Background

Frontier Web Development (FWD) has been the steward of Schwebel Goetz & Sieben’s (SGS) website since February, 2005. FWD was brought in to make major improvements to the site’s organizational structure, content management system and to organize SGS’s thousands of pages of legal and personal injury content. While making other smaller changes and upgrades over the years, FWD became experts at understanding what changes to website design and structure increase lead generation – specifically in the personal injury law arena.

The Opportunity

The main strength of Schwebel.com has been great search engine rankings and a vast array of legal advice and content. FWD saw the opportunity to completely redesign the site feel and interface so that these strengths would lead to even more new cases.

Before

Goals

Improve the user interface and the user experience while at the same time increasing the search engine optimization for each page and increasing the conversion rate for site visitors.

Redevelopment

The redesign of the site streamlined the user interface by modernizing the page layouts and creating a more intuitive navigation, adding parallel video content to many of the sites most popular pages and reorganizing the press room section of the site for easy navigation and searching. Since lead generation remained the top goal, all points of user communication were strategically positioned to encourage the user to fill out the free case evaluation form. No matter what path a user might take through the thousands of site pages, all sections and content would lead the user’s eye (and/or mind) to the form or phone number.

The main strategy for increasing the search engine optimization on the site was to use video content to increase the page rank scores of the site’s most popular pages. The two biggest reasons video increases page rank are that, first, search engines will now actually transcribe the words being said in video content. Then they analyze that content just as they analyze text and use that information to make positive additions to the page rank score. Second, videos that are relevant to a user are extremely likely to encourage that user to stay on the page longer to watch them. When this happens, the bounce rate for pages with video decreases and, in turn, increases page rank and leads to search engines sending more users to the site.

FWD worked closely with SGS to prioritize the videos being produced for the new version of the website and helped outline a long-term plan for ongoing production of fresh and interesting video content. By advising SGS on how to produce the videos, FWD ensured that content was extremely similar to the content already on the site so that users would stay on the site longer, building trust, and have a more compelling motivation to contact SGS for advice about their potential case.

FWD also worked hard to keep the development costs as streamlined as possible for the project. The redevelopment was achieved mainly by changing the user-facing side of the website and making only slight tweaks to the existing content management system. By keeping the administrative framework and management solution that had been refined by FWD over the years, the costs for such a major website upgrade were much lower than a complete site remake.

After

Results in the first 2 weeks

•    Contact form conversions increased by 76%

•    Average user time on the website increased by 28%

•    Average user time on each page increased by 21%.

•    Home exits decreased by 19%

•    Additional search engine traffic lead to an increase in total site traffic by 17%

 For more visit this project in our portfolio, or www.schwebel.com