About SRF Consulting
SRF Consulting is a full-service infrastructure consulting firm that offers an incredibly broad selection of award-winning services. They employ planners, designers, and engineers to help bring client’s ideas into actionable reality throughout the Midwest. While the variety of projects they work on are nearly endless, a few stand-out services include transit planning, environmental planning, electrical engineering, site planning and design, visualization, real estate consulting, and more.
Situation: A Website in Need of Modernization
SRF Consulting wanted a website that had a state-of-the-art, easy to navigate appearance to modernize their brand and business while serving as a point of validation in the sales process. They wanted everything updated and modernized: their look and feel, their technology, and their site’s base code. Alongside the aesthetic and functional overhaul, SRF also had a desire to improve their on-page messaging and user engagement.
They had a few specific goals for the project:
- To improve their site’s navigability
- Modernization of the brand and business in order to facilitate more trust in the sales process
- Clarification for their brand messaging and positioning
- To attract and increase the amount of career seekers sending in applications
- Improved qualified lead generation from organic search
Another big goal of this project was to attract and increase the amount of career seekers sending in applications. Engineers can be challenging to recruit because of the competitive nature of the field and low number of available, new-to-the-field recent grads. SRF wanted to make sure their website was the right kind of inviting and accessible in order to attract the specific applicants they were seeking.
We looked at each of these goals, met with the team at SRF Consulting to discuss them at length, and then crafted a website redesign strategy that addressed them each in turn.
Solution: A Website Redesign That Drives New Business
The very first thing we did for this project was send out a survey to SRF’s core principal group to gather feedback. SRF has employee share ownership, which means that the key stakeholder for this redesign project was the employees themselves. We took the survey approach to make sure that all voices felt heard during our efforts to improve their site’s lead generation and recruiting efforts.
We learned a number of useful things from that survey. Namely:
- Company culture and educational content is a priority
- Clear and concise positioning statements are sought after
- Market sectors, projects, and service information was more important to the group than traditional blog posts
- Visual display is just as important as on-page copy so there needs to be a special focus on video and other dynamic digital imagery
This initial discovery influenced the rest of the project. The next step was to develop a unique, custom concept for the site’s creative direction that incorporated their existing color scheme, logo, and brand elements.
The sitemap was retooled to meet their need of improved navigation, dividing their site’s many pages into organized and search-friendly buckets. This was especially relevant when it came to the services they provided, since SRF offers so many. We streamlined those options into five separate service buckets that could then be further refined as you went deeper into the site.
The process of completely refreshing a website’s design is complex, with a lot of moving parts and pieces. SRF Consulting’s redesign was no different. After information gathering, CRM integration, and sitemap retooling, we had a number of other updates to make, including:
- Keyword research, ranking report development, and on-page copy optimization to improve their organic search rankings
- An overall content refresh that removed marketing “fluff” in lieu of detailed, technical information that was clearer and easier for prospects to understand
- The introduction of dynamic elements to the site with on-page element additions like gifs, animation, and video
- A new career section with updated copy and imagery to better persuade potential talent to submit applications
- Training and support for their in-house team to make sure they could take all the updates we made and run with them
Are you looking for a digital marketing partner that understands the complexities of your industry? Let’s talk today
Windmill Strategy is a web design company & digital marketing agency helping engineering & consulting companies achieve increased visibility, higher quality leads, and greater marketing ROI through smarter web design. Our website design and B2B digital marketing approach goes beyond “more traffic,” seeking out better traffic, by gaining the attention of the specific niche groups of buyers and influencers that represent your best customers. We help our clients communicate and sell their complex products and services to multiple audiences – be it through web design or digital marketing and SEO. Working collaboratively with your in-house marketing and sales team, we design websites that drive leads and sales that result in overall business growth. Schedule a call to learn more.