On Monday we launched the re-vamped EurofastHost web hosting website. As you can from the screen shot below the site was due a makeover. There was also the addition of a new product VPS Hosting (virtual private server hosting).
EuroFastHost.com’s main focus for the re-design was to
- remove the cluttered homepage and increase focus on the core products
- increase conversion rates
- better SEO (search engine optimisation) through clean URLs, semantic markup, a regularly updated blog and quality content
- increase traffic
With the new design the old look was banished and a fresh contemporary feel was used.
Landing Pages and Focused Content
The main focus of the home page is given to the packages with the main banner changeable to co-inside with whatever promotion is currently being run that month. Using a similar theory to Apple we can promote a certain service, at the moment this is Shared Web Hosting but future months will focus on spam, one click Wordpress installs and much more. Using a combination of search engine advertising (more on that later) and focused content we can direct customers to a relevant landing page and hopefully increase conversion rates.
Although I have talked primarily about the home page future campaigns will run simultaneously with focused landing pages that may or may not be the home page.
The main points to a successful launch were, a cleaner structure to enable customers quick access to the various hosting packages as well as support documentation. We decided to keep the login to support as during user testing this was a primary feature that customers wanted. A quick link to the support documentation is also included. Allot of time was spent creating tutorials for common support requests like setting up email in Outlook. The documentation works on two levels 1. A decrease in customer calls (or shorter calls) frees up staff to work on other projects and 2. Good quality content is indexed well by the search engines, anybody searching for “How-to” articles like Outlook Express POP3 setup, Editing your website using Microsoft Expression Web will hopefully end up on our site re-enforcing the brand and if they are ever looking for a quality windows hosting with good support they will remember EuroFastHost.com. A little bit of effort may yield results in the future.
Search Engine Optimisation
To enable better search engine positioning we avoided using query strings (e.g. http://eurofasthost.com/index.php?c=1&p=2), instead we used clean URLs (http://eurofasthost.com/virtual_servers/) that makes it easier for search engines to index and are more readable. The old table based design was removed and a clean css based design was used, again search engines love css based designs plus as an added bonus, updates are a breeze. If we ever want to change colours, fonts etc a quick update to the style sheet and voila the whole site is updated. This in combination with content as we spoke about above will re-enforce EuroFastHost.com position as a well supported quality provider of windows hosting.
Although only time will tell if the changes do enable better search engine position we utilise google adwords to make sure that we have a presence on the first page of Google. Later bringing on board other search engines like Yahoo and MSN.
For now the volume of traffic to Google means the focus will primarily be on Google Adwords. Because of budget and quality of traffic we have decided to focus on the long tail when it comes to search terms(keywords). Firstly because EurofastHost is a hosting company keywords like Hosting, Domains etc are extremely expensive plus because of their wide focus we would spend lots of money on wasted traffic. To explain the company focuses on Windows Hosting therefore somebody searching for Linux hosting might search on the keyword “Hosting” which if they ended up at our site would leave them frustrated and us out of pocket. A better approach is to used focused keywords that are longer in nature hence the name long tail. Web Hosting with free phone support, dotnetnuke hosting are two such keywords that have less traffic but our services closely match the long tail hence better quality traffic that will hopefully yield better results.
Finally to make sure the site is indexed regularly a blog has been added that needs to be kept updated. If you consistently add content and it stays steady, spurts of do not sit well with the search engines. Steady and consistent updates that are added at regular intervals will yield better results helping search engine ranking.
Pagerank
Before the launch we used the great page rank tool from SEOmoz.org the web site had a page strength of 4 which SEOmoz states:
“Although not a considerable presence, your site/page is making inroads online. Visitor traffic and search engine visibility is within your grasp.”
In the subsequent days the page rank did drop to 3 but hopefully this can be explained because of the page name changes. Something which should be avoided but in this case the cleaning up of the URLs should increase the page strength longer term so hopefully the drop will only be short term.
To summarise the easy work of changing the structure, updating the code, cleaning up the URLs and freshening up the design is done but the hard work starts now making sure the site increases and maintain a decent search position through quality content(blog articles), checking stats to see which pages receive traffic and alter those that don’t.
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