Objectives
Royal Agricultural University has been growing futures since 1845.
The university has been at the forefront of agricultural education for more than 175 years and pride themselves on combining knowledge and industry connections with a forward-thinking approach. They offer undergraduate and postgraduate study as well as foundation degrees, and welcome UK and international students. It has achieved silver ranking for teaching excellence.
They have been a client since 2021 when we were asked to build their new website. Our objectives were to:
- Design and build a new website fit for a leading UK University
- Deliver a site that is easy to use, is accessible, and can cope with traffic surges during Clearing
- Preserve and improve previous organic rankings through SEO best practices
- Deliver GA4 set up and bespoke analytics dashboards
Our Approach
We split the project down into its constituent elements and worked closely with the client throughout the design and build process.
- Discovery: In-depth SEO analysis of the existing site was completed and a plan for the new site SEO created. Audience profiling, extensive user journey analysis and UX research including usability testing of three competitor websites informed our designs.
- Planning: In order to create an IA (site architecture) plan we conducted a client stakeholder workshop to discuss priorities, agree the build specification and scope the required systems integrations. We were able to provide objective leadership to ensure we arrived at a compromise that satisfied all stakeholder’s, technical and SEO requirements.
- UX and UI Design: Informed by our research, we created wireframes and UI designs for all required page templates and site areas. Designs addressed the important AA accessibility criteria required.
- Site Hosting: We considered and created a specification for the security of the site hosting and the ability to handle traffic surges during Clearing when choosing a Hosting partner.
- Site Build: We created responsive modular HTML templates in Drupal 9 for all site sections/page types. We then set up the site on the new host, added functionality, integrations and migrated the content. We provided CMS training and documentation so the client team could easily manage content going forward. We created an accessibility audit and implemented the required changes.
- SEO: Our SEO experts were involved in defining site architecture and managed the migration process, creating the detailed URL redirect list to maintain rankings post move. A dev site SEO crawl was completed to ensure the technical health of the site, and provided recommendations for changes prior to go live. We also provided meta data review and creation services.
- Analytics: We set up their GTM, GA4, and are creating a Looker Studio dashboard for reporting to meet the client’s reporting needs. We will provide training to the client team on how to access and use the data.
Results
The outcome of the site build and migration was that RAU now have a site fit for a leading university that delivers to their requirements and which exceeded prior rankings within 30 days of the site migration.
The site has been tested and approved as providing 'AA' accessibility.
Post go-live we provide on-going website maintenance, client consultancy and support including ensuring all security and patch updates take place, hosting is secure, monitoring up time and providing and managing additional server capacity at peak times e.g. during Clearing.
- Generic Share of voice (SOV) increased by 9%
- Number of Top 3 ranked keywords increased by 31%
- Bounce rate down 12%
- Pages per session up 11%
Kate Perris, Marketing and Campaigns Manager, RAU said:
“Working with the team from Equimedia has been a real pleasure. Building a complex website is never going to be easy or straightforward but they kept me informed with progress at each stage and always gave me recommendations for solutions or improvements on the occasions when an obstacle was met, so that the outcome was satisfactory and the process painless. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them.”
Generic organic SOV up by 9%
Top ranked keywords up 31%
Pages per session up 11%
Interested in seeing what we can do for you? Get in touch and let us know about your requirements today.
