97% increase in web traffic

The challenge

Freshfields are an international law firm and one of the largest in the world.

After some consultancy, we uncovered that their current website wasn’t performing in search as well as it could, often struggling to rank the right content in the right languages and the right regions.

What we did

The decision had already been made to redesign and rebuild the site, upgrading EPiServer versions in the process. Our recommended course of action was agreed:

Audit the old site to understand fully what was working and what wasn’t – not just from a technical point of view, but also what news and knowledge hub content was performing best
Design and agree a clear SEO Strategy that aligns with Freshfields business goals. Most converting organic traffic would be from referrals seeking out lawyers by name. Therefore, the lawyer profiles pages had to rank first
We’d need to address the new site’s internationalisation before launch. This would see us consolidating several TLDs, countryfolders and country-subdomains into something more manageable. Freshfields operate in 5 territories and 27 languages, so the original set up had around 405 versions of each page
Site launches come with a risk of losing rankings. We’d need to build a complex redirect map that consolidated past versions of the site in order to concentrate PageRank, the result should be to increase rankings following the launch, not lose or just maintain them
Finally, we’d need to audit the new site for common and bespoke issues before launch