Brrrr… Double Glazing Anyone?
Good morning campers … today’s Surgery review comes from Khalid. He’s been working on a double glazing site for the past couple of years and wants some help with improving the current conversion rate.
Site Preview [click to enlarge]:
Khalid asks: “Hi all.
I’ve been running CentralScotlandJoinery.co.uk for a little under two years now and I’ve achieved a page 1 ranking for “double glazing” amongst many other long tail terms.
The site gets just shy of 2,000 unique visitors per month but the conversion rate is under 1%.
I’ve recently installed ClickTale.com to assess where visitors are going and trying to ascertain where I could improve, do you have any suggestions?
Kind Regards,
Khalid”
Here’s what Dan and Carl had to say …
Dan
Hi, Khalid, how are things going?
Here are some notes that I think will help in your quest to improve your site’s conversion rate. I will keep these mainly to bullet points to hopefully keep things clear.
THE PROBLEM
You have 2 main conversion points on the site from what I can see. Both are ‘contact us’ forms. Neither is particularly straightforward. There is no real enticement for anyone to contact you (over & above a competitor), and each of your calls to action is very easy to miss.
NOTES ON EACH OF THE CONVERSION POINTS
Conversion Point 1: This is a little contact form on the right-hand side of most pages. Here are the issues with this:
1. It’s in an area that’s more usually used for navigation, contextual information, or ads, i.e. it’s a place that’s easy to ignore/miss.
2. The text on the form is dark grey on dark blue.
3. The call to action at the top is “We’ll Call You Back!”.
Conversion Point 2: This is reached by clicking ‘Get a FREE Quote!’ from the top navigation.
1. On this page, you’re now asking for the full address (rather than just a postcode).
2. The form is much longer than the one on the right-hand side.
3. It’s full of scary language telling people that by asking for a quote they won’t be “pressured”, it shouldn’t “ring alarm bells” and that they won’t be “pushed into buying”. (There’s no need for this, as they’ve already clicked the ‘give me a quote’ button).
4. The main area that points through to this is the top navigation, alongside that there is a graphic dumped in the middle of some other pages that doesn’t really spell out what it’s trying to say.
HOW TO FIX ALL OF THIS
Here are some suggestions that may help fixing this:
1. Create a simple PDF guide along the lines of “10 Things You Need To Know Before Hiring a Tradesman”. Use this as a friendly extra enticement for visitors to fill in your quote forms.
2. Fix the call to action on your right-hand contact form. You could trial “Claim Your Free Quote” vs “Download Your Free Guide” (with detail underneath) to see which works better.
3. Fix the text colour on your right-hand contact form so that people can read it.
4. Add a large call to action at the foot of the content area on each page – link this through to your ‘free quote’ page.
5. Remove all the scary language from your ‘free quote’ page. Trial simplifying the form. If you really want to add some extras to that page, try testimonials. (I’ve found adding testimonials below forms sometimes works well).
6. Your ‘free quote’ area in the top navigation – you could trial moving that out into the whitespace above to give it greater visibility.
7. Things like ‘Claim Your Free Quote’ on buttons often work better than ‘Send’ or ‘Submit’.
CONVERSION RATE(S)
Finally, in Google Analytics, I would monitor whether these changes have a positive effect by looking at 3 ‘before’ & ‘after’ conversion rates, rather than just 1. They would be:
1. The percentage of site visits that result in someone filling in your right-hand column form (ie. do the changes to that form increase the likelihood of someone completing it).
2. The percentage of site visits that result in someone visiting the ‘free quote’ page. (i.e. do your calls to action get visitors to reach that page, and when you make a change does it increase or decrease that).
3. The percentage of unique ‘free quote’ page views who complete the form.
If you made the changes bit by bit, it would give you an idea of exactly which had the biggest effect, allowing you to follow similar patterns on your other sites. You could run them through Google’s Website Optimizer, though it may take a while with your current traffic.
I hope something here’s been helpful. Apologies for all the bullets!
Dan.
Carl
Conversion Rate Optimisation is not my usual specialist area – but here’s a few deas that might help you out.
1. Display your customer testimonials block higher up the page, it’s currently appearing below the fold. You want to instill immediately trust to the visitor.
2. Change the black and white images to colour, they look quite dull and miserable, making the subject matter seem boring and almost a little daunting.
3. As most people know that the majority of attention is focused on the top right of the page, I suggest moving your “We’ll call you back” to a more prominent location and emphasise that you’re willing to reduce the hassle by calling them back. This will allow for your “recent installations” to appear higher up the page – everyone loves seeing examples of work in any trade.
4. A revamp of your “We’ll call you back” will almost definitely help improve conversions. Make the form look different, maybe number each step, “5 steps to a safer, more environmentally and better looking home” using your checklist from the image on the homepage. Make the form design more interesting in the design of windows around a house, there are some great customised forms out there (see: Pattern Tap)
5. For each image of the “recent installations” gallery add the testimonial to match up – again, this will instill more trust in to your website, as let’s face it, builders don’t exactly have the best rep. A genuine letter and images work well together.
6. The top right of the homepage has a lot of white space, might be worth adding banners explaining how long you have been in business, how many installations you have successfully completed or something like “We have installed enough glass to cover Celtic park x10″, plus any builders association badges you belong to.
7. Change the colours / design of the tabs in the header menu for “Testimonials” and “Why Us” – it immediately lets people know that you’re proud of what you do and that you want them to see the work for themselves.
8. Sounds simple, but a huge red bendy arrow to “Get a Quote” should influence clicks to that page.
9. I see the site is built on WordPress, so I’d suggest using Gravity Forms to help log data but allow you to customise the forms to have more appeal and look more trustworthy; the current forms look a little amateurish.
10. With all the great images you take going forward, I suggest you have a business board in the window to prove that those windows were installed by your business, as it’s quite easy for people to take pictures of any double glazing installation.
As with any building, plumbers or tradesman website, it’s about instilling trust in your visitor and making your business seem family friendly, trustworthy and reliable.
Carl

Guys, thanks for the impressive and valuable information, it is amazing how a fresh set of eyes on something can highlight stupid mistakes and such.
As a direct result of this fantastic review, I’ve made a number of the recommended changes and will monitor for changes in the conversion rate and hopefully report good movements!
Thanks again,
Khalid.
Hi Khalid. No probs and glad it’s helped you out. That’s the fastest I’ve seen anyone making recommended changes – would be great to hear how the conversion rate changes in a follow up.