Marketers often treat a website redesign as a design-and-dev problem — “make it look better and the leads will follow.” A recent case involving Acorel, a French market leader in automatic people-counting technology, is a useful reminder of why that framing is risky in B2B: a site that’s technically and structurally broken quietly cancels out every other marketing effort, no matter how much budget goes into content, paid media, or SEO strategy.
The project was carried out by the Go Global team, and it’s worth examining through a marketing lens rather than a purely technical one.
A problem marketing couldn’t fix on its own
Acorel has been in business for more than 37 years and is a recognized leader in its niche. But a full audit revealed a pattern common among mature B2B companies: the product and reputation were strong, but the digital storefront was working against them.
The marketing symptoms were telling:
- 275 monthly visitors, 100% from France — for a company with an international client base, this meant the site wasn’t functioning as an international lead-generation channel at all.
- A Domain Rating of 18 versus 57 for a competitor of the same age — meaning two decades of Google indexing had never translated into real search authority.
- Ranking for only 47 keywords, none in the top 3 — content that could have driven organic traffic was effectively invisible.
- Mobile performance of 23/100, with an 18.3-second Largest Contentful Paint against a recommended 2.5 seconds — most mobile visitors never waited long enough to see any marketing message at all.
That last point matters for any marketer: no paid campaign, email send, or LinkedIn post can “work” if the traffic it drives abandons the page before the content even loads.
Why site structure is a marketing problem too
Beyond the technical issues, the audit found a confusing information architecture: “Products,” “Services,” and “Solutions” existed as disconnected sections, while there was no “Cases/Projects” section at all — despite case studies being one of the primary trust signals in a long B2B sales cycle.
This illustrates a principle marketers frequently underestimate: a site’s information architecture is part of the funnel. If a prospect can’t grasp the product’s value within the first two or three screens, and can’t find proof points — case studies, numbers, named clients — the site fails at soft conversion even when the traffic reaching it is well-targeted.
The English version of the site, built as a literal translation of the French original (down to leftover French text like “Fermer” showing up in the English inquiry form), is another example of how localization without adaptation undermines trust with an international audience, even when the translation is technically accurate.
What changed — and why it’s a marketing story, not just a UX one
Go Global ran the full cycle, from positioning through technical SEO, and each stage carries a direct marketing implication:
- Repositioning based on competitor analysis (INIT, Xovis, Webreathe) — lets the site speak the market’s language rather than only the company’s own, which directly affects inbound lead quality.
- A new Cases/Projects section — pre-answers the standard B2B question, “show me this has worked elsewhere,” before a prospect ever reaches sales.
- Technical SEO: correct hreflang structure, rewritten titles/meta/URLs — the foundation without which the rest of a company’s content marketing stays effectively invisible to search engines, regardless of how good the writing is.
- Core Web Vitals moving into the “green zone” (90+, up from 23–44) — this affects both search ranking (speed is a ranking factor) and paid-traffic bounce rates.
- Live chat added at the final stage — turns already-acquired traffic into processed leads faster, shrinking the gap between visitor interest and sales response.
It’s worth noting honestly that Go Global’s own write-up says the impact on traffic and lead volume will be measured separately, once enough post-launch data accumulates. In other words, what’s been delivered so far is the removal of technical and structural barriers that were previously undercutting marketing effectiveness — not yet a confirmed growth metric.
The takeaway for marketers
The Acorel case is a clean illustration of a simple but often-ignored principle: in B2B, a website redesign isn’t a project that sits next to marketing — it’s the precondition for marketing to work at all. Load speed, clear structure, proper localization, and a solid technical SEO foundation don’t just “improve” marketing results; without them, there are no results to improve, no matter how much budget goes into driving traffic.
For companies with a similar profile — a strong product and reputation built over years, sitting on a technically outdated website — this case is worth treating as a checklist item: before scaling paid campaigns or a content strategy further, it’s worth checking whether marketing’s most expensive asset, the website itself, is quietly leaking value.