Our B2B marketing strategy: 2020 website redesign results.

Introduction.

At the end of 2019, we decided to refresh our website as part of the marketing plan for the upcoming year. It wasn’t because there was anything wrong with our old site – on the contrary, it was recognised by the web designers community on the prestigious AWWWARDS!

As it often happens with agencies, we prioritise our clients’ projects, which means our own marketing strategy is sometimes neglected. However, in 2019 we decided to take a step back and rethink our brand, proposition, business & marketing strategy, which became the driving force behind the website redesign.

Why we did it?

We concluded that we can do better, mainly because of those reasons:

We could not track conversions well, thus did not know which acquisition channel generates the most conversions.
It was not conversion-focused. We had to find a balance between being more ‘salesy’ while maintaining the high-end, bespoke angle appealing to our target audience/potential customers.
It was not ideal for SEO, which was very important to us. We advise on SEO during all our projects, so we had to step up on our platform as well.
It was not flexible enough. We could not easily amend it, add new elements or landing pages to support our marketing campaigns.

Those were the main areas we improved. We wrote an in-depth blog post about the design & development side – click here to read it.

To improve our SEO specifically:

We did in-depth research – what was working now & where we wanted to be.
Rebuilt our website to improve its speed and crawlability.
Reworked our copy and page titles to target the desired search terms better.
Ran multiple post-go-live audits to ensure the technical side is impeccable.
Continuously updated our website with new content: case studies & insightful blogs.
Built valuable backlinks from websites recognised in our industry.

What are the results?

In short, our SEO strategy has greatly improved the website’s performance, probably more than we initially planned, with a 238% YoY increase in organic search sessions!

Nowadays organic search drives the largest amount of traffic, in comparison to other sources of acquisition. It was definitely a time-consuming process (thus costly) but in the long-run 100% worth it. Currently, KOTA ranks on the first page of Google for many high-volume web design-related keywords in the UK, sometimes even in top 3, and keeps improving!

Moreover, we can track conversions more accurately. For all form submissions, we can see a referrer in Hubspot, which enables us to see where the leads are coming from. Having the data on our lead generation allows us to assess their quality and amend our marketing spending based on those results.

We were very lucky and redesigned our website at the right time, so it was in its prime by March when the pandemic hit. As a result, we are in a really good place now as a business, having won work for some amazing clients in new industries, and are currently expanding our services into the USA!

The Stats.

Here are the website statistics indicating our progress (2020 vs 2019):

+167.4% sessions
-15.19% bounce rate
+34.53% avg. session duration
+241.84% contact page views

Solely from the SEO perspective:

+238.1% organic search sessions
+5.87% increase in visibility (on average, our competitors recorded an increase of +0.53%)
+25.22 increase in average position

Also, we’re ranking in the top 3 (UK) for example for:

Website design agency (60,500 avg. searches per month)
Web design agency (2,900)
Web design London (4,400)

What’s more, our new website won an Honorable Mention on AWWWARDS, as well as Special Kudos and UX, UI and Innovation Awards on CSS Design Awards.

Needless to say, we’re quite happy with the outcome!

Our Advice.

Sometimes you need to take a step back to go forward and this was true in our case, with rebuilding the website to improve our SEO & conversions.

Working with plenty of marketers and decision-makers in various industries, we can say that SEO is starting to get more attention alongside our B2B customers. Yet oftentimes, it is still misunderstood! It is not a get-rich-quick scheme, takes a lot of budget, time and upkeep. However, in the long-run, for some B2B companies like ours, it can become more valuable than PPC.

We believe that SEO should be at the forefront of every website redesign. At KOTA, we only design bespoke websites and over the years, we have worked out the perfect recipe.

How we create well-performing websites:

Mobile-friendly UI & UX design with CRO focus.
Utilising the latest best practices in web development to ensure speed and crawlability.
CMS flexibility, so the website can be adjusted in line with business needs.
SEO, of course, through sitemap & content advisory, writing custom meta titles & descriptions for key pages & more!

We cannot stress enough how crucial the correct site migration is, this is an aspect we start to consider at the very beginning of each project, to ensure no traffic is lost.

If you’re looking for more advice on how you can improve search visibility in your business sector, don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We’d be happy to advise on how you can improve your website to get more organic search traffic. Take it from us – it can really transform your business!