Valitics. Web Strategies, Net Results

A couple of years ago, we designed a website for a Boise-area professional services client (think CPA firm). The website design was clean, professional and intuitive to navigate. It had good SEO basics (clean code, keyword-relevant title tags, etc.), and had decent text content (that was provided by the client). Other than that though, it was nothing fancy. The client merely wanted a rebranded website with ten pages or so to feature three or four of their primary service offerings. We delivered, they were happy, and the site basically sat there for two years without being marketed touched by the client.

Cut to two years later - I get a meeting request from the client. He wants to talk about their 2011 advertising budget and possibly doing more with the web. Obviously, I am excited to hear that and we schedule a meeting.

Here are some of the highlights I learned during that meeting:

I couldn't help but smirk. We kept analyzing...

Yep. It cost this client about 2300% more to get a lead from the phone book than from the web.

To this client’s credit, they had been tracking where these leads were finding and contacting them from. They also had a good handle on their lead-to-client conversion rate and their average client value, so we dug a bit deeper.

The client's average conversion rate (from a lead into a paying client) was about 37.5% and the average client value was $1,500.

I don’t throw out the cliché “tip of the iceberg” very often, but when this client asked how they were doing from a web marketing perspective, I couldn’t help but drop it. They had literally done nothing other than have a website. What they had done is akin to getting a phone number and not giving it out to anyone. And yet, their website had produced about half the leads that their $40,000 in phone book advertising had. How?

We, of course, had website traffic data about this client’s site (we install analytics on all the sites we do, even if the client doesn’t care about the data when their site launches; they will eventually!). We noticed that:

• The site ranked well for their branded keywords (business name, names of the company principals, location info) but they were getting very few non-branded keyword referrals from search engines
• Their site was listed in the top seven listings and prominently displayed on Google Places for their industry and location

Even with these modest credentials, the site was producing results. The client, however, wanted more. We are now actively working with this client to:

• Increase their search engine ranking for industry specific non-branded keywords in order to get them more traffic from people who are looking for services they offer, but do not necessarily know about their company
• Increasing their ranking on Google Places from 5th to 1st for their geographical area
• Targeting online advertisements to local people in their area who are searching for services that they offer
• Adjust and test aspects of their website to make sure that, once someone gets to their website, that that person has every opportunity and desire to contact the firm to become a client
• Monthly website analytics reports that we create and discuss with the client about their website’s performance, where there are new opportunities, and what we should do about it during the next month

At the end of the day, the goal we now have with this client is to reallocate their advertising dollars from inefficient and hard-to-measure activities (i.e. phone book advertising) to more incremental, affordable and measurable tactics while maintaining or increasing the number of leads they get per year.