Building a best in class website that serves a national network of customer service centers
LAYING THE GROUNDWORK
United Site Services (USS) is a leading event services company in the US, providing portable restrooms, restroom trailers, temporary fence, storage, erosion control, temporary power, street sweeping, and other construction site services. They have over 80 service centers in the U.S. and service approximately 140,000 customers annually.
We first built a site for USS in 2012 and then a new site in 2016. We have provided a variety of services in addition to design and web development including SEO, Pay Per Click management, monthly Drupal maintenance, security, and hosting management.
Working together since 2011 helped us prepare for the 2016 site redesign. This includes understanding who their customers are, what key factors are most important to them, how USS services their customers and extensive details about their product line. Having this background allowed us to collaborate effectively during the initial Discovery phase on key aspects of the project including information architecture, sitemap, content, and calls to action.
DESIGNING THE STRUCTURE
Once we understood USS's customers and what drove their decision making process we could start designing key pages and calls to action. The home page is a classic Row Based Design with a simplified color scheme to highlight the calls to action.
Other objectives for this page include:
- User centered navigation e.g. "Your Needs", "Get My Quote"
- Highlighting the 'Branch Locator' below the billboard since most needs are location based
- An emphasis on service and credibility supporting their motto "Service you can trust"
- Limited use of color (blue and yellow) so the calls to action can stand out. Note the page is bookended with a CTA at the top and bottom to increase conversions.
We also utilized a visual grid so visitors can easily scan a page as shown below. The background was removed on product photos to increase emphasis and make for a cleaner layout.
The content management system Drupal was used as well as a responsive web design for mobile optimization. Drupal’s flexible taxonomy capabilities helped with the extensive amount of content types, lead management, HR job application requirements and CRM integration.
OPTIMIZING THE SYSTEM
Previous to the new site launch in 2016, we optimized the site for search engines. This exercise included evaluating analytics, keyword analysis, on-page optimization (custom title tags, meta descriptions, alt text, file names and headers), duplicate content removal, error corrections and inbound link development.
We also optimized Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns, including: evaluating previous campaigns and analytics, account restructuring, manual bidding optimization, ad copy revisions, mobile landing pages, bid multiplier adjustments, increasing Ad Extensions, keyword expansion and Google search retargeting.
Before the new site was launched in 2016 we also worked with another SEO agency to implement a SEO transition plan to retain search rank and traffic as much as possible. This plan included 301 redirects from old URLs to new, a custom 404 page, inventorying content to ensure high performing pages and page linking are retained, the URL structure is optimized, an updated XML sitemap and Robots.txt file and updated submissions on Google Search Console, Google Submit URL and Bing.
RESULTS
The new site was well received by the client and target audience. It was a substantial improvement in the areas of user interface design, content and lead generation. Also here are stats from one of the months that we were actively managing PPC campaigns and SEO.
- PPC conversions were up 40% and cost per conversion decreased by 26% year over year
- Pageviews and sessions were up 25%, average session duration was up 40.82%, and bounce rate decreased 15.61%
- Website conversions were up 17.58% and the conversion rate increased by 44.89%
