Website too "slick" for the clientele

was.deevey

Really amazes me sometimes what sells ..

I just did a complete revamp on a client site (Legal site) which had a "reasonably" ok layout previously, however things were mismatched thoughout e.g. colors clashed in certain areas, images not crisp etc...it had been a bit of a frankenstein where things had been put in / taken out of the original design.

The goal was to make it look more professional, smoother, cut down load times and make it mobile compatible via a responsive theme.

So re-did the site.

• Retained the old "header/slider" picture.
• Logo/Header was Brightened up.
• Sticky menu bar which included the phone/address/
• Kept the contact form in place (right side of header slider/image) and retained most of its style.
• Retained most of the old colors - however matched properly.
• Fonts were "improved" to more modern throughout (Raleway instead of Arial).
• Everything ran smooth as butter unlike the old site which was kinda laggy in spots.
• Microdata added for just about everything.
• Re-structured the URL's in certain non-ranking areas.
• Re-structured the titles in certain non-ranking areas.
• URL's for these areas were all of course 301'd and the site re-structure read by google within 24 hours.

Result = Increased click though, from local listing and adwords. However decrease in phone calls and form fills (by a huge amount).

Left it "settle" for 2 or 3 weeks without any improvement.

So as an experiment we re-enstated the old website.

Result = Slightly Decreased Click though rate, however increase in phone calls within 2 days with the same adwords campaigns

Content is the same, and same arrangement on the page (most only get as far as browsing above the fold anyhow before contacting).

What the hell do you do next ? Client really would prefer a better looking website, but not at the cost if alienating clientele (mostly lower class clients on a no win/no fee basis).

strandroad

Introduce a person (photo + testimonial) talking about their experience on your main page, and make sure it's a real photo of a real person, similar in stature to the type of clients the company normally works with? Rotate a few perhaps?

was.deevey

That was already in place as well - but people generally don't scroll down the page whatsoever to read any further than the first visible 700 pixels (did a heat map experiment a while back).

Put the testimonials above the fold and you'd lose the impact of the home image and contact form.

Unfortunately with the type of business it is - people agreeing to photos is potentially a tricky legal situation, agreed it would be ideal, but its not Irish law were talking either.

Bit of a Lingscars situation :P

Trojan

Can you start multivariate testing with some elements from old and new?

was.deevey

Possibly, but not as simple as switching templates as tons of crap plugins/widgets etc ...were shifted out and the site structure has changed immensely.

The site just got out of the google manual penalty a few months ago. So risking anything (even as simple and an A/B that could possibly look like a redirect/seo-fixing might be a no-no.

Ideally it would just be a simple template swap but unfortunately its not. Redirects would need to be put in place and can't imagine google looking on that too kindly even if its short term we could risk losing local and organic placement which TBH is more important in the short term to the look and feel.

Might be lumbered with this old layout for a while until the local rank is back up to A's and B's and then we can experiment more.