14
billion in sales
10,000+
employees
49
years on Fortune 500 list
A Fortune 200 with a large-scale problem
Land O’Lakes was faced with a big problem. Their multi-faceted digital strategy was held back by a cumbersome CMS, preventing the brand from delivering the best web experience possible. Broken links were difficult to find and optimizing their sites for SEO seemed impossible with their existing solution.
To navigate these challenges in the short-term, the digital team at Land O’Lakes was paying for a tracking solution to crawl their site and provide a list of broken links and misspellings. However, the team didn’t know where these issues were located, making it incredibly difficult to correct problems.
Optimizing their websites the right way
“Before Siteimprove, it was chaos for sure,” said Joseph Lindberg, Digital Communications Editor at Land O’Lakes. “But I think it was more that we did not optimize our websites the right way. We weren’t paying attention to how important it was to have all these technical fundamentals. It was just throwing darts at the wall and hoping you’d see some kind of improvement.”
However, Lindberg said once the team started using Siteimprove, they were able to bring their talented IT group together with their content team and create a single source of truth for everyone to work from.
“We also had additional stakeholders such as legal and HR that were also part of the plan to ensure our website was compliant,” said Salmanowicz. “Having that strong internal partnership is essential so everyone’s clear about their roles and responsibilities and also clear on the end goal. When we crawled our website using Siteimprove for the first time, it was humbling. We had some work to do.”
Getting to work and getting results
The Land O’Lakes teams went to work. Salmanowicz immediately found that Siteimprove's Digital Certainty Index (DCI) scoring system gave the digital team a huge boost of motivation. “The tool gamifies it for you,” Salmanowicz said. “It allows you to focus on the right things to improve your score. So as the teams were working on it, they could immediately see the progress.”
This did more than just provide the digital team with quick wins that demonstrate results and boost morale. It also helped the rest of the organization understand and trust the tool, allowing the digital team to more easily secure IT, legal, and HR buy-in for its website improvement efforts.
“It took a lot of teams coming together and saying: ‘We want great sites,” Salmanowicz said. “We need a technology partner to help us with that. But we’re all committed and we all play a role.”
Kirsten Salmanowicz
Digital Marketing Platform Manager
As the team worked to make improvements, the digital marketing team found satisfaction in boosting their scores. In the meantime, IT was pleased that the websites’ deep, technical issues were brought to light and resolved. And everyone enjoyed the ability to have a holistic view of the Land O’Lakes digital picture to better prioritize which objectives to tackle next.
Seeing the ROI of Siteimprove
“A lot of the ROI we’re seeing with Siteimprove is centered around organizational efficiency,” Lindberg said. “Because we have a tool with benchmarks and guidelines built in, everyone tends to speak the same language, we’re not repeating ourselves, we’re not duplicating work.”
Salmanowicz said, that by centralizing the tool stack, Siteimprove has also created tremendous time and cost savings for Land O’Lakes. With Siteimprove, Land O’Lakes was able to reduce agency spend by identifying issues they can tackle in-house instead. They also advanced their go-to-market speed by creating a one-stop shop for all teams to use.
“So as we think about some of our key initiatives at Land O’Lakes, driving digital transformation, accelerating e-commerce, those are some of our big goals. Siteimprove’s a key player to making sure we can achieve those,” Salmanowicz said.
