Case Studies

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Schwebel Goetz & Sieben

SERVICES PROVIDED:

• Website Design
• Website Development

Background
We’ve been the steward of Schwebel, Goetz & Sieben’s (SGS) website, Schwebel.com, since February, 2005. We were brought in to make major improvements to the site’s organizational structure and content management system and to organize SGS’s thousands of pages of legal and personal injury content. As web developers, we know how website design and structure can increase lead generation; we applied these techniques on SGS’s site.
 

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

Goals
We wanted to improve the user interface and experience while simultaneously 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 site’s 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 attention) 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 top two reasons video increases page rank are: first, search engines now index the words being said in video content, just like webpages; 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, increasing page rank and leading to search engines sending more users to the site.
 

We 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. We also ensured that video 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.
 

We worked hard to keep the development costs as value-oriented as possible for the project. By keeping the administrative framework and management solution that we had refined over the years, the costs for such a major website upgrade were much lower than a complete site remake.
 

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%