Few organizations have as dramatic an impact on our daily lives as Battelle who does everything from conducting research and development, to managing laboratories, to designing and manufacturing products. Because they have a varied offering to such a broad audience, one of its key challenges was to effectively communicate all the ways it helps its clients. In an attempt to solve this challenge, Battelle created an interactive online portal – Battelle Village, which was designed to effectively tell its story and its impact to their audiences. However, the structure of Battelle Village was not user-friendly and they realized they needed to make some changes to create a better user experience as well as to enhance search engine traffic.
The objectives for Battelle Village were defined as:
- Build awareness of Battelle’s impact on our daily lives
- Educate prospective clients and decision makers on Battelle’s unique capabilities
- Increase organic search traffic for key search terms related to Battelle’s services
Marketing Works audited Battelle Village to identify opportunities for improvement and outlined the best approach to rebuild the portal. The original portal was built using 3D software and provided an interactive experience. However, that format led to significantly long load times and difficulty viewing on mobile devices. We also discovered the interface was not as intuitive as needed.
A project plan was created to update Battelle Village and build it in a HTML structure that made it easy-to-use, mobile-friendly, fast-to-load, optimized for search engines and highly interactive.
The redevelopment process began with outlining the comprehensive information architecture for the new portal. This included revising the sitemap as well as building wireframes for the overall Village structure and for each of the six environments – Hospital, Medical Research Facility, Farm, Airport, Oil Field and House. The desktop and mobile design concepts were then developed for Battelle Village and for each of the environments. Based on the approved designs, the portal infrastructure was built in HTML 5 with the content and imagery. When the new portal was launched in January 2018, a total of more than 100 unique environments and facts had been incorporated.
After re-launching Battelle Village, unbranded search traffic increased significantly, which substantially improved Battelle’s ability to share how it impacts our daily lives. The site was built to leverage the high domain authority of Battelle and provide engineered landing pages for a wide assortment of terms that Battelle had never had traffic for in the past. Within days of the launch, pages within the site were ranking in Google. Battelle historically did not have access to any user engagement analytics for the Battelle Village and the new website allows Battelle to track where users are landing, what they are interested in and how they flow through the information available. Another key feature that has great value for Battelle, is the ability for its team to manually add tags to the pages to enable searching between relevant products that don’t share keywords (e.g., Power Pane windows and solar energy production).