How We Beat the Odds with a Stronger, High Converting Website

Updated website strategy increases traffic by 35% and more than triples new orders for Seattle area small business

Year-over-year organic traffic.Covid Shutdown:3/15/20|Website Relaunch:3/26/20|Source:Google Analytics

Home-based businesses have an advantage right now, but that doesn’t mean growing one is easy. Here’s how a small business located in Bonney Lake, WA, continues to increase orders and revenue while the rest of the world seems at a relative standstill.

Tom Watson runs Watson’s Wooden Words from his home studio and workshop. It wasn’t always the case. He was a retail manager for Office Depot for 30 years before starting his custom sign business. The idea of doing this for a living started way before his retail days. As a boy, he helped his Dad create trail signs for the California State Parks Department. He knows his way around wood and CNC equipment, and works with a team for painting and finishing.

Rather than punching out cookie-cutter signs, he enjoys the creative side the most, working with clients to translate everything from old photos to napkin sketches into works of art.

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Using Google Analytics to Identify the Problem

A couple of years ago, Tom decided to learn more about how to grow the business. I met him at a class of mine he attended at the Bellevue Library. A few months later he contacted me to ask how we could work together.

His website was my first stop. After a look at the site and review of the data, it became clear Tom was getting a decent amount of organic traffic. It was supplemented with Google Ads, referrals, and just a bit from Facebook, but the website was a dinosaur, resulting in very low visitor quality and conversion. Leads were just dribbling in, 2-3 a week.

Watson's Wooden Words' old website was getting organic traffic, but quality metrics were low.

The site had a difficult to use back end and management dashboard.

The look and imagery was really hurting. Tom’s work, a key differentiator, wasn’t presented in the best light. The templates were very basic, with no standard grids, which made it difficult to maintain with a consistent, professional look. Who really wants to spend that much of their time these days writing HTML and modifying the CSS?

The architecture was confusing; the language written for some old Google algorithm, not human beings — you know, the people that actually buy stuff.

How We Decided to Move to a New Website Platform

From the beginning, I wanted to update his website to increase conversions from the traffic he was already getting, while driving more organic traffic with the idea that they would be more qualified and engaged (to lead to higher conversions).

Tom wasn’t excited about building a completely new website. He had spent quite a lot of money on the old one (and a couple of others before that), and he was leery of throwing more money at the problem. So as a first step, we cleaned up and edited the content and added keywords. The traffic increased somewhat, but we were still experiencing low quality visitor participation, and poor conversion.

We needed a much better way to show his portfolio, and the whole website needed to be more visually appealing and branded. After about a year, I finally persuaded Tom to do the site overhaul and a thorough on-site search engine optimization.

6 Changes Increase Traffic and Conversion

Let’s just say, his online presence went through a drastic change on 3/26/20. Here’s what we did:

Website builder platform: We built the new site on Squarespace, because it presents images beautifully. It has an overall “design” appearance that underscores what Watson’s Wooden Words is all about. Like other popular platforms, it's also mobile responsive, easy to use and maintain. If ecommerce had been a priority, we would have chosen another platform, but with so much customization it's too complex at this point. Leads are acquired by website form, email and phone.

Overall design and personality: We chose fonts and colors that warmed it up and reinforced the personal brand. We added lifestyle images from customers (which saved money on photography), rather than just showing signs alone. We resized all the images to better show detail, while optimizing size for less impact on site speed.

Less is more: We improved the navigation by reducing the number of items in the main menu to feature popular pages (based on website traffic data), and moved secondary navigation into the footer. Content was edited down to focus on key differentiators, while making it easier for visitors to acquire information, and to ultimately drive contact and purchase.

Content that converts: We added what I like to call “Decision Helpers” and “Money Pages.”

Decision helpers, as the name suggests, build trust and remove the confusion buyers experience when purchasing high involvement products, like creative services. For this site, we added pages demonstrating the sign making process. We’ll use this “bucket” to add more content later, like photos and video. This type of content is also valuable for generating organic traffic.

Money pages provide a key signal in the buyer journey, indicating a visitor is on the verge of making a purchase (or generating a lead). It’s important for measuring value, especially if a site isn’t set up for ecommerce. The “How to Order” page in this case is a good example, so a key strategy is to direct visitors to it and to understand which source is sending that valuable traffic. It’s not surprising that Google organic is driving more than 50% of the visitors who end up on that page, because we know that organic has higher purchase intent.

Social proof: We used a third party tool to embed Google reviews, and added a “Latest Creations” page with feeds from Facebook and Instagram. It allows Tom to keep the site fresh without a lot of effort.

SEO: We made improvements to all the site’s optimization (titles, descriptions, H1’s, etc.), while keeping the URL’s of the pages that had decent traffic. Position has remained relatively the same for key search terms, yet there’s been a tremendous improvement in impressions, click through and actual clicks.

Improved SEO results in better rank,impressions and click through to the website.Source:Google Search Console (earliest tracking available 4/29/19)

Operational improvements: Selling custom, creative products can be a challenge. So beyond driving more traffic and increasing conversions, we wanted to use the website to help Tom be more efficient when working with clients. We built in functionality on the Contact page that allowed visitors to upload their artwork, added a design resources page, and built a “catalog” for sign hanging hardware to assist added value sales. As Watson’s gets busier, we’ll be introducing other website strategies to reduce labor, while continuing to increase revenue.

More than 35% Increase in Qualified Traffic — Conversions and Sales Way Up

Beyond improved acquisition numbers, year-over-year quality metrics are way up thanks to the site redesign. Visitors are sticking around to see what Watson's is up to.

All indicators are positive, and we’re ticking all the right boxes (year over year data):

• Organic traffic has increased by almost 35%.
• Quality metrics — pageviews, pages/session, average session duration, and bounce rate — have all improved.
• Tom, on average, is now getting 2-3 leads per day, not per week, and he's a great closer.
  
• The value of each sign order has gone from $100-$200 on average to more than $300. Bracket sales are up too.
• More leads are coming from businesses, including one from Facebook.
• Leads are coming in from further afield, including Alaska, New Jersey and Florida.
• More Google reviews are flowing in, which in turn will help improve search rank.

Tom couldn’t be happier. While walking his dog Rambo the other day, he called me to say, jokingly, he’s got too much work now. In fact, we’ve had to turn off his ads until he can catch up with all the orders. That’s a problem most small businesses would love to have.

About Watson's Wooden Words
Watson’s Wooden Words, located in Bonney Lake, WA, creates custom wood signs for homes and businesses using old world craftsmanship and modern technology.

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About Robbin Block

Robbin Block is the Owner and Creative Marketing Strategist at Blockbeta Marketing located in Seattle, WA. She takes a big picture approach to help expanding businesses strengthen their brand and amplify results. Robbin specializes in working with complex, often high ticket/lower volume manufacturers, makers, services, consultants or online publishers.