Project Details
Midwestern Pet Foods largest and most popular brand–Earthborn Holistic® Pet Food–was in dire need of a web design refresh. It had been around 6-7 years since the website had a new look. The navigation was antiquated and the overall user experience felt very dated.
In addition, Earthborn, the Evansville, Indiana-based brand, had developed a new logo and new category branding that needed to be incorporated into the new site.
A Website Strategy for a Family-Owned Brand
The new site needed to align with Earthborn’s position in the market–they are loved by customers, eco-conscious, and a family-owned consumer brand. The site built upon the strength of the brand-equity and trust Earthborn had built over many years with its customers. The website redesign conveyed a continued commitment to the planet and loyalty to its customers-–both furry and not.
As part of the new website strategy, we worked with the internal marketing team to find creative ways to highlight Earthborn’s commitment to the environment and its programs, including Earthborn Reborn, UPC for Trees, and PlantBag®.
While the brand’s audience hadn’t changed too much, Gulo’s web strategists built tightly-defined personas and user journeys to ensure visitors had pre-built pathways to purchase and targeted messaging that speaks to their needs.
The user journey needed to foster more exploration of the brand’s products and various brands–Earthborn Holistic Dog, Earthborn Holistic Cat, Venture & Unrefined.
“We received a beautiful site that runs smoothly with a good user experience…and gathered more data and captured more emails than the site before.”
– Diane N., Digital Marketing Manager, Earthborn Holistic® Pet Food
Paving the way for growth
The Midwestern Pet Foods teams asked our Chicago Web Development teams to fuel the brand for the next era of growth. As such, we recommended the site leverage WooCommerce, the customizable, open-source eCommerce platform built on WordPress.
WooCommerce provided a wonderful framework for their 66 products and 50+ product attributes.
The ux web design team created an extraordinary product filtering experience coupled with a gorgeous product page to highlight ingredients and “Buy Now” experience to bridge their brand strategy between retail and DTC.
SEO-Focused
Earthborn Holistic® historically hadn’t leaned too heavily on organic search as part of their digital strategy, thus they never looked too closely at SEO and the effectiveness of branded and non-branded search queries for organic SERPs. The web strategy team and brand team went through detailed exercises to hone in on keyword phrases designed to put category pages in better position to rank higher organically.
Let’s Get Technical
As part of Google’s mission to help site builders build better, more technically sound websites, Google built a tool called Lighthouse. Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of web pages. The new Earthborn category pages and the Earthborn product pages scored nearly perfect (>90) in all categories: Accessibility, Best Practices & SEO.
