SEO from every angle

With websites in 40+ countries and 20+ languages, Mercer provides human resource consulting services in health, retirement, investments, and talent to Fortune 500 companies around the world. They turned to IfThen to help rethink their corporate websites - not just the look and feel, but also the content strategy, country domain structure, lead generation approach, and translation models. 

Demonstrating their expertise in navigating complex HR regulations is core to maintaining a trustworthy brand. IfThen led them towards a new content strategy that leverages customer insights to identify key topics and publish thought leadership that matters to their clients, thereby capturing better qualified leads to covert into sales.

Each country site had its own domain, resulting in a fragmentation of the SEO power of the organization. By combining all countries into a sub-folder structure, IfThen was able to create one single Mercer where traffic to any country benefits all countries.

Managing content translation and inheritance between countries with varying amounts of resources is not only a content challenge but can also have a negative financial impact on the company if not handled efficiently. IfThen led the implementation of a third-party translation service within AEM that enables countries to easily inherit translated content from the global source while at the same time localize it and create their own content. 

1. Understand the landscape
Our work with Mercer began with a deep dive into the company’s business, their challenges and pain points, their competition, and the insights they had collected on what matters to their clients. The goal was to understand how best to drive their clients from consideration to commitment. 

2. Transform into global thought leaders
Development of detailed personas based on actual jobs their clients needed to do fostered the creation of an ecosystem of interlinked stories that not only proved Mercer’s value but also strengthened SEO. An updated user experience and more modern design further enforced the credibility of the brand. 

3. Architect a global infrastructure
A complex network of countries, some of which are regionally managed, accompanied by the need for each country to inherit all or very little global content, led IfThen to architect an efficient inheritance and translation infrastructure. All global content passes through a third-party translation service prior to inheritance and localization at the country or regional level. This provides the ultimate flexibility to countries, enabling as much or little localization as desired.

4. Build a scalable solution
The Mercer site was built in AEM with a set of reusable componentry that extends the approved brand design to the local level while enabling countries to manage and operate their own campaigns. Country domains were consolidated into subfolders to strengthen the SEO power of a single Mercer.com domain. 

5. Carefully launch
When 40+ country sites have to be launched while also changing domains, the site roll out has to be meticulously planned. Redirects have to be mapped, Geo IP detects have to be implemented, and cookie consent management must be transferred to facilitate a seamless transition. Over the course of two months, IfThen carefully launched country sites in small groups to minimize risk to a shared platform and execute detailed test plans for each site.