New website increases web traffic by 16%

Creating a new website can be daunting. The planning, resources, programming—it can overwhelm your team.  But if done right, it can yield a better experience for your visitors and overall better performance in terms of lead generation.

I really didn’t want to launch something brand new, simply because we have a huge investment in our current branding, and to be honest, I still liked the design or our website.

But our site was overdue for a refresh—over the years we had haphazardly added pages and widgets to fill immediate needs. But it looked thrown together and ultimately it hurt our performance. So, we brainstormed and got to work.

It took about 6 weeks to develop a wireframe and structure, populate the site with fresh content, and then program and launch. The site has been live since October and  page views alone are up 16%. In fact, all our key metrics improved substantially:

• Page views: +16%
• Unique page views: +12%
• Average time on site: +14%
• Bounce rate: -12%

I wanted to share some of the key updates to the site we feel have had the biggest impact on performance.

STRUCTURE

We built our original site 5 years ago as a simple one-page website. I have always liked this format, as I felt it was the most efficient for the user. However, we quickly realized it did not allow for strong content organization or let us benefit from SEO.

So we created a new wireframe and rearranged the content our viewers cared about most.  We also beefed up the content on the homepage compared with the last version, but the organization makes it much easier to follow.

MENU

We debated the menu items most—what to include, how to label them, and how they should be arranged. To help figure this out, we researched many competitors, both big and small, looking for trends. We aligned with many of these trends and developed a menu structure that improved our overall navigation of the website.

CONTENT

We had to decide on the right content. Not only did we want to get our value proposition top of mind, but we wanted to highlight our thought leadership, client relationships and satisfaction, employee culture and capabilities. We did this by creating a slider at the top of the page and drilling down on the content as you scroll. The variety of the content keeps the readers engaged and hopefully creates some intention as they scroll to the contact form.

CONTACT FORM

To make the most of our web leads, we created custom code on the contact form to help both the prospect and our sales team out. The prospect’s website is automatically filled in based on the email address, and when our sales team receives the lead, our code will pull the website title and description from Google. This allows our sales team to take a quick glance at the company and see if they’re a good fit for our agency.

We are very happy with the result and are excited that the tweaks we made have contributed to a better-performing website. Of course, we will continue to keep an eye on our site metrics, test and try new creative and messaging, and make updates based on new web technology.

If you’re interested in adding direct mail to your marketing mix, then drop us a line. We’re standing by to answer any questions, and, most importantly, to help you get your mail opened.