Optimising for SEO and reinforcing reputation

This website required an innovative strategy that made the most of SEO opportunities without sacrificing performance

Project launch: August 2021

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Project Scope

Website design

UX & Digital Product Design

SEO & Digital marketing

Technologies

About the Client

EFX made incredible bespoke trophies for all sorts of events. From corporate awards evenings to prestigious sporting competitions, they create trophies, awards, medals and more. They needed a website that showed them as the market leaders they are, with a much better foundation for organic search visibility to attract more visitors.

Reputational enhancement through modern design
Improved SEO and ranking
A fast, user-focused experience
Intuitive filter system for products

The Challenge

With so many different products and possible product filters, a significant challenge was creating a site structure which enabled us to create landing pages for specific keywords, without creating stress on Google’s crawl budget.

We decided to create a system that allowed us to choose which filter combinations would exist as true landing pages, and which would remain as the product list with filters applied.

This strategy enabled us to identify and target the well-searched product keywords, without creating thousands of URLs that would never be used, and would eat up Google’s crawl budget, to the detriment of the pages we really need it to index.

Discovery & strategy

With our plan for the filter pages in place, we needed to identify the keywords that were most relevant and drive most traffic, so that we could decide which filter combinations would require their own landing page.

Design

While EFX had a wealth of fantastic images on their old website, many of these had been hidden away on a testimonials page, rather than integrating them throughout the website’s design.

By creating a modern new layout, both these images and the testimonials were brought front and centre. By making these a key focus of the design, it naturally highlights the excellent work, clients and projects that EFX have worked on.

Filters and landing pages

From our research, we identified several long tail keywords that EFX would need landing pages for within their products section. However, with so many different filter combinations, having a dedicated page for each and every one was simply not feasible.

That would create literally hundreds of thousands of landing page combinations. Not only would they be unnecessary for the vast majority of users, it would also take a huge chunk out of Google’s crawl budget for pages that were far too niche to need indexing.

So we came up with a unique way to turn some of the filter combinations into dedicated landing pages, while the others just remained a filtered product list. For the user, the experience was no different. For Google, it meant a much smaller number of pages to crawl. And for EFX, it meant they had searchable, UX friendly landing pages based around their key phrases.

Static site generation

The client had requested that we use a WordPress platform, as it was a CMS they already used and really liked. But WordPress can cause issues with loading speed, so we needed to offset that as much as possible with static site generation.

By separating the front end from the back end, we split WordPress and its code from the HTML and user interface. This allows visitors to enjoy a really fast browsing experience, while administrators can still manage content through the WordPress CMS.

Diagram showing the static site generation process

efx.co.uk
Bespoke award inner page
efx.co.uk
Product overview including filters
efx.co.uk
Get a quote form
efx.co.uk
Testimonial slider
efx.co.uk
Image layout
efx.co.uk
Highlighting finishing options
efx.co.uk
Home page showreel video
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Integrated graphic use for call-to-actions
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Off-the-shelf award inner page
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Information layout

The Outcomes

Comparing the pre and post launch conversions over 6 weeks, there was an immediate 15% improvement. And longer term, the 12 months after launch saw an incredible 191% increase in user numbers.

With a new, SEO optimised website, EFX are able to reach a far wider audience, and with a website that clearly shows them as the market leaders, they’re able to convert more of those users into customers too.