400% Increase in Qualified Leads After Redesign Recovery
Outcome
We diagnosed the root causes of their poor lead generation, developed a plan to correct the issues and then executed this plan to improve their lead generation by 400% within eight months. We became a lead generation and technical partner for this client and their end-clients over the next four years.
Background
We were contacted by the principal of a nationwide business consulting firm who had noticed a drop in the quantity and quality of the leads his firm was getting shortly after they redesigned their website.
He thought it was overall a “better website”, but felt something technical was going on as visits and leads decreased.
Process
The first thing we did was perform a website audit and deliver the outcome of this to them in a report and phone call to discuss.
Our website audit discovered and solved the following issues.
- 567 links with specific link text related to the client’s services from 12 domains were pointing to the client’s site. This looks extremely unnatural to search engines like Google. The solution was identifying the riskiest links and using a disavow request to tell Google not to count the links.
- No on-page optimization. Most pages on the website were raw text with no formatting such as headlines, sub-headlines or bold text. We had to research appropriate phrases and optimize these pages with proper formatting.
- Internal URLs not updated. There were links pointing to sub-folders and .html files from the old site that were still live. We replaced all internal links to old content.
- Almost no internal links in page content. The website had 120 pages and almost no links connecting the pages together other than navigation and footer links. This caused people (and search engines) to bounce from the site without reaching related pages. We built out more internal links pointing to relevant pages that helped build context between areas of the site and keep people from leaving.
- Very few external links. The web content wasn’t referencing any other websites. This sends low quality signals to Google which affects rankings. We researched reference sources and linked out as needed.
Conclusion
Most of these issues were caused during the redesign process. We helped the consulting firm rebound from a decrease in visits and leads and went on to partner with them, and their end clients, for four years.