POLARIS accelerated the re-development of Milton Park’s new website as they were undertaking a slight re-brand on their current site. As identified by our SEO Agency team, the website had multiple technical and content issues which held back their organic visibility due to an inherited website with fundamental legacy issues.
The primary business challenge was that organic traffic was down approx. 25% YOY throughout 2023, which largely came from the website framework making it very difficult to change or add to the website’s pages.
As part of multiple technical and content-led optimisation requests from SEO, we found out that the CMS was built within Umbraco by an overseas company (inherited by the UK development team) which had multiple issues. These factors meant that it was very hard to gain any sustained SEO traction outside of a couple of core pages (i.e. the homepage being the main candidate).
In addition, the CMS that was built by the developers was too restrictive to use, leading in difficulty to doing something as simple as inserting a “homepage contextual link”. This also meant that the internal marketing team struggled to make quick changes, which led to delayed implementation.
Lastly, the site was very dated and used design principles around the customer journey that were inherently bad not just for the user but also SEO.
To have a website that was easy to update, scale-out for future and capitalise on the organic channel growth from international customers and specialised higher-value clients based around their science and large-scale premises proposition.
Although the new website was scheduled within a roadmap, the actual work completed was still at a very early stage. The developers had put together some ideas, and along with the client they had a vision that mainly focused on the aesthetics, not the function.
POLARIS were able to get involved at an early stage and through a series of stakeholder meetings, cross departmental and agency workshops, identified several key areas that needed to be addressed within the new site. These focus areas were generated from data-led observations from qualitative and quantitative research, further enhanced by stakeholder interviews, in-market demand share of search and competitor analysis.
In parallel, we also needed to manage the re-platform migration – develop the project plan, set up a scope of work for multiple phases (pre, launch and post) as well as guiding the in-house marketing team. We also needed to advise the design team and developers as the POLARIS lead-consultant was the most experienced within the migration project.
Customer-first IA: Utilising search data, data audits, analytical behaviour patterns and stakeholder/customer exercises, we designed an information architecture based around a visual mega-menu design that matched specific journeys taking a web user from whatever page they entered the site directly to their target-need page within one-click.
Specific Development Pages: From the same research to coincide with with the IA development, we created concept wireframes to bold specific sub-category collection pages that previously did not exist. From this strategy we were able to host pages within the site that allow specific targeting like offices, laboratories, R&D and warehouse/industrial use. These pages offer a higher relevance for the user while also giving the website the potential to target specific higher-value queries within search.
Property Pages: The existing property pages were lacking from a conversion perspective, so we re-designed the wireframes to make the pages more engaging, creating a sense of place through careful structured regional USPs.
Build static pages instead of relying on filters : With the site built on a filter system to access properties and JS lightbox pop-ups, Google could not discover these pages. We recommended to remove the filters and the lightbox pages and rebuild as static pages within a parent category to enhance the site relevance and ranking potential around these topic areas.
Technical Excellence: One of the biggest issues with the current site was that technically it was poor. Indexing issues, page rendering, orphan pages and legacy coding challenges doubled with the filters made it difficult for Google to read the property page. The POLARIS team are technical experts and through audits and strategy work we made sure technical performance would not be an issue on the new site.
“Lots of hard work and passion for the website to be moved to WordPress with an updated design. Thank you to all our team involved and we do really appreciate your hard work. Thank you for the testing aspect as this is super to have and a must to help the understanding of how the website has “bedded in”.”
Joanna Harwood
MEPC Milton Park
After the site was launched, which was carefully observed and monitored by the POLARIS specialist migration team, we encountered a few further issues – largely related to technical and tracking.
There were others that were raised in the post migration timeline – however the technical team were on hand at every step of the way to bring these to the attention, advise at all stages to make sure these issues get addressed even working with multiple external partners
Overall, the migration was successful, further bolstered by our new property and meeting room pages.
Even though there were multiple stakeholders to manage and post-launch technical and tracking challenges to contend with, the site performance was generally unaffected. In addition, the website’s performance has significantly increased in the past months and is tracking growth instead of tracking at around 25% YOY down.
“On average, our client partners see a 721% increase in their investment with POLARIS."Amo SokhiDirector
