Know-How Exchange : Website Critique

Hi there,

I'm a newbie to these boards, but your posting intriqued me. I have a couple of ideas for you.

The main idea I have for you is from looking at your site and noticing this list: (copied directly from your site)

Benefits of CPEhr's HR Outsourcing Services for your California business:
Access to California labor law experts
Expertise in California payroll and tax laws
Access to experienced California safety consultants
Onsite management training for your California employees
Convenience of local corporate presence
Better economies of scale with local vendors
Personalized attention and flexible service offering

You state that these are the "benefits" of working with your firm, but I observe these to be "features." In my experience, people buy benefits not features.

Try asking yourself this question after you read each item in your list....."SO WHAT?"

What I mean by that is to take your feature (for example...Onsite Management Training for Your California Employees) and ask yourself...so what?

The "so what" might be...reducing your onsite training costs and ensuring that your team has all the tools necessary to immediately hadle day to day challenges.

I don't know if that is a real benefit or not...I'm not in your industry, but I hope you get what I'm trying to say.

Take your list of features and ask yourself the "so what" question on each of them and see what benefit that feature brings to your prospective clients.


Anyway...hope this was okay for a first post. Feel free to let me know if I can be of further assistance.

Kris

As stated above, your conversion rates seem to be just fine. However, looking deeper into the pages, I recommend segmenting them. It could go a long way in spicing the pages up and directing people to the call-to-action. It can be done by blocking groups of information together and providing clearer section headers. Currently, all of the information kind of runs together.

Even with bold text and the arrow, the impact of your call-to-action is slightly lost because it seems to be out of place. It might also help to add a disclaimer to let people know that you will not share their contact information with outside sources.


One other thing of note, is how do you direct people to the page? I went to the site's homepage and tried to navigate back to the link you posted. I went to a few pages before I saw the link at the bottow of the page. The header above it seems to blend in with the blue and yellow text directly above it. A more prominent link to the landing pages may produce better results.

Hope this helps!

Kris is right, there are no benefits to the prospect. Tell them what problems you solve. Or, to put it another way, it's not about your grass seed, it's about their lawn. Don't talk about your hybridization process, tell them about the beautiful, lush, low-maintenance lawn they will get.

The pages are very text heavy, but most of it focuses on your company, rather than what the prospect will get from the consultation. In fact, it's not clear to me exactly what I would get if I asked for the audit. What are you going to tell me? What issues will you cover? What problems will you address? Will you tell me how to reduce turnover by 18%? Ensure that I comply with all state regs -- and stay in business? Teach me how to spot dishonest employees?

Also, if an office visit is a concern, schedule the audit over the phone, or offer it as a written report (with phone follow-up). That may make it seem less risky, and less "salesy".

First, do you have the right traffic? What phrases are people searching for and clicking on your site? Are you doing PPC as well on various phrases, and have separate landing pages for each of these phrases?

Next, as others have mentioned, you're asking people who don't know you to take a big leap to provide you with information to make an appointment. It's basically asking them to have you make a cold call. I'd make the get-to-know-you phase a bit less intimidating. Have them opt-in to your free HR tips sheets (or whatever else of value you can provide), which are sent via autoresponder over a period of 5-10 days. Each tip sheet should be highly valuable, showcasing your deep knowledge and skill of making a difficult subject easy to understand. Halfway through, start offering them a free consultation, but only if they respond in the next 2 weeks. Reinforce this message on subsequent tip sheet emails.

Your landing pages are text-heavy, and not well segmented to the specific problems your prospect may be having. Ideally, you want them to tell you about their problems, and spoon-feed information about that problem to them. That's a dialog that produces results. Otherwise, you have a vanilla sales letter, which doesn't usually produce.

D4 is on the right track. Having clicked through to your landing page all they see is stuff about only you and what you want them to engage you for, why you are great etc. Generic benefits like 'peace of mind' are passe especially in consulting. Keep it simple. Make quantitative claims. Focus on the free audit, what it could throw up for them in terms of insights (positive tone rather than just negative) and what a couple of your other clients found after an audit that surprised them. As D4 said, give an instant gratification like a how to guide, whitepaper or a book that will be sent in the mail.

Lastly see if you can fit it in one screen page where the prospect does not have to scroll down. I think this is extremely important for landing pages. Remember the goal is to get them to give you a meeting to hear you out, not brand creation, awareness building etc.

Shekar Prabhakar
https://marketingshiksha.blogspot.com

Hi there,

I have a couple of ideas. If you're using the landing page for a PPC ad try:

1. remove all navigation from the landing page - the fewer options you give the visitor to move off the page, the better your conversions will be.

2. Review your keyword phrases and ad copy. If a visitor lands on your site and doesn't find what they are looking for, they will bounce immediately. The landing page may not be the issue, the keywords may not be targeted enough.

3. Edit the text so that it is much shorter and includes answers to specific needs.

4. Make the contact form larger - possible move it to the center of the form under intro copy

Now, if you're concerned about organic conversions - then I would double check the keywords that you are using and also improve calls to action on the page. Think in terms of the need and the solution. If the site does not fill a need for the visitor then the bounce rate will be high.

hope this helps.

To start with a 70 to 80% bounce rate is nothing to get concerned about. You’ll be glad to hear that this is better than normal for most websites.

What it implies is that you are getting a number of people blundering in without a clear idea of what they are looking for from you.

This may include many people who come in and plan to come back to you in the future. To know whether this is true, see how many of your visitors are putting your site in their favourites list for future reference. If you use CPanel, you should have access to this information.

I suspect you need to sharpen the tools you use to attract visitors, and also sharpen/massage your landing page text to define more clearly the benefits you offer rather than the facilities you offer – make it more “you” oriented than it presently is. I don’t agree that it is too text heavy. A person coming there is looking for information and it is nice for him to be able to find lots of it.

Lastly, the word free has lost relevance and attractiveness. Instead, you might offer a money back if not satisfied with a trial session.

Sure hope this helps. All the best!