Ronseal manufactures and sells wood stains, paints, and preservatives to help the British public transform and look after their homes and gardens.
Having become established as the go-to DIY brand in the UK market, Ronseal wanted to bolster its global reputation.
One aspect of realising this ambition was migrating its website from a local .co.uk URL to a global .com. This aimed to change the public perception of Ronseal as a brand exclusively for British consumers, and would help position it on a global stage.
However, Ronseal reached out to us when the migration didn’t go as planned. Overnight, it lost 96% of its Google rankings and 80% of its immediate traffic. This significantly impacted its authority in the UK.
As a matter of urgency, we needed to fulfil the original objective of the site migration and restore Ronseal’s digital performance.
Our priority was rectifying the migration issues with the wider objective of restoring Ronseal's search equity.
We quickly identified every affected URL and manually mapped them against the closest relevant page. We also requested Google to crawl and index pages of the website at regular intervals.
This helped Ronseal reappear in the search results, but not in its original ranking positions. Work was still needed to rebuild Ronseal’s authority and improve its search rankings.
Google favours detailed, in-depth content that is helpful and engaging to its audiences — thoroughly answering their questions on the subjects that matter. And because Ronseal wanted to be a market leader, its content needed to outstrip anything its competitors were doing.
First, we needed to understand what topics were relevant to Ronseal’s audience and what they wanted to read about.
Extensive keyword research gave us the direction we needed. It influenced the sitemap and the categorisation of product pages which helped its products rank for a wider range of relevant keywords, capturing more search traffic.
The keyword research also helped us better understand the quality of Ronseal’s content and how to optimise it. The website was bloated with fragmented guides and blogs that underperformed and didn’t give users the value or extensive answers they wanted.
We audited Ronseal's existing content and removed redundant pages that didn’t increase the site’s visibility in search engines, had minimal visits, or poor dwell time.
For the articles that performed better, keyword research unveiled opportunities to optimise and improve them.
Our keyword research also allowed us to understand when to serve topics to users at the right time. This informed a detailed content plan comprised of existing and new content, optimised for maximum impact, reach, and visibility.
However, Ronseal’s website infrastructure was fragile, and changes caused outages. While inconveniencing users, the outages also threatened to impact Ronseal’s overall search visibility.
Ronseal believes that everyone should feel confident enough to tackle a DIY project, a view that's commonly reinforced in their external comms.
To get this point across on the website, we incorporated familiar imagery like paint splatters, tea stains, and DIY-stained denim. We also introduced a range of icons that help users quickly understand what the products are for and find key information like the number of coats and dry time.
Once all the migrations issues were wrapped up, we gave Ronseal’s website fresh lick of paint, updating its look and feel to reflect its ambition to become a global name.
Previously, its website featured outdated packaging, and the product pages didn’t properly reflect Ronseal’s ‘does exactly what it says on the tin’ mantra, missing essential information that highlighted key product benefits and instructions of use. There was also clear disconnect between its online and in-store experiences.
The new website puts Ronseal’s products front and centre. The unfussy colour scheme ensures the users’ focus is firmly on the products. There are also familiar touches of paint splashes and DIY-stained denim dotted around the website, reflecting the fact that Ronseal’s products are for everyone; not just perfectionist professionals.
To reflect the simplicity of Ronseal’s products, we introduced a range of icons that help users quickly understand key information like project type, the number of coats and dry time. All this information is clearly presented and explained, making it easy for DIY beginners to understand.
To provide users with the most relevant content, we future-proofed the website’s imagery and structure to accommodate seasonal updates. Now, from February to October, the website promotes outdoor projects, and switches its focus to indoor projects from November to January.
And now, thanks to a wide-scale refresh, restructure and redesign, the website provides a digital experience worthy of an iconic brand, matching its global ambitions.
