3 offices in major cities. Over 2,500 language associates. Able to provide interpretation, translation, and training in over 40 languages. Numerous official accreditations. Big name clients including BBC, Police Scotland, NHS, RBS, and the Scottish Government.
Surely this is all a recipe for success when it comes to winning over potential clients in the digital realm?
Whilst Global Language Services dominate the rankings for their target keywords, attracting high volumes of relevant traffic, they were not seeing the conversions they expected.
GLS needed a total website redesign to refine the customer journey, optimising it for conversions. Here’s how the Digital Impact design and dev team modernised the GLS website.
The Challenge
Global Language Services target clientele hail from a wide range of industries with varied needs. Their choice of translation or interpreting provider is not one they can take lightly - their own reputation, and potentially individual’s health and safety is at risk if the work produced isn’t accurate. They need to know that the company they employ is reliable and authoritative.
In the digital age, the first customer touchpoint is often a company website. A thoughtfully-designed, smooth customer journey is essential to instil confidence in consumers. It demonstrates care and attention to the needs of potential clients.
Global Language Services’ website was performing well in Google search results. Their SEO marketing investment was bringing in high volumes of relevant traffic for their target keywords. But the traffic simply wasn’t converting into paying clients at a rate you would expect from such an authoritative company.
Their website was several years old and had not kept up pace with the changing digital landscape. The user experience was clunky - the navigation was poorly organised, the content was blocky and hard to skim, there were no clear call-to-actions, and it was not fully responsive on mobile devices.
Digital Impact’s challenge was to redesign the GLS website, bringing it into the modern digital age. The site needed cleaner navigation centred around conversion-focused location and service landing pages. It needed to be responsive across all devices, with a mobile-first focus. And it needed to work in harmony with a brand new, bespoke quote builder.
GLS needed to take full advantage of their authoritative SERP positions and convert their hard-earned traffic into actual clients!
The Solution
Backed by existing analytical data, our UX designers and web developers joined forces to design a shiny new website geared to convert their already high levels of traffic. Our process centred around the following core elements:
- Mobile-first design.
- Conversion-focused location and service landing pages.
- Creating a quote builder to generate quality leads.
Let’s take a deeper dive into the project.
Mobile-First Design
In the years since the previous GLS website went live, there has been a serious shift in how we access websites. Nowadays, around 50% of visitors access websites via mobile devices. GLS’ previous website was not designed to adapt properly to mobile devices, resulting in a poor user experience for a large proportion of their visitors.
Text size, image ratio, the ability to see all the options on the navigation menu and use the contact forms was hampered. Conversion rates were poor on mobile.
The redesign took a mobile-first approach. The navigation menu, structure of the pages, and the quote builder were all designed to adapt to fit mobile device displays intuitively, removing the obstacle of navigation frustration that was holding many potential clients from converting.
Landing Pages
GLS targets clients from a broad spectrum of industries who are looking for translation and/or interpretation services or training. Their original website was geared to attract most users to the homepage, rather than funnelling them straight to the service they required.
To combat this, we designed landing pages that catered to location and service-based needs.
Location Landing Page
For users searching for local keywords - such as “translation services Glasgow” - there were no corresponding landing pages on the old GLS website for Google to display. This posed two issues:
- Competing websites with local landing pages would take precedence in rankings and look like a more attractive, relevant result to searchers.
- The homepage would rank and add an extra, unnecessary step in the customer journey, hindering conversions.
Before the redesign, contact details for their 3 office locations were simply listed at the top of the homepage. No page on the site was optimised for local keywords.
To improve their local SEO and to funnel their target audience more effectively, we recommended, designed and built location landing pages for their Glasgow, Edinburgh and Highlands sites.
These location landing pages would take users directly to the relevant contact page, speeding up their customer journey which in turn would increase leads.
Service Landing Pages
GLS offers three primary services: interpretation, translation, and training.
Prior to the redesign, their website navigation menu poorly communicated this. Residing under “Our Services” were five services, pictured below:
Further along the navigation menu lay a separate “Training” section, under which four further training services were listed.
This disorganised site architecture complicated the customer journey. Visitors did not have time to browse multiple service pages in order to find what they needed. The system needed to progress with a real customer’s journey.
We redesigned the navigation menu to be far cleaner and intuitive. The site architecture was reworked so users could access the broader category landing pages from the menu, and then the specific subservice landing pages they required from there. These specific service landing pages were optimised for their relevant keywords, allowing Google searchers to access them directly from the SERPs, again making the conversion process quicker and easier.
Landing page content was cleaner, providing users with only the information they needed to avoid information overload. The previous content was blocky and cumbersome to wade through. New content was added, addressing the concerns of the user at their respective stages in their decision-making progress. A new, clear CTA banner was added to the bottom of the page to grab the user’s attention and encourage conversions.
Quote Builder
When visitors were ready to request a quote on the previous GLS website, they were met with a sparse “Request a quote” form page. This form let them input minimal information and only allowed them to select one required service. The form did not align with the needs of potential clients, who could be seeking a combination of services.
This final and crucial step in the conversion process was confusing and didn’t leave potential clients with the best impression, potentially putting many off reaching out to GLS.
We created a brand new quote builder that allows potential clients to adequately add all the information they require to get an accurate, tailored quote. We added the option to select multiple services and to specify language(s).
This new and improved quote builder is designed to instil confidence in site visitors that the process of reaching out to GLS will be hassle-free. Through the form, it’s clear that they are able to give GLS sufficient information to flesh out their project needs - it removes the worry that they’ll have to spend additional time chasing back and forth with supplementary details, slowing the conversion process down.
The Results
Global Language Services’ fresh new website is far more fitting for the 2020 digital age.
With a clean, modern aesthetic, intuitive site architecture, and conversion-optimised landing pages, the new site is much better geared to meet GLS’ goals.
The user experience their new site offers is aligned with their average target customer’s journey - any layout confusion experienced by prospective clients has been eliminated on their new site.