In July 2009, emda put out for public tender the contract to redevelop the England's East Midlands website with the objective of increasing its prominence and  appeal to international businesses looking to relocate to the region.

EMDA used the ‘supply2gov.uk' tender website, a national contract opportunity portal provided by Business Link, to ask for expressions of interest. Of the 80 expressions of interest, and subject to two tender stages, Absolute was short listed to present our proposal along with five other agencies.

Our understanding of the nature of foreign direct investments and its impact on the region meant that we were well equipped to manage such a project. Having worked with EMDA on many regional projects, we were delighted to get the call that we had won the contract. We are proud to be part this major project that will help support businesses throughout the region.

With over 600 pages, the site uses Sitefinity, an ASP.NET platform that ensures the marketing team can easily and quickly manage site content. Creative aspects of the project included a strong web design, commissioned photography and a Flash-based interactive map.

East Midlands Business Champions are a business resource developed by emda which provides a free mentoring service for SME’s and facilitates networking opportunities at a senior level.

In addition to developing the Business Champions brand, we designed an illustration style that was able to work across all of the marketing collateral. We produced a series of annual reports utilising uncoated stocks and embossed finishes, plus exhibition systems, monthly newsletter, event invitations and a web forum.

It has been an extremely successful year for the England’s East Midlands website in terms of it performance in the Search Engines. Currently it is dominating the top of the Google Search Results Page (SERP) for the majority of its selected search terms and displaying multiple listings for a number of these results.

The websites success has been achieved with a number of SEO initiatives distributed at various points throughout the year. These have accumulated to this current point in time when the England’s East Midlands website is saturating nearly all the top results within the Google SERP.

After the completion and caching of the new website in January the results seen in Google were sporadic. The site was performing well for phrases that included the names in the domain name but poorly for the rest of the search terms. After consultation with Absolute, it was deemed necessary to study the website and optimise it for predetermined key phrases that were relevant to the objectives and essential for it to become a success.
From this study, the Meta data, page titles and content were rewritten to incorporate the various key phrases that had been found, helping to focus the particular phrases to the relevant pages.

After this increase, the results began to stabilise over the next month and we researched and implemented further measures to achieve the desired positioning in Google. A comparative study was under taken across competition websites to identify what tactics were working and which were not.
Inbound links are one of the most important factors in a websites SEO as it is used as a reference by Google to gauge how important a particular website is for a given subject. Many competition sites had several thousand inbound links, which therefore necessitated us to undertake a link building campaign focusing on content based links including the key phrases established during the initial search engine optimisation in March. It was designed to slowly build these links in order to not be penalised by Google for any artificial growth.

It was obvious from the results that the link building campaign was a success, but the website still needed a final push to help increase the performance of the stray key phrases identified above. After further analysis it became apparent that additional keyword-rich content was required on the homepage to effectively optimise for the chosen phrases. We therefore proposed a tab system that would increase the content without comprising the design.

Social bookmarks were added to the news items, allowing users to immediately link anything interesting to their own pages, thus building back links and generating organic growth.

Working closely with the marketing manger, we were asked to create a house style for emda’s tourism function. We rationalized the existing brand and created a colour coding device to signify the five regions that was flexible enough to work across newsletters, folders, stationery and annual reports.