Envisage Associates

envisage associates new website

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TAKE A LOOK
envisage associates new website
INDUSTRY
Exhibitions, Interiors & Graphics
SCOPE
Planning, Design, Development & SEO

1. The Introduction

Envisage are an award-winning design and production agency based in Stoke on Trent, with locations globally. They’ve a huge list  of impressive clients such as, Samsung, 3M, Emirates, Sony, JCB, Wedgwood, GE Oil & Gas, Wagamama, Toshiba, Cote Brasserie & Bet 365 to name a few. They offer an long list of services from production through to full service solutions, including:

Brand Experiences
  • Bespoke exhibition stands
  • Event solutions
  • Pop-up Stands
  • Storage & Global Logistics
Interiors
  • Retail fit-outs
  • Brand & work spaces fit-outs
  • Bar, Cafe & Restaurant Fit-out
  • Contract Furniture
Graphics
  • Signage & wayfinding
  • Portable graphics
  • Digital content
  • 2D & 3D visualisation
  • Large Format Graphics
Digital Solutions
  • Bespoke exhibition stands
  • Event solutions
  • Pop-up Stands
  • Storage & Global Logistics

Envisage approached Digital Defined having worked with us on other digital projects previously, They wanted a new website, which reflected their Brand, solutions, & also improved their online presence within the online market.

Envisage’s previous site was a high-performance custom site built in Laravel, which offered amazing load speeds. However, the custom element became a problem when they wished to update their site. They found that only one user was able to log in at a time, page layouts and elements were heavily locked in place and most features required going back to their developer for changes which came with significant costs. Some examples they explained included:

They had videos at the top of each page, which didn’t load on mobiles and didn’t have a backup image which results in error messages

They found their brand name was misspelt in the footer of their site, but their agency wanted £250 to correct this mistake.

When their agency pushed their new site live, they didn’t make a backup and deleted years of blogs articles, losing valuable backlinks.

Ultimately, the new website failed far worse than they first thought! After one month of being live, they’d lost 75% of their traffic compared to the previous year! With a 79% drop from Organic traffic too!

Ultimately, the new website failed far worse than they first thought! After one month of being live, they’d lost 75% of their traffic compared to the previous year! With a 79% drop from Organic traffic too!

2. The Challenges

Envisage acknowledged that nearly all of the SEO traffic came to their site through brand search, and they wanted to expand their online reach and presence. The new agency offered to achieve this through creating an effective SEO and Content strategy and would deliver an SEO  optimised & device friendly website. Unfortunately, they didn’t deliver.

Further to this, the Envisage didn’t feel that the site reflected the creativity of their brand, nor did it clearly define their solutions. Envisage Associates is made up of several sub-brands which offer very different solutions and this was something they were keen to demonstrate with a new site (Shown Below).

Brand Experiences

After reaching out to the incumbent agency, we confirmed that no back-ups of the blogs existed and were also unable to find anything when we completed a deep dive ourselves. No attempt had been made to recover any of the lost links, which provide so much value for SEO.

As mentioned earlier, the new site had been custom-built which had created limitations & additional costs to Envisage, such as:

  • Only one user could edit at a time.
  • it didn’t allow for them to make edits to everything on the site themselves.
  • Videos didn’t work on mobiles and showed error messages.
  • The page layouts were static in design.
  • It didn’t have the option of adding new plugins themselves.
  • Basic SEO & website maintenance could only be completed by a developer.
  • The Sitemap submitted to Google had errors, which were not addressed.
  • The HTTP and www versions of the url weren’t redirecting.
  • Expensive AWS hosting costs.

3. The Solution

The first solution we explored was deciding which platform to build the site it. The client was very keen to return to a WordPress site, given this offered a lot of customisation & flexibility without the expense of requiring a skilled developer, Put short, WordPress has a plugin for everything, and has existed long enough that most issues are easily resolved with a quick search around.

Following this decision, we then began to explore  WordPress themes that offered a lot of compatibility with common WordPress plugins, but also allowed for us to show the creative aspect of their brand. We decided that the best theme for the new site was The Gem by CodexThemes.

Since the previous agency had already completed and shared its keyword research and content strategy, this was reviewed and updated. Once completed, the keyword research was uploaded into SEMrush to enable us to establish benchmarks for Envisage’s SEO keywords and better understand their competitor landscape on search.

Given the broad range of services Envisage offer and the huge range of clients, it was important for us to develop the content strategy further to ensure the site Digital Defined was building not only worked immediately by improving performance, but also offered them room to grow easily. So, early on in the process and plan was formed that not only considered the current site, but also the future of the site too.

Given the brand had several sub-brands and solutions, we felt an important part of the re-build was for us to clearly signpost users to the most relevant content quickly, but also add weight to those pages by writing clear and concise content which could be easily read to help users have a clearer understanding of the sub-brands and solutions, the added bonus was that this content would also benefit the sites SEO.

As with most B2B Businesses, the most valuable assets you have, are your portfolio of work. Using these on the site allows for users to quickly understand the types of brands you typically work with, the industries you’re familiar with and works to demonstrate your expertise and range. Envisage’s photos showcase that they’re a creative design and production agency, better still, they add value by helping prospective clients quickly understand their capabilities, scale & creativity.

With the loss of so many links, it was important that we put together a plan to recover as much as possible, given Envisage had spent 2 decades acquiring these links, which provide highly specific traffic, but also SEO value too. We began to look for broken & lost links and created a plan to recover as many of these as possible. Since Envisage’s blogs had been deleted, we started working with them on ways to find past articles, luckily after some digging, a few emails and files were found that contained articles that we were able to restore back on to the site.

Another issue the client faced was the high cost of hosting the site using Amazon Web Services, seeing little in the way of value from this. The solution came from Cloudways Hosting, which offered us a dedicated server at a competitive rate and delivered much better customer service.

4. The Benefits

With a strengthened content strategy, we able to create a site that offers users concise signposting which ensured they were able to find the most relevant content for them, with plans to further develop the site to increase this further, ensuring each user had the capability of create a custom experience of Envisage Associates themselves.

The additional benefit would be the Envisage would rank for a broader range of keywords in Google, but these would offer more specific solutions to the right audience.

We expect to see better engagement from users on the site as a result of improving the customer journey and rethinking the user experience. When designing the new page layouts, we ensured that the content flowed easily and was engaging enough to keep users scrolling through each page. Making sure that the users understood Envisage’s offering fully and that they were able to easily find the relevant content, whilst giving them ample opportunity to convert.

294%

Increase in Traffic without using ads

Whilst rebuilding the site, we took the opportunity to fix broken links, not only does this help their SEO but it also allows for more valuable connections from their target audiences.

3X

Increase in Leads

The website’s conversion rate has increased to 2.8% from 1%. This coupled with the average duration a user is on the site being 17 minutes whilst visiting more than 3 pages, demonstrates that we’ve created & delivered an engaging content strategy.

294%

Increase in Traffic without using ads

Whilst rebuilding the site, we took the opportunity to fix broken links, not only does this help their SEO but it also allows for more valuable connections from their target audiences.

3X

Increase in Leads

The website’s conversion rate has increased to 2.8% from 1%. This coupled with the average duration a user is on the site being 17 minutes whilst visiting more than 3 pages, demonstrates that we’ve created & delivered an engaging content strategy.

Ben & the team at Digital Defined recently re-built our website. Along with helping us to better define our brand and solutions, we’ve seen a 232% increase in Organic traffic to the site. The SEO competitor planning and research prior to building the site ensured we had the perfect content and SEO strategy and beautiful site that works well on all devices.

alastair wilkins managing director of envisage associates

Alistair Wilkins

Managing Director

5. The Results

We went live with the new site from Digital Defined in 2 stages. Firstly we launched the new site and did what’s called a soft launch, this gives us an opportunity to look for any issues, conduct post live SEO checks and fixes, along with functional tests of forms, buttons., etc. This also afforded our client and their teams a chance to review the site and check content, giving them time to make any edits.

The second stage referred to as a hard launch, involved the client publically announcing the launch to their followers and customers.

The week following the launch saw a huge increase in traffic of 470% with an increase of 713% new users to the site too! After the effect of the launch settled, we started to again measure the performance of the site against the benchmarks we’d previously established. The first full month after going live, we saw traffic from Organic search increase by 219%, whilst total traffic to the site increased by 294% compared to the previous year,

Site metrics that we use to measure engagement with the site and the content also reflected positively, including:

  • Average time on site – 19 minutes
  • Average pages viewed per visit – 2.9
  • How many people left the site (bounced users) – 23%

Ultimately the purpose of any business tool is to provide value. Since going live up until the day this case study was written the conversion rate of the site has been 2.48% versus 0.7%, and has generated 10 times more Goal Completions (conversions) than the previous year.

This is Envisage’s Organic search traffic, the results speak for themselves..

This is Envisage’s Organic search traffic, the results speak for themselves..

We can help you too!

Call now and arrange a face to face meeting with Ben, We’ll perform an SEO review of your site, conduct some keyword & competitor research along with an SEO strategy and prioritised SEO plan to fit your budget.

Contact Us
ben clay digital marketing expert

6. What's next?

A new website is a great start, but that’s what it is. A starting point. We’ve worked hard to ensure the site’s SEO health score in SEMrush is above 92%, which puts the site into the top 10% for SEO health. We’ve set up the site structure and content strategy with growth in mind, now we need to deliver it,

Whilst the client will continue to write blogs, we’ve now given them some direction, so any articles that are written work to support the areas of the site we develop, again allowing us to add more rich, relevant content to support the pages being built. With this in mind, the client is also now aware of which portfolios to prioritise for the site for the same purpose. The benefit of this is that it will also offer more value to users who are in different stages of the conversion journey and also help to support prospective clients where there is more the one person responsible for selecting a provider.

Following on from the Website work, we’ve also prepared a Google Ads strategy to support those highly valuable keywords which we’re not currently ranking for through Organic Search. Again, the aim is to help Envisage improve their online visibility within the market and Google Ads is the most effective and efficient way to reach users with the right intent until we’re able to make more advances with our SEO keyword rankings.

Given client typically sees conversion rates double when a person has visited their site before, we’ve also created a cost-effective remarketing Strategy utilising the client’s creative assets they’ve previously generated to reach people with content fully showcasing their expertise and range of solutions.

We’ve also worked with the client to improve their social media strategy, to help them reach out to their followers and show their full capabilities.

Envisage Associates have been a joy to work with and we’ve felt like part of their team throughout our journey with them, we can see why they have so many satisfied customers.