Holcim

The client 

Holcim UK is a leading provider of sustainable building materials and integrated solutions, committed to shaping the future of construction through innovation, sustainability and investment in people  (colleagues, customers and communities).

In 2025, Holcim UK united Aggregate Industries and its 24 associated businesses under a single, powerful Holcim identity. This marked a significant milestone in simplifying the brand architecture and establishing a unified digital presence across all customer touchpoints.

To support this transformation, Holcim partnered with Hallam to deliver the digital migration and SEO strategy ensuring the new Holcim UK brand launched with a seamless customer experience, strong online visibility and a foundation for future digital growth.

The challenge 

Our ambition was to transform a complex “house of brands” into one cohesive and recognisable digital brand presence. This involved consolidating more than 18 standalone regional and specialist websites, many with low organic visibility and inconsistent performance into a single Holcim UK domain.

The challenge was twofold: to preserve valuable brand equity and customer journeys during the rebrand, while also improving SEO performance and user experience across every migrated site. The project demanded a robust technical SEO strategy, meticulous redirect planning and extensive UX auditing to ensure we not only retained visibility but set new digital standards for the brand.

Drawing on insights from Holcim’s wider ecommerce portfolio (including Bradstone and Concrete2You), we leveraged best practices across SEO, content and UX to deliver a future fit platform. Post-migration we actually saw increased brand traffic followed by a large drop. This was proactively mitigated through scaled Paid Media activity maintaining visibility and growing lead flow while search performance stabilised under the new Holcim UK brand. 

During the latter half of the year our core challenge shifted; mitigating a reduction in leads whilst experiencing the drop in traffic.

What we did 

Our work with Holcim has been a deeply collaborative effort between Hallam’s consultancy and Holcim’s internal team.

Structural & technical SEO: Our consultancy guided key structural changes, such as moving critical site sections from subdomains into subfolders to improve crawl efficiency and domain authority. We also implemented Schema markup to future-proof the site and performed a comprehensive overhaul of metadata and meta titles to improve click-through rates on product and service pages.

Local SEO & location page pivot: Recognising that 300+ location pages were previously “orphaned” and difficult to discover, we advised on a total structural integration. This included a massive audit of Google My Business (GMB) profiles to ensure local specifiers could easily find plants and products.

Content strategy & engagement: We developed a robust content plan that moved beyond standard blogs into thought leadership and whitepapers. Crucially, we integrated the client’s internal “Our Stories” series, which showcased the people behind the brand to drive emotional engagement and counter post-migration traffic dips.

UX optimisation: Following the migration, we pivoted toward UX audits, tree-testing, and form optimisation to ensure the site remained a high-performing lead-generation tool.

The results 

Despite the significant disruption typical of a large-scale migration, the strategic focus on high-intent traffic ensured that Holcim’s commercial performance remained stable. Looking at 2025 as a whole, the results demonstrate remarkable resilience:

• Organic search equity retained: We successfully retained 94% of organic search equity through the transition in 2025 versus 2024.
• Lead stability: While total organic traffic eventually saw a 30% drop following the loss of the legacy domain, total leads remained stable (up 1% YoY), indicating that high-intent traffic was successfully preserved.
• Local SEO success: The location page overhaul was a major victory, with traffic up 110% and leads increasing by 300% in this area. This led to a significant surge in high-quality phone calls for core products like asphalt and ready-mix.

This collective effort not only managed a complex rebrand successfully but also laid a technical foundation that has allowed Holcim to emerge with a more strategically aligned and future-proofed digital presence.

Holcim joined Hallam at the European Search Awards in Krakow, 2025

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