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Digital Makeover Overhauls Traditional Image

Website, design and SEO for world-class engineering brand

113.54%

Increase in users from organic search

148.18%

Increase in new users

10.21%

Increase in average session duration

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The Brief

The William Cook Group is a world-class engineering company with over 180 years of experience. The William Cook story started in Glasgow in 1840, where they manufactured saws before branching out into steel castings. Today, they design, manufacture, and overhaul a wide range of high-quality, precision alloy and superalloy components and systems for defence, rail, and other industries, where safety and reliability are critical.

We’ve been working with the William Cook Group since 2012 across a whole host of projects. Over that time, we’ve seen the company grow and diversify, expanding their product offerings and capabilities. The Group were keen to move away from their traditional steel casting image. So, we set about going through and updating their marketing materials to reflect their full range of products, technologies, and facilities.

Website Development

We started by updating the website to act as an online brochure – clearly displaying all relevant product, service, and contact information. Working closely with the Group’s Chairman, our website designers created a bold design that embodies their dynamic approach to engineering and their vision.

The angled lines and images used are a nod to the Group’s forward-thinking attitude. We created a user-friendly CMS system so the Group can keep the site updated with all their latest news, products, and developments. We also built in the ability to change the language, depending on the territory, to reflect their global audience.

Cloud-Based NDT System

And it doesn’t stop there - we’ve also created a bespoke cloud-based system to help William Cook monitor all non-destructive testing (NDT) activity. They needed a way to show traceability and produce a variety of different reports easily, and ultimately help them increase their productivity.

William Cook needed a system that’d meet their varied requirements, including uploading photographs, auto-selecting specifications, looking up previous tests, and providing a knowledge base for techniques and procedures. Our system is entirely bespoke, from the layout to the logic that powers it. This allowed us to provide all the specific functionality and features William Cook needed without any extra clutter or buttons that could potentially cause confusion.

Offline Marketing Materials

As well as their online marketing, we’ve also worked with the Group to update their offline marketing materials, including designing a bespoke exhibition stand for a major industry show, magazine adverts and a new company brochure. All of which utilised the same angles and large imagery as the website, helping to build a strong and consistent brand. The brochure's design has been created with a pocket for product inserts, allowing the Group to tailor what they send out to each customer so that it can be easily and cost-effectively kept up-to-date with new products as they’re launched.

We carefully refreshed the colour palette to provide added flexibility, introducing new secondary colours. The new colours are clean and contemporary, retaining a premium, quality feel. We also updated the full suite of logos to provide greater consistency across all divisions.

SEO Campaign

William Cook wanted to improve brand awareness, enhance engagement, and increase relevant traffic to their website as an ongoing concern, so they came to our SEO agency to put an SEO plan in place and to implement it for them.

Our initial website audit showed a high number of pages without meta-data (the title and description displayed in search engine results). Although this does not directly affect the page ranking, being vague or not there at all can influence the user’s decision as to whether or not they click through the search engine result to get onto the website.

We ensured each website page was fully optimised to include relevant meta-data, page titles and content. Once completed, these tasks enabled search engines to crawl the website with ease, which enhanced the search engine rankings and visibility of the website.

We identified and removed any wrong external links to improve domain authority and search engine rankings. This is crucial to improving domain authority, as bad backlinks can be viewed by Google and the other search engines as black hat SEO, negatively impacting how the search engines view and rank the site. We then focused on creating good quality, relevant external links to help improve page rank.

There has been a 113.54% increase in organic search traffic from May 2021 compared to May 2020.

The Bounce Rate has improved by 25.89% as of May 2021 compared to May 2020, which is a crucial finding when the number of users has increased by 181.50% in this same time period.

Users spend longer on the site viewing various pages, which we highlighted as a key objective for the SEO campaign, as the longer a user browses a website, the more they will engage with the brand and the messages portrayed.

For more information on any of our services, contact our team today.

“Everyone is super friendly! Also we've got to a point now where our branding is very clear and everyone is on the same level, so it makes the starting point of each project much easier to get off the ground. I feel as though I can ask for help with absolutely anything and trust that they are keeping an eye on the things I perhaps don't know so much about (SEO, for example).” - Jenny Cook, William Cook Holdings Ltd.