Embassy English multi-lingual website refresh

Project brief

Rejuvenate a multilingual website (13 languages) for an English language school chain (UK, US, AU) to improve SEO, user experience (UX), and conversion rates (CRO) within a tight 8 week timeframe.

International SEO considerations were key to ensure website content was suitable for a variety of search engines beyond Google. These included Baidu for the Chinese market, Yandex for the Russian market and Naver for the South Korean market).

Culturally specific considerations were also of huge importance to ensure the website imagery and UI layout of the site was aligned to the users being targetted.

Understanding the problem

The Embassy English brand was one of many within a large portfolio of educational establishments, and working as Website and Design Manager I was the Product Owner for this website alongside 3 others.

Developer resource and a full website redesign was out of scope, with only limited access to people and tooling resources, so there was a need to take a lean design approach to priotising problems and allocating resource accordingly.

Prior to starting the website updates, I added event tracking to the website via Google Tag Manager, did an SEO audit of the website, conducted competitor benchmarking, and created and promoted a web survey to gain understanding of who the users were and what they needed.

Collaborating with the Brand Manager and Head of Marketing to identify key areas for improvement, I secured our team additional people resource for the project and agreed acceptance criteria for the changes.

Designing the solution

The identified updates to support business and user needs were:

• Factual correction of content in each language, specifically to course and location pages.
Many of the header images were utilising outdated iconography, and the look and feel of the site came across as aimed at a much younger target audience than intended. Removing outdated icons and adding more photography was essential.
• Removal of collapsible content sections, as this was being missed by users and needed more visibility.
• Removal of web content for under-performing regions, with creation of new lead capture landing pages to replace them.
• Populating the entire site with translated content required in-house content creation and live site edits through Sitecore's experience editor. Publishing needed to be delayed until all content was finalized. Additionally, development site CSS changes needed to sync seamlessly with live site content updates.

I collaborated with the Brand Manager on content generation, and managed the production of content, and scheduling of development work.

During the project I liased between stakeholders in the UK, US and Australia in order to ensure the main goal of the project was understood, and that the best possible technical changes possible were being implemented to improve functionality and accessibility of the website, identifying technical bugs and resolving them swiftly through the process.

Summary

Ceased before completion due to a business merger, but work was on track to be delivered on time, with solutions to the problems identified.

• UX Research: Conducted website feedback survey, analyzed event tracking data, and benchmarked competitors.
• Prioritization: Collaborated with stakeholders to identify key areas for improvement within limited timeframe.
• Content Refresh: Factually corrected content across languages, replaced outdated icons with relevant photos, and improved information accessibility on location pages.
• Multilingual SEO: Optimized webpages for search engines in each language.
• Landing Page Creation: Developed bespoke lead capture landing pages in 5 languages (replacing underperforming pages).
• Project Management: Established milestones, managed production (internal & external), and coordinated stakeholders across continents.

 

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