The Client
Noviant Inc. is an ICT and AI consulting firm headquartered in Midtown Manhattan. Their clients are mid-market and enterprise companies in financial services, healthcare, and logistics. Average contract value: $85,000. Their website — when they came to us — had a Lighthouse performance score of 41 on mobile.
Three Problems Costing Them Real Money
Problem 1: Invisible to Chinese-language search. Approximately 30% of Noviant's target client base — financial services firms in NY, LA, and SF — have Chinese-speaking decision-makers who search in both English and Chinese. Noviant had zero Chinese content, zero Chinese-language backlinks, and zero organic presence in that search segment.
Problem 2: Performance destroying credibility. A 41 Lighthouse score on mobile meant LCP of 6.2 seconds and INP of 480ms. When enterprise procurement teams evaluated Noviant against competitors during RFP processes, a slow website signaled technical incompetence — fatal for an AI consulting firm.
Problem 3: No conversion architecture. The site had no clear calls to action, no case study pages, and no contact flow optimized for enterprise buyers. Traffic existed but converted at 0.4%.
Technical Solution
We rebuilt the site on Next.js 15 with App Router and next-intl for i18n, generating static pages at build time for all locale/route combinations. Key technical decisions:
- Static generation (SSG) for all content pages — eliminates server latency for the content types that matter most to SEO
- React Server Components for data-heavy sections — zero JavaScript shipped to the client for sections that do not need interactivity
- CJK font subsetting — reduced Chinese font payload from 4.2MB to 287KB using glyphhanger and a custom build script
- Edge CDN deployment via Vercel — assets served from 40+ global edge locations, cutting TTFB from 820ms to 68ms
- Correct hreflang implementation — alternate tags in the document head for /en/ and /zh-CN/ variants of every page
- Hero image optimization — WebP with AVIF fallback, explicit dimensions, fetchpriority="high", preloaded in document head
Results After 90 Days
- Lighthouse performance score: 41 → 98
- LCP: 6.2s → 1.4s
- INP: 480ms → 76ms
- CLS: 0.31 → 0.02
- Organic traffic: +340% (driven by Chinese-language keyword indexing)
- Qualified leads per month: +280%
- Site conversion rate: 0.4% → 2.9%
Three Lessons for Any B2B Tech Firm
Lesson 1: Your website is part of your product demo. For a technology consulting firm, a slow or broken website is a direct contradiction of your value proposition. Fix it before you lose the next RFP.
Lesson 2: Bilingual SEO in a major US metro is low-competition, high-value territory. Most competitors have not touched it. Six months of bilingual content compounds into a defensible organic moat.
Lesson 3: Enterprise conversion architecture is different from consumer. Long sales cycles need case studies, credibility signals, and frictionless contact flows — not hero carousels and stock photography.