International Franchise Association (IFA)
About IFA
Celebrating 50 years of excellence, education and advocacy, the International Franchise Association is the world’s oldest and largest organization representing franchising worldwide. IFA’s mission is to protect, enhance and promote franchising through government relations, public relations and educational programs.
The Challenge
IFA contracted Hodgson to conduct a complete audit and assessment of their Ektron-managed website, www.franchise.org. This needs analysis and discovery process was to precede a redesign and re-skinning of the IFA homepage and section pages. IFA was clear that they were particularly concerned with improving the organic search engine optimization (SEO) of their website. For this reason, Hodgson ensured that our SEO and online marketing experts were heavily involved in this project.
The Solution
Hodgson conducted a full-scope audit and assessment of IFA’s site; this was immediately followed by a redesign and implementation of the new design into Ektron, the association’s content management system.
The audit and assessment process included an examination of the current information architecture on IFA’s site as well as the production of a recommended information architecture that would be more user-friendly and easier to navigate.
As a part of the audit and assessment, IFA required extensive SEO and analytics consulting services to maximize the visibility of their web presence on search engines like Google and Bing. This entailed conducting SEO analysis of two of IFA’s competitors, performing a full assessment of analytics available for www.franchise.org and doing a full-site SEO analysis of IFA’s own website, including keyword recommendations based on pay per click campaigns.
The organic search engine optimization analysis of the existing IFA website resulted in specific recommendations for improvement, including but not limited to the following areas:
- Refinement of title tags and meta tags based on keywords
- Addition of meta tag keywords to all pages
- Population of alt img copy with relevant keywords
- Recommended page copy and specific page development based on targeted keywords for each page
- Search engine indexing recommendations