Synopsis

The client company was a 40 year plus leader in the online travel guide business and was noted for providing the paper directory used by travel agents prior to the digitisation of such services. The client ran an online business that syndicated (licensed) content mirrored on its website to major airlines, financial institutions and travel companies. The website’s visibility, which had been several million visits a month, suffered a severe decline in traffic. As a result there was a severe decline in advertising revenues and was beginning to impact content licensing. Our consultant was asked to investigate and recommend a course of remedial action.

Begin with the end in mind

After initial discussions with the management, technical and sales teams, it became fairly clear to our consultant that the problems they were experiencing ran deeper than that experienced with the loss of web traffic. Our consultant knew that what was being experienced was just the tip of the iceberg.

The objective became one where the fortunes of the business itself were at stake. To this end, our consultant embarked upon an exercise that would aim to repair the online damage, and then build a strategy the company could follow to ensure that the problems suffered wouldn't recur, as well as highlighting the underlying and far greater reasons for failure to the management team, along with suitable recommendations.

Break it before it’s broken

To the staff and management team, the sole problem was that the website was losing traffic from Google, which naturally impacted advertising revenues from Google. There didn’t appear to be any other issues evident.

The traffic problem was suspected as being related to a Google search and rankings issue, and indeed that was the case. However, there were more serious issues that related to the content itself and the underlying technical architecture of the website. These were two entirely different issues, with two entirely different solutions.

Ultimately the solution was twofold, one that was expected: a careful re-optimisation of the website content, a new strategy for the editorial team to follow to ensure content was produced in a way that matched Google’s evolving algorithms expectations. The unexpected solution, was rebuilding the company’s website on a more fitting system architecture. None of these issues had been perceived as being problematic.

Complacency breeds failure

Much of the problem stemmed from the systems upon which the website was built. A few years earlier, the company had spent an eye watering sum of money on a new website. Although the client’s web team had been involved in the new website, the MD at the time had chosen to outsource the build. This caused a communications problem internally, as for some reason, the web team had been kept at arms length from the third party building the site.

The resulting website, although appearing functional and effective, had a number of flaws that would soon become near fatal. This was because the older architecture, which previously supported some legacy systems and services, had been retained and the new system tried to incorporate it, badly.

Complacency crept in because the management who contracted the website builders and who didn’t understand how to build a website of this scale, left it in the hands of the builders assuming they and the company’s web team would simply sort things out. Unfortunately, the web team, who had been excluded for much of the development, didn’t become very involved in the build and when asked about progress responded that everything seemed okay.

When the new site was commissioned, all seemed well. It was only some time later - probably around 2 years, when problems emerged. As traffic increased, the strain between the poorly integrated legacy systems and the new website architecture began causing issues. One significant issue was the time it was taking to render a webpage because of the amount of processing the web server had to do to pull all the information together across the systems. It was this response time that was causing most of the woes with Google.

While the technical issues had a solution, the other underlying problem was more difficult. This related to the fact that there was a team of people in the company dedicated to running the website and support services technical function. The size of this team appeared to be inordinately large. Running a website of this nature should not have needed a team of that size. After an extensive investigation which included interviews with the web team, it was discovered that they spent most of their time correcting mistakes, errors and failures caused by the poorly integrated systems.

To the management team, all seemed well and they just let things be. The technical team however, used the problems as an excuse to maintain their own positions, when in reality a properly working system didn’t require them. Both teams operated in their own silos with limited communication and the situation persisted for some time until the traffic issues began to emerge.

Realise, rationalise and adjust

It took time getting the various teams in the company to realise that the problem they were experiencing was just the tip of the iceberg, one caused by a variety of failures, shortcomings and complacency in the company.

The company had a whole team of technical specialists dedicated to running the website and support services. Much of the internal hardware and software costs were eliminated through a combination of rationalising the website and support services operations and the suitable outsourcing of hosting services. That meant staff costs could be reduced too.

Ultimately, the main adjustment required to secure the company’s longer term performance, was its approach to the market. Adjusting how content was produced and how it was optimised for the website, ensured that the website’s traffic recovered and advertising revenues grew. This required training the editorial staff on the basics of digital marketing and ensuring freelance article writers were given the necessary guidelines to produce content at the required quality levels. The editorial team’s own approach to content creation had to change too, with priority being given to current and emerging travel trends, as opposed to a scheduled update roster.

Outcome

Our consultant conducted a thorough audit of the company’s technical and marketing operations (as marketing ran the website). He produced a detailed presentation outlining the state of affairs and recommended a course of action. It also included a strategic marketing plan, based on a comprehensive review of the current wisdom concerning achieving high rankings on Google’s search engine, which was at the heart of the traffic issue the company was experiencing. He was then asked to help with the implementation of the plan which took 9 months to achieve.

The remedial actions were successful and the website’s traffic returned. And in the longer term, he was instrumental in restructuring the company as a whole; this resulted in the removal of the internal technical team, the building of a new website which eventually removed the legacy systems and improved the company’s net profitability by 20%.