Snapshot
- Client: Northwest Pipe Fittings ()
- Industry: Plumbing, HVAC & industrial supply distribution
- Services: Development, API & Systems Integrations, Discoverability — technical & natural SEO
- Location: 13 branches across Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota & South Dakota — including Rapid City
The challenge
A single "Contact Us" page and one set of company-wide keywords don't work for a distributor whose entire pitch is local, in-stock inventory across 13 separate markets. A contractor in Butte, MT searching for pipe fittings has nothing to do with a branch in Huron, SD — but a generic multi-location template treats every branch as an interchangeable list item instead of a real place with its own address, hours, and manager. Worse, when every update has to route through a central webmaster, branch info quietly goes stale — an unplanned Saturday closure or a new branch manager's contact info sits in a request queue instead of just getting fixed the same day. The site needed each branch to be genuinely findable and current on its own, while the company still read as one 70-year-old name a contractor already trusts.
The approach
We built branch pages that function as real local pages — not one template with the city name swapped out — each carrying its own address(es), phone numbers, hours, and a branch manager profile with their own bio, tied together through a consistent site instead of 13 disconnected micro-sites. Each branch can manage that content directly: contact info, hours (including one-off changes like an unplanned Saturday closure), the manager's own bio, and a short local-market write-up about that city — without waiting on a developer or a central request queue. Technical and natural SEO were built around how contractors actually search under time pressure: by city, by trade category, and by part — not generic company-wide terms.
- Self-service branch control: each location can update its own address, phone numbers, hours (including one-off closures or schedule changes), manager bio, and local-market write-up directly — no dev ticket needed to fix a wrong phone number or post updated hours
- Location-finder and maps integration tying all 13 branches into one consistent, wayfinding-friendly experience, with real per-branch contact info and directions
- Technical and natural SEO built per branch and per trade category (plumbing & heating, mechanical & HVAC, utilities & excavation, irrigation, pump & well, industrial) instead of one generic company-wide page
- Site architecture built to hold 130+ supplier brands and six industry categories without turning into an unusable catalog dump
- Fast, mobile-first pages for a contractor checking stock and hours from a job site, not a desk
Results at a Glance
Running more than one location, and only one of them shows up in search?
If half your branches are invisible online, or every fix has to route through one person, that's a Development, Integrations, and Discoverability problem we know how to fix.
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