I'm the SEO at Click Optimize, a web design and internet marketing company based in Raleigh, NC. I may not do as much as my co-workers on the client side of things, but even I know that when it comes to clients, they're almost always results-oriented. Of course, it makes sense... why would you pay for something that doesn't have tangible results? If "content is king," then results are the divine being that grant the king sovereignty over his kingdom. Without the blessing of results, the king reigns supreme over a whole lotta nothing.

That said, I'd like to present a case study of how at least one super-simple change tripled sales leads (results!) for one of our clients.

Traffic in March, 2010

In March of 2010, not long after we took control of the site, it was pulling around 3,200 unique visitors per month. Not too shabby. For goals, they were tracking leads in the form of completed "Contact Us" forms. The form was located on their site on the "Contact Us" page. Straightforward enough. Tons of sites do it this way. Those 3,807 visits led to 56 goal completions. So, they were converting at 1.7% on their own, using the one contact form. Like I said, plenty of sites do things this way, and there's nothing explicitly wrong with it. But after the time I spent doing SEM, I remember that a good practice to follow is to have your landing page be as few clicks from a conversion as possible. A "Contact Us" page is pretty necessary, but it often doesn't make for the most appropriate landing page. So what did we change?

Enter the Short-form Contact Box

If the conversion you're looking for is a completed contact form, it's pretty simple to make every page a landing page by adding something like this to a sidebar. A "Contact Us" page is still certainly necessary, as it contains detailed info (hours, address, email, etc), but for speed-obsessed customers, the short form and ever-present contact box is hard to beat. This allows you to direct traffic to the most relevant page while still never being more than 1 click from a conversion! In the event your business needs more info than a short form box will allow, you can always gather their contact info and follow up later on the phone, or via email.

Seems simple, right? I'm shocked at how few businesses actually employ this tactic. It's such an easy way to add another contact touchpoint with potential buyers. Let's see how it affected the company in question for our case study...

Goal completions after adding the box

Fast forward to March, 2012. Let's have a look at goal completion with that box on every page.

175 goal completions. That's over three times as many. And I know what you're thinking... there was more traffic, right? Nope! (Well, at least not significantly more)

More importantly than raw conversions was the fact that adding this box tripled the conversion rate, up to 5.1%. Talk about increasing bang for your buck!

Another interesting item of note is pages per visit. They actually dropped (along with time on site) from 7.70 to 4.92. However, bounce rate was almost identical. So what can we infer from this? To me, it's pretty clear that the website design is more user-friendly, which is really what this is all about. Making a few key changes allowed users to find what they were looking for faster and more efficiently. So, the client benefits from higher ROI, users have better access to the info they're looking for, and we get to keep a good client. Win-win-win!

Closing

I'm not claiming to be breaking any ground here... the tactic outlined has been done before. I'm just trying to show (with numbers) how attention to some of the simpler things can really benefit your website in a measurable way. Perhaps stuff like this is obvious to many of you. That's great. However, considering how many sites out there forgo simple improvements like this, it couldn't hurt to share! Go add those forms to your site! And hey, if you don't want to do it yourself, feel free to contact us!

Any of you folks have similarly simple changes that can really help? I'd love to hear about them in the comments!