LHH

Overview

Lee Hecht Harrison is Adecco's career transition and leadership development brand. In 2016 it ran a different domain in almost every one of its fourteen territories: lhhpenna.com in the United Kingdom, lhhknightsbridge.com in Canada, lhhitalia.com, lhh.ch, and so on, with languages layered on top. The brand wanted a redesigned global platform that localises by territory, and its stated driver was search. LHH.com had SEO problems it wanted solved, and it wanted the Native thought leadership platform, hosted elsewhere, brought onto the site for the same reason.

What the audit showed

The SEO findings from the 2017 platform audit were specific. Several LHH domains did not canonicalise on HTTPS. None had a robots.txt. There were 302 redirects where a link could go straight to the page, and redirect chains that search engines only partly follow. Additional navigation sat in a JavaScript pop-up, invisible with JavaScript off. Title tags carried the brand name rather than a keyword focus, and home pages had too little content to tell a search engine what they were for. None of that is exotic. All of it is what happens when a site is built without anyone owning search.

The shape of the answer

I scoped the redesign in four phases. Discovery and planning: requirements against a Sitecore checklist covering authoring, users and security, workflow, SEO, accessibility, search, delivery, globalisation and integration, and a target architecture with analytics, insight, decisioning and automation configured in, on Azure. A UX and design framework phase: research, journey mapping, competitive landscape, personas, information architecture, wireframes for desktop, tablet and mobile, prototyping, usability testing and brand guidelines. Build, test, train and migrate, run as iterative sprints. Then profiling and personalisation: behavioural personas, profiling cards and keys, a content scoring matrix, and Sitecore configured for quick-win personalisation first.

The SEO fixes were placed where they belong: in the site architecture, in development practice, in URL management handled by the platform, and in training so the LHH team could manage titles, meta descriptions and image naming themselves. Multiple concurrent editors under a defined workflow, integrations with social channels, the CRN candidate platform and PeopleSoft, search and accessibility were in scope from the start. Target launch was October 2017.

Status

Scoped and proposed in February 2017, estimated in full up front with the estimates to be verified after discovery. The global estate consolidation that followed carried Adecco's brands onto one Sitecore platform; that programme is its own case.

Why it matters

Search is an architecture decision, and the cheapest time to make it is before the templates exist.