Engineering Firm Increases Traffic by 155% and Conversions by 1142% with Website Redesign

By now, you’ve probably heard of the HubSpot Impact Awards. If not, they're basically a series of different awards given out quarterly by HubSpot to HubSpot Certified Partners.

The six award categories include Inbound Growth Story, Integrations Innovation, Website Design, Growth-Driven Design, Graphic Design, and Sales Enablement, and needless to say, every agency wants to be recognized.

In addition to recognition this quarter, Q3 winners are automatically entered as finalists for the annual Impact Awards that are presented at HubSpot's INBOUND Conference (coming up in November).

Having taken two of these awards last year, our talented family here at IMPACT has decided to once again enter one of our best websites into the mix!

Who is New York Engineers?

New York Engineers is a well-known engineering company based in New York, NY.

Started by Principal, Michael Tobias, in 2012, they offer multiple engineering services to their clients, including mechanical, electrical, plumbing, fire protection, energy modeling, building commissioning, LEED consulting, and more.

They have expertise with a wide range of projects, from private residences to large industrial warehouses, and they possess a particular finesse with New York City construction. 

New York Engineers has recently been named one of Inc. 5000’s fastest growing companies in the U.S. and they take great pride in being accurate, responsive, and easy to work with.

With all of these great qualities, New York Engineers needed a website to match so they came to IMPACT. 

The Goals for Building a New Website

New York Engineers came to IMPACT with specific goals in mind. To reach them, they knew they needed a brand new website that would ultimately do two major things:

1. Attract more traffic to their site, while also building brand awareness

• With only about 900 total visits per month to their website, New York Engineers had a dire need to increase traffic -- fast.
  • The goal: Increase traffic from 900 visits per month to 1,524 visits per month within 3 months of launching the website.

2. Increase their traffic to lead conversion rate

• Because of the lack of conversion points on the site, their traffic to lead conversion rate sat at about 0.20%.
  • The goal: Increase traffic to lead conversion rate from 0.20% per month to 1.15% per month within 3 months of launching the website.

Their previous website screamed “outdated” and featured a 2-image homepage slider with no text (which meant no SEO value).

Their navigation sported About, Capabilities, Projects, Contact, and Career Opportunities, all of which lacked in keyword optimization. The only conversion points on the site were a contact form and a newsletter sign up form.

In terms of brand, the colors, fonts, and imagery just didn’t do a great job of showing how professional, reliable, and experienced New York Engineers really is.

With that, we knew there was a lot of room for improvement, so we set out to do just that.

The Strategy for Success

Now, I could try to sit here and write about the strategy that went on behind this project, but my partner and Strategist (and Texas native), Brie Rangel, would explain it a lot better than me:

“New York Engineers came to us with aggressive goals, a head-first belief in inbound marketing, and a clean slate. I devised a two-pronged approach to quickly get them on the right track: PPC clean-up and the build of a launchpad site.

While the launchpad site was being built, we focused on creating branded landing pages for their engineering services to pair with new and existing PPC campaigns. This assisted in an initial traffic and conversion lift.

In the background, we also created their keyword and content strategy and their first premium content offer to quickly grab more top of the funnel contacts.

To avoid a traditional, time-consuming website redesign, we implemented a Growth-Driven Design approach and built New York Engineers their launchpad site in 45 days, ensuring it clearly articulated just how they help their personas.

Every launchpad site requires strategy, so I researched their competition, as well as nationally-known engineering firms, to get an understanding of the type of information that our personas would find valuable. Then, my team and I put together logical conversion funnels to test against as the site launched.

We’re not done, and we still have quite a few assumptions to test. New York Engineers is an awesome client that is the perfect example of how to do Growth-Driven Design successfully.”

The Plan for Design

Of course, the website was planned to be designed and developed on the HubSpot COS.

To clearly define the kind of work New York Engineers delivers, it was well-known that imagery was going to be a huge part of the website design. Along with a completely redesigned Homepage, a defining About Us page, and an easy-to-navigate Blog, detailed Services and Project page layouts were created to really show the talent that sets New York Engineers apart from the competition.

Creative Lead, Marcella Jalbert, shares her vision for the final design of the website:

“When I envisioned what the new New York Engineers website was going to look like, I knew we needed something professional, modern, and with a little character to speak to the right personas. It needed to be reminiscent of the iconic New York Skyline. So, I chose the clean, modern Sans Serif font Roboto Condensed and riffed off the classic black and white photography with modern bold teals and oranges. Diagonal lines are used throughout to further support the geometric, modern tone.”

Compared to the previous website, the current design really helps showcase who New York Engineers is as a company, promoting their professionalism and expertise.

The website is laid out in a way that resonates with the visitor, ensuring they consume the correct message and clearly see the value of working with NYE.

The Development & Functionality

Once we had the perfect design, it was time to bring it to life.

Being built on the HubSpot COS, we had a lot of opportunity for customization, easy management, and flexible layouts. Always a part of our process, the website was constructed in a manner so that the majority of maintenance and update activities could also be performed by New York Engineers.

Providing everyone with the ability to visit with optimum experience, the site was developed with at least three responsive states for desktop, vertical tablet, and smartphone devices, and browser compatibility was ensured for IE9+, Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, Opera, iOS and Android.

In addition to the high-impact service and projects pages included in the launchpad site, New York Engineers had a desire to show their strong, local presence.

We knew we wanted to implement a map onto the homepage, so we left it up to our Senior Front-End Developer, Kyle Sheldon, to efficiently build exactly what they envisioned:

“I had the idea to use a Google Drive Spreadsheet with all of their locations so they could all be controlled from one place while cutting down on work involved to implement it. This allows me to dynamically create an interactive map section or lists -- something we’re building out in October -- with the same data over and over, while New York Engineers maintains editability throughout the life of the map.”

And we can’t possibly forget the mobile experience.

To ensure the UI was intuitive, Kyle created a mobile menu that expands to fill the entire browser window, making it easier for the user to navigate. The flipping icons indicate change and bring delight to the user.

Optimizing For Awareness

It would be too good to be true if the design and build of the website alone would produce the results we wanted -- so that’s where optimization comes in.

Using inbound marketing and SEO best practices, we ensured all website and blog pages included keyword optimized title tags, meta descriptions, headers, and content. The main homepage value proposition was a careful decision, as we aimed for our visitors to know exactly what NYE does in about 2 seconds.

As Brie mentioned, she did a lot of research on the industry and on NYE’s competitors, allowing us to use the HubSpot Keyword Tool to help identify keyword strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities.

During the design phase, a heavy focus was set on appropriately restructuring the site architecture by creating content for awareness, consideration, and decision stages and implementing this content within the appropriate areas on the site. We utilized tools like Hotjar to gather data from the previous really to understand how visitors were engaging.

To support the projected increase of conversation rate, we planned to use specific "hacks" or tactics like the lead magnet currently on the homepage.

And Now...The Results!

To reiterate, within 3 months, our goal was to have accumulated at least 1,524 visits per month (up from 900) and a 1.15% conversion rate (up from 0.20%).

Currently, as I’m writing this post on the last day of September, approximately 2 months and 5 days since we launched the website, traffic stands at 2,053 visits and the website has a conversion rate of 2.48%. A more detailed report of a 3-month period is shown below:

What's more, organic visits account for about 36.2% of all of NYE's traffic, with 11 keywords ranked in the top 3, 31 keywords ranked in the top 10, and 29 contacts from organic within the last 30 days.

With the plan to continue building upon the current website using the Growth-Driven Design methodology, there's no doubt the future is very bright for this successful New York Engineering Firm.

Some Before & After Images

Homepage

Before:		After:

About Us

Before:		After:

Projects

Before:		After:

New York Engineers previously did not have a blog, nor were they optimized for a mobile experience. The following two images show the current blog and mobile navigation.

Blog		Mobile Nav