Published by Sue Johns-Chapman
Published Date 12.07.2022 
Human-centred digital design and development agency, Nexer Digital, has completed a project with medical product and technologies company, Convatec, which has led to a 400% increase in organic traffic to the website and has been shortlisted in the Global Search Awards.
At Convatec and Nexer Digital, both teams are delighted to be part of the Global Search Awards 2022 with two shortlisting’s!
Gemma Cleland, CMO at Convatec and lead of the Marketing Centre of Excellence said:
“So proud of the team – shortlisted for the Best In House Global Search Team, and Best Use of Search! This is a testament to the work they have led; building a winning mindset and culture, working with huge passion and intent to improve the lives we touch, and delivering against our #forevercaring promise, by becoming more user-centric and giving greater visibly to the patients and healthcare professionals we serve. I have nothing but pride and admiration for them”.
During the pandemic, Convatec established the need to move away from traditional in-person sales visits by reps to a sustainable digital-first marketing approach, so ensuring the website was visible, accessible and user friendly became a priority. The site already contained a strong foundation of relevant, informative, legally and medically approved-content, but this was not always available to the right people at the right time.
The primary audience for the web refactor was patients and healthcare professionals (HCPs), such as members of the public looking for support at the beginning of their journey with a stoma or HCPs looking for specific products or resources to support their patients in their post-operative lifestyle.
The work carried out by Nexer Digital involved a comprehensive technical audit of convatec.com, including technical SEO and accessibility compliance against Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), an agile project to deliver the fixes identified by the audit and domain consolidation to unite the previously fragmented digital estate.
The consolidation element, which repointed country top level domains (TLDs) (e.g. .co.uk, .fr, etc.) to a unique www.convatec.com domain, was important to the project as the previous mushrooming of domains led to inadequate search visibility.
The results of the project were an uptick in organic search traffic by over 400% year-on-year, just one month after the final consolidation, over 100,000 clicks and search impressions that surpassed two million in one month. In addition, the website’s domain authority – a search ranking metric – increased from 63 to 70 out of 100 between January 2021 and March 2022, and content from the website appeared as snippets, the text that appears at the top of results pages, in Google searches across all markets, increasing overall visibility on the search engine.
Damien Robert, SEO and Content Marketing Manager at the Marketing Centre of Excellence of Convatec, said: “Working with Nexer Digital, experts in web accessibility and usability, has been incredibly valuable in supporting our move into a more digital approach to marketing. Throughout the project, there was clear communication with our internal teams and stakeholders, as well as ongoing coaching, operating as an extension of our team rather than an external third party.
“Working with an ageing and disjointed digital estate for a global group with over 9,000 employees was always going to be challenging, but Nexer Digital worked in an agile and open way, addressing issues early on rather than in retrospect and that was instrumental in the overall success of the project.”
Simon Wissink, Account Director at Nexer Digital, said:
“Really pleased the Nexer Digital and Convatec team have been recognised for all the hard work that went into refactoring and consolidating Convatec.com, and the results achieved. Congrats and good luck to all those shortlisted. The pandemic accelerated the rate of digital change across the entire business landscape and it was brilliant from the outset that Convatec recognised the need to stay ahead of this rather than getting stuck in traditional ways of working. This project was not only a success story in terms of search visibility, but also for user experience, accessibility and inclusion more broadly. Convatec is now ahead of its competitors that haven’t consolidated domains and also has a strong Accessibility Statement that shows both progress in the website and lays out the standards to strive towards to ensure that the digital services are usable by all.
Established in 2007, Nexer Digital (formerly Sigma) is a leading human-centred design and development agency that designs products and services that help people to live and work better. By working with users at the heart of its solutions, Nexer helps to add genuine business value and bring people together.
Nexer works with companies large and small, in the public, private and not-for-profit sectors, nationally and internationally. The team believes strongly in developing long term, mutually beneficial strategic partnerships with its customers, with key clients including mental health charity Mind, AstraZeneca and the Department for Education.
Nexer Digital is part of the Nexer Group – a Swedish technology firm with over 2,000 staff around the world.
