Mo’ Money, but also Less Problems

A website should do lots of things for you – it should function as your online brochure, it should help people learn a little about you, and more than anything, it should act as a sales tool for your business or product. Yet many websites, if they were an actual employee at your company, would probably be fired for poor performance.

In the spirit of helping you understand how a good website should function…it’s case study time!

First, you might not know this about your good friends over at Digital Link: we are not only your favourite local IT company, we also design websites and make them perform better for you, among other things.

Now that we have established that, I want to introduce you to one of our happy clients, because there is no case study without a client!

Dennis Bancarz of Dennis Bancarz Chartered Professional Accountants needed a new website, and being the happy obligers that we are, we happily obliged. Dennis is an accountant in Sherwood Park, which is a competitive market for accountants. As such, he found himself on page 27 for the basic search term “Sherwood Park accountant”. I don’t know about you, but I rarely go all the way to page 27 of a Google search to find my accountant. So a new website was a great idea, which is why we call Dennis “the Accountant with Really Great Ideas”.

After a redesign of the website (make it look good, and make it well-organized), some new copy (a word we use to describe the words on websites), and some changes to the backend (a word we use to describe the secret inner workings of your website that talk to search engines and send people your way):

• Dennisbancarz.ca moved from Page 27 to Page 4 in just 7 weeks.
• They saw a 670% increase in website traffic. That means that a whole lot more people searched and found Dennis and his accounting services. Website traffic is something you definitely want more of, unless “Best Kept Secret” is your weird new marketing strategy.
• There was a decrease in the bounce rate of 82%. This is a very important metric – it indicates how many people clicked on your website link, then immediately hit the back button. It is essentially the equivalent of a blind date walking in, seeing you (Well, not you – this wouldn’t happen to you) and immediately turning around and leaving the restaurant. It says a lot about first impressions and the design of your site. A decrease in bounce rate is very important for someone trying to get customers or clients from online searches.
• There was also a decrease in load time from 9 seconds to 4 seconds. This might sound like the least impressive metric, but it is actually quite impactful. 79% of web users say they abandon websites that take too long to load, usually never to return. Even a 1 second delay in how fast your website takes to fully load can result in a 7% reduction in conversion. If you saw $100,000 annual revenue from clients who found you online, a 9 second delay would potentially cost you $35,000 in income. Load speed is critical.

So, although this is a blog post and not a sales pitch, I have to ask: what do you think a 670% increase in web traffic and an increase in conversion could do for your business?