Web Design & SEO Case Study On www.HLS.ie

This website design case study and search engine optimisation case study provides information on the background to and implementation of a new website on behalf of HLS Ltd. by The DG Group.

The DG Group was approached by HLS to design a new website for their company. There were 4 key reasons for their requirement of a new website as follows:

1. Their online visibility was poor and they wanted their website to help generate business for them.
2. Their previous design was extremely basic, giving a very poor initial impression to visitors to their site.
3. Their business is split into 2 key areas
• Trade Suppliers Of Industrial & Engineering Equipment
• Suppliers Of Centralized Lubrication & Automatic Oilers For Plant Equipment
4. They wanted to have a simple online product catalogue allowing them to promote their best

In short, the requirement was for an attractive website that helped to promote their complete business offerings online without ongoing costs to them. Additionally, they had a clear budget within which the total project had to be completed.

The DG Group split this project into 3 key areas:

1. Design
2. Functionality
3. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

From a design perspective we created a simple home page that clearly presented the two parts of their business. From here users could visit either the Trade Sales area or the Centralised Lubrication Services area.

For the design we took our lead from HLS's distinctive blue and red colouring of their logo. In this way we were able to give a uniform feel to the site while differentiating the supplies side of their business from the services side.

We also used a dual-navigation system, putting all the company-related page content in the top, horizontal menu and the product/services related pages in the left, side menu. This helps to increase longer-term product/service recall because they are shown on every page. It also reduces the number of clicks required to get from any page to any other page.

HLS indicated in their brief that they needed a simple and inexpensive online catalogue. We therefore created a custom system that provided a very simple front-end for users to browse and back-end for HLS to update products with.

The front-end  included four actions that visitors could take when viewing any product:

• Print Page - In a specially formatted output to match what users see on screen without any of the typical browser window content.
• E-Mail A Friend - Allows the visitor to email the details of what they see on a page to a friend/colleague.
• View Full Range - Allows a user to see every other product in the range of the product they are currently viewing.
• Request Quote - Allows a visitor to request a price for the product they are currently viewing. It automatically populates the product code into the online form, allowing HLS to easily respond to inquiries.

We also implemented our SEO-friendly content management system, providing HLS with complete control of the editing of existing pages and creation of new pages as required.

The SEO element of the new website was the most complex as it involved extensive keyword research to identify those keywords and phrases that were most relevant and being searched for by potential customers. These keywords and phrases were then integrated into all aspects of the content of the site. To achieve this The DG Group wrote all the content for the site allowing us to build in the keywords into the text and the metadata of all pages.

Due to the need to have a larger amount of text on optimised pages, we also implemented "drop-down text"elements that avoids visitors being overwhelmed by large portions of text, while allowing them to view just the content they wish to read more of and also still making all the text content available to the search engine spiders for crawling.

From a design and functionality perspective, the website is distinctive yet easy to navigate and update. However, the real test of the success of this site was its visibility in searches and in this we are delighted with the results.

Of the 57 keywords targeted the website ranks on page 1 of Google Ireland for 33 of them. This is an exceptional result, putting HLS in an industry leading position against their competitors. They may rank on page 2 or 3 for some or all of the others, but we do not count this as it is estimated that only 3% of all web searchers click on page 2 of results pages.

The DG Group was able to meet every requirement asked of us by HLS and within the budget specified. 

We are delighted with the results achieved in this project and we wish HLS every success in the future.

Find out more about their range of Engineering Supplies, Industrial Supplies and Lincoln Lubrication systems with a visit to www.hls.ie and please feel free to contact us if you have any questions on the content of this page.