Sometimes, online marketing campaigns are dazzling, magnificent in scope and incredibly complicated. Thankfully, there are also great gains to be made by getting back to basics and ensuring best practices are followed across your site and web presence.
A company website is a living, breathing representation of the brand on the web. Over a site’s lifetime, content is added and taken away. Copy changes. Pages may be redirected. Landing pages come and go. Menus and navigation change.
Each of these changes over the site’s life (hopefully) served its purpose and helped the site become more productive for the company and helpful for customers. However, it can also leave the site disjointed, riddled with errors, and underperforming.
Ongoing Site Audits Point to Opportunities
Brands need to step back often and perform a full site audit, either in-house or with the help of an agency. Optimization is an ongoing process and it’s critical to understand where your opportunities lie at any given time. Sometimes, seemingly insignificant changes to bring your site in line with best practices can produce surprising results.
Recently, the TopRank Online Marketing team had an opportunity to increase traffic to a consultation-booking page and improve conversion on a client website. This particular client operates a large service-oriented business in the healthcare industry; increased discovery and conversion by prospective patients was a major lead generation goal for their website.
It is a fact that sites will lose a percentage of converting visitors with each additional field in a form. This is increasingly relevant as consumers search and browse on mobile devices, where filling in forms may be more cumbersome than it was with a QWERTY keyboard. Though companies may be tempted to gather as much information as possible, only that which is necessary to contact the customer or otherwise take action on the lead should be included in the form.
In this case, our client’s goal was to increase targeted, qualified leads. Their existing page offered prospects a free consultation and contained seven form fields.
In the new version, the number of form fields are reduced by just one, to six. This is accomplished by combining the first and last name fields to one for “Name.” This one small change shortens the length of the form, while still allowing the client to collect the same amount of pertinent information.
In addition, the client implemented on-site optimization best practices, including a more descriptive title tag and rewritten meta description, to attract and engage the right type of traffic in search engine results pages.
Page and Form Optimization = 101% Increase in Pageviews, Conversion Improves by 8%
The TopRank team ran the optimized version of this lead generation page against the existing version for a period of one month in an A/B test and observed:
- An increase in pageviews by 101%
- Conversion increased 8%
The combined effect of additional targeted traffic and uptick in the percent of those visitors who opted in to the program resulted in a substantial improvement in qualified leads for the client.
Often, it is these small improvements, founded in a great understanding of the customer journey, that yield the most significant results.
If you’d like to improve the quantity and quality of traffic to your site, while improving your lead generation program, contact TopRank Online Marketing today to get started.
Top image courtesy of Shutterstock.
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