I wanted to share a case study about a new home page design that helped a client in the estimated tax business improve conversions. The results have been great so far – up 83%.

First, let’s get the background info on the client (Easy Estimated Taxes) out of the way. Easy Estimated taxes is a site that allows taxpayers to manage their quarterly estimated tax payments. Taxpayers can pay their estimated tax payments out of their bank account, keep record of their payments, and they get reminders of when their next payment is due.

Probably the most important thing to know about the business is that it’s seasonal. There are four payment periods per year and their traffic peaks during those four periods. That means those four periods are super important to them – it’s how the business sustains itself for the entire year. By now you’re putting 2 and 2 together and realizing that their site needs to perform during its peak period. If not, then they have to wait 3 months for another peak to come around.

The client had the following goal: get more of the existing traffic into their sales funnel. Put another way, get more of the people that visit the site clicking on the right call-to-action.

Accomplishing this goal goes beyond making the call-to-action button larger. There are some subtle details we had to address to make people comfortable with clicking that call-to-action. In other words, not only should people click it, but they have to want to click it because they were confident that Easy Estimated taxes would provide the services it claims to provide.

Here’s the design before we got our hands on it:

Here’s what we noticed needed to be adjusted to help accomplish the client’s goals:

1. Above the fold was actually decent. There is a clear call-to-action with fairly easy -to-understand text. There is always room for improvement, however.
2. Everything below the fold looked inconsistent with the rest of the page. In the tax-related industry, it’s incredibly important to convey a strong, professional, and trustworthy appearance. Users in this industry are highly skeptical of sites that don’t appear to be run by the government.
3. It wasn’t clear to the user how much the service cost.

After some iterating, here’s the design that we launched for the client in time for the last peak period (September 15, 2011):

We focused on conveying more trust, tweaking the text to better educate potential customers, and increasing the perception that the site is a legitimate, trusted way to pay estimated taxes online.

The results were all very positive:
When compared to the previous quarter, 83% more customers completed the signup for the site. Most importantly, the client was psyched!

Thoughts, comments, or questions? Let’s discuss i the comment section below.

The new IRS.com layout - optimized for revenue generation

Last month we completed a project for IRS.com. I just finished writing an SEO case study (it may be better classified as a white paper) highlighting the process we went though with our client and ensuing results.

The entire case study is fairly lengthy, so I’m including just the summary in this post.

Just five months of working with Tax Center produced extremely positive results. The website is now better positioned in the search engines than it was before and it is receiving more traffic because of that positioning.

This project was different from most for a couple of reasons. First, it was shorter. Most content strategies are at least 12 months in length. Second, we began working with Tax Center at the beginning of their most important months of the year (as opposed to implementing our plan in the offseason for taxes).

This means that we needed to implement a strategy that did all of the following:
A) Got results without adversely affecting current search engine positioning,
B) Resulted in accelerated returns (meaning immediately), and
C) Laid the groundwork for long term performance beyond the scope of the project (future tax seasons).

We began the project by performing an in-depth audit of the site. The audit pointed to several key areas of improvement – basic SEO fundamentals, a more trusted user experience, and more high-value content. We based our strategy on those key areas.

The results were quick, and significant. First, the site was better positioned in the search engines:

• The number of pages on the site that come up in search results went UP 686%
• The number of pages on the site that are on the first page of Google search results went UP 175%

Second, more people visited the site in the 2011 tax season than in 2010:

• 49% more people visited the site
• Traffic coming from the search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) was more than 4 times higher

The content created yielded an immediate return. The ROI for the more than 250 pieces of content we created and posted was better than 127%. That means the client more than made their money back for the cost of the content in less than 5 months.

The positive results don’t necessarily end with the passing of the 2011 tax season. The groundwork laid for the client will continue to bear fruit in the offseason and in future tax seasons. All of these numbers may increase in the future as the new content gets more inbound links.

Here’s the full case study.

What are your thoughts? Any feedback? I encourage you to participate in the comment section below.

Seemingly out of nowhere, the title tag in the search snippet for one of our clients completely changed. Well, that doesn’t sound too horrible or harmful you say. Normally that’s right. Sometimes titles in snippets can be altered by the search engines and in rare cases can improve click-thru rates (I still recommend controlling all information in snippets with custom META data for every single page on your site).

The issue in this case was that the title tag now included information referring back to a really old (and outdated) sponsor…like years old. Even though the META data and the code said one thing (and keep in mind hadn’t been touched for at least a year), the title tag said something completely different.

Check it out. Here’s a screenshot of the source code:

And here’s a screenshot of what a users would see on Bing (and Yahoo) when searching for “holiday bowl”:

Notice anything strange? Hint: the title tag in the search results does not match what’s in the source code. In fact, nowhere on the Holiday Bowl home page does it even mention the word “Culligan”.

So what gives? And more importantly, how can it be fixed?

I had heard that sometimes the search engines pull META data from DMOZ and use that in snippets – overriding what a website has in its source code. So I checked DMOZ to see if that was true in this case.

Here’s what I found when I did a search for “holiday bowl” on DMOZ:

There it is! There’s the source of our pain. Bing and Yahoo are pulling “Culligan” from DMOZ and using it in the snippet.

After a quick search, I was able to find and install the following script into the home page code telling the search engines to ignore the META description in DMOZ and use what’s in the source code:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noodp”>

After about 4 days the title tag was back to normal:

Hooray! It’s fixed. Bing and Yahoo are pulling from the right source and “Culligan” has disappeared from the snippet.

Whenever you see this problem with one of your sites, just use this simple-to-implement fix and you’ll see results very quickly.

Have you ever had this problem? Did you use this method to fix it? Let’s discuss in the comment section below.

I integrated(*) the Thesis WordPress theme to this blog 30 days ago. Granted, 30 days isn’t a long time, but it’s long enough to begin to look at some data. In particular, I want to see if what the makers of Thesis claim is true – that inherently it will help SEO performance out-of-the-box.

* The theme is up-and-running, but obviously I haven’t done anything to customize the design. Work comes first, you understand.

Here’s what good old Google Analytics reports for thew 30 days since Thesis was integrated:

Basic Data:
Traffic: UP 39%
Pageviews: UP 40%
Pages per visit: UP 0.5%
Bounce Rate: DOWN 5%

It’s always nice to see traffic up. I’m not pleased about the bounce rate actually getting worse, but all of the other high-level numbers are going in the right direction. At first glance, bounce rate got worse most likely because I haven’t done anything to incorporate my brand into the blog and don’t have a really great call-to-action.

Let’s look a little deeper – into some SEO indicators to see if Thesis is actually delivering new traffic from the search engines:

Organic search traffic (all search engines): UP 7%
Google organic search traffic: UP 8%
Yahoo! organic search traffic: DOWN 15%
Bing organic search traffic: DOWN 26%

Pages per visit from organic traffic: DOWN 11%
Bounce rate for organic traffic: DOWN 13%

So…overall organic traffic is up, but it’s down on Yahoo! and Bing fairly significantly. And again, it looks like the engagement metrics have gone in the wrong direction. This data points to the fact that I need to do more to make this blog more sticky.

Here are a few qualifiers to go with the data:

• The data compares the last 30 days to the previous 30 days
• I try to blog once a week. In the first 30 days I posted 3 times. In the most recent 30 days I posted 5 times.
• When I integrated Thesis, I stopped using “All In One SEO” and opted to use Thesis’ built in SEO tools.

After 30 days of having Thesis integrated it looks like traffic is a little better, but engagement is down. At this point, Thesis’ claim that it works well for SEO out-of-the-box appears to be true – it definitely didn’t hurt (which can happen when you change your internal SEO Structure like I did). My best guess for the downside is a lack of engagement. Readers are not feeling compelled to click on other posts and visit other pages once they finish reading the first post they read.

How do you interpret the numbers? Have you integrated Thesis on your blog? What happened to your traffic? Let’s discuss in the comment section below.

Here’s a quick client success story in-the-making that I think is worth sharing with you: the Pacific Life Holiday Bowl is a client of ours. For you non-sports fans out there, the Holiday Bowl is one of the post-season bowl games held annually in college football (aside: it’s one of the best bowls year in and year out). We’ve had the pleasure of working with them for the last few years.

After last year’s game, the Holiday Bowl said they wanted more organic traffic for the 2009 game (being held at the end of December).  Although the site gets decent traffic all year long, it gets an overwhelming majority of its annual visitors in December (when the game is played).  So December is very important. It’s their entire year. The vent is once-a-year, so the better the webiste performs in that month, the higher they can charge for ad deals, partnerships, etc.

We did a few basic things to help improve their overall search profile. And so far, those things have paid huge dividends. Traffic for December of this year is way up when compared to last year (stats listed below) and the year before (which is as far back as we have traffic stats for the site).

Here’s what we did:
1. We looked at the last 18 months of data about how the site was performing organically. As you might guess, the site dominated searches for “holiday bowl”. But we noticed for searches like “holiday bowl tickets” (a really popular search), the site was getting beat by ticket dealers and brokers. We saw a huge opportunity to gain substantial traffic just by improving on 10 searches similar to “holiday bowl tickets” – ones that had high volume and low/”beatable” competition.

2. Here’s where we addressed the fundamentals: for all of the pages we wanted to rank in those 10 terms, we rewrote the URLs and meta data using the most valuable keywords.

3. We checked out any pages that were listed as “not found” in Webmaster Tools and redirected to existing pages. This saved them a bunch of wasted link juice.

That’s it. That’s all we did. I’m not saying that took us 5 minutes to do, but it wasn’t like we had to come up with come kind of extravagant plan. We just stuck to the fundamentals.

Here are the traffic numbers so far for December 1-9 (as compared to December 1-9, 2008):
* Traffic is up just over 82%
* Pageviews are up 70%
* Average time spent on the site is up 10%

That’s all great, but what about organic traffic? (what they asked for):
* Traffic coming from Google organic search is up 120%
* Traffic coming from Yahoo organic search is up 24%

The best, and most telling, number might be this one:
* Last year people visited the site as a result of clicking on the search result for just over 2,400 keywords. This year that number is 5,200 keywords! So the net that was cast out in the search engines was twice as big this year than last year. That’s a huge difference.

And finally, traffic from the term “holiday bowl tickets” is up 180% thanks to be ranked #1 in Google.

What’s the big deal? This reinforces what we tell potential clients when we talk about our strategy to help them. You have to get the fundamentals of search engine optimization right first.

We frequently talk to companies who are eager (rightfully so) to change their search profile. They are in a big rush to get aggressive with massive PPC campaigns and the like. That’s great.  We can do that for you, we tell them. But often times, as is the case here, we can deliver huge ROI just by making sure the basics are done right. Page titles and URLs are underrated when it comes to SEO, but they make a big difference.

Granted, the Holiday Bowl has the best domain name possible. That’s super valuable for them. That being said, the way the URLs were built didn’t leverage that domain fully. So now what we are seeing is improved performance in the long tail of keywords. And that’s where any website, regardless if they have the perfect domain, can see a serious improvement in traffic.

Thoughts? Comments? Any similar experiences? Share them in the comment section below.