Aligning stakeholders
We often find during our discovery workshops that different stakeholders bring different perspectives regarding the focus and requirements for a website.
For this project there was a tension between the website being a sales tool to generate more leads versus an information platform for members. In a simple world, the website would be one or the other, creating a more streamlined experience for its audience (as well as making our job easier!). However, with a project on this scale, with many stakeholders and with statistics pointing towards a diverse audience, a pragmatic view was needed. The website needed to attract a new audience, while at the same time being a useful resource for current members. In one sense these are related – by showcasing invaluable member content in a rich, engaging way, and surfacing this content so that it was easy to find, it shows the club in it’s best light. Demonstrating their knowledge, innovation and showing that they care about the experience of their members in turn makes them attractive to new audiences.
In order to achieve both requirements, we rationalised the club’s taxonomy and structure to create a central, searchable repository for all their knowledge. This includes a powerful faceted search based on topics and content types. We also created landing pages and spaces in the site for different departments to curate their best content.

Fixing the Search Engine Optimisation Issues
The old Standard Club website was suffering from quite a few issues that often happen to websites that are added to piecemeal over time:
- Duplicated content - Pages in different locations of the site that had the exact same content.
- Declining click through rate from search engines - This is often a sign that meta descriptions aren’t engaging enough.
- Thin content - Although it’s good to be succinct and we’d never recommend adding content for the sake of it, search engines tend to surface longer pages of rich, informative content.
- Lack of headings - Without useful headings blocks of text become hard to read and digest for humans, as well as search engines. It is also a missed opportunity to highlight keywords and phrases.
- Lack of structured data / schema markup - A missed opportunity to provide content for rich snippets on search engine results pages.
- Overuse of PDFs - While these can be indexed by search engines, we’d much prefer if users clicked into pages where we can influence their journey through the site, rather than downloading PDFs.
We worked through each of these points and advised the marketing team on how to follow SEO best-practices in the future. This has resulted in a 73% increase of users, and 24% increase in page views in a 6 month period compared to pre-launch.
We’ve also worked with Standard Club to identify various goals to measure in analytics that will be useful for them to be able to understand what content is and isn’t successful.