“The Lumar Platform helped us pinpoint which issues we needed to work on, as well as helping with education from a digital engineering perspective so the same issues don’t arise again. We’ve been able to improve our domains’ overall technical design while continuously improving on an ongoing basis.”
Rod Cunniam, VP of Digital Insurance Solutions, Western Financial Group.
In brief…
- Client Type: Financial Services
- Lumar Services: Analyze and Professional Services
- Challenges: Understanding what needs addressing and the impact of changes
- Outcomes: Improved Technical Design and Alignment to Search Engines
Client Profile
Western Financial Group is a diversified insurance services company that is focused on creating security and has provided over one million Canadians the right protection for more than 100 years. Headquartered in High River, Alberta, Western provides personal and business insurance through over 200 locations, its affiliates and a variety of connected channels, with an engaged team of approximately 2,200 people.
Challenges
The team manages more than 20 sites to promote their products and services across Canada and, under the leadership of Rod Cunniam, VP of Digital Insurance Solutions, the team is always looking at how to improve the experience of visitors to their sites, to make sure they can find the information they need. However, understanding what we needed to address without the correct data was a challenge.
“We were utilizing A/B testing and recording tools to help identify some opportunities,” explains Cunniam. “But this was trial, and error based on existing knowledge and experience, and it was difficult to tell if the improvements added traction.”
How Lumar is Helping
After researching a few tools, the team decided that the Lumar platform would help them identify and prioritize issues impacting the performance of their sites’ performance and give them the data points they needed to verify how successful their improvements had been.
The Western team took ownership of the onboarding process and, using tools provided by Lumar, quickly got to grips with how the platform could help them achieve their goals in what Cunniam calls a ‘targeted boot camp.’ The team would identify and work on five key things in two-week sprints as part of a journey toward their overall goals.
“The Lumar Platform helped us pinpoint which issues we needed to work on,” says Cunniam, “as well as helping with education from a digital engineering perspective so the same issues don’t arise again. We’ve been able to improve our domains’ overall technical design while continuously improving on an ongoing basis.”
The team has made several improvements to the Western sites and is now really pleased with how the design is performing. Availability, minimizing broken links and redirections, discoverability, all pages and links are working properly, rankings, tagging, schemas, page content that support SEO are just a few samples of milestone enhancements.
This now means the team can start looking at new areas to address, working with Lumar’s Professional Services team of Technical SEO experts. “The Lumar team took the time to really understand and align to our goals and objectives and are giving us a deep understanding of improvements that we can implement to proactively propel us even further forward. It’s a partnership.”
Cunniam attributes the performance improvements they’ve seen with closer alignment to what search engines expect. “A lot of people spend time and effort trying to outwit the search engines, but Lumar helps us align with the search engine’s design and desires, so our shoppers get the right return on a search.”
“Lumar has improved our technical performance considerably,” concludes Cunniam. “It removes unknowns so you can make more informed decisions, and it audits your sites quickly and easily. With the health scores, I can get an instant, at-a-glance view to see the impact of changes, delve into the details, and fix any issues immediately. I’m on the platform so regularly it’s one of the few passwords I still know!”
