Click Through Rate Case Study

This is an interesting case study that I’ve been meaning to do for some time, and is for a local company called “Yorkshire Clearances” for whom we also designed the website.

The first thing you’ll notice about their website is that it is very simple and straightforward, and we laid the site out in this way for a specific reason.

First of all we didn’t want lots of colour and images and other distractions on the pages, we wanted to focus the attention of people onto what was important to them.

This is something a lot of web designers do not understand – what is important to the visitor is the only thing that is important!

Usually when someone wants a house cleared it’s because a relative has passed away, and so they want to know that the job will be carried out sensitively and carefully, and that any property that is removed will not just be slung onto the local tip.

So these key points are pretty much the first thing you see on the site to the top right, it goes straight into dealing with what is important to the actual customer.

Underneath that is a picture of the business owner with his personal guarantee.

This was also important because in this industry, when you search for “house clearances [location]” you will often find websites that are purporting to be local companies, but who actually are nationwide companies trying to hoover up all of the business they can from all around the UK.

All you need to do is to go to some of these sites and scroll down to the bottom of the page and you’ll see links to page, after page, after page of “house clearance [location]” pages on their website.

You end up if you ring them talking to a call center, and you will then if you hire them end up with some guys who are just employees rather than running their own businesses, and all that they are interested in is their bottom line and how fast they can empty the property.

It is exactly the same in many other niches like pest control for example – try find a local company who will come and deal with a wasps nest and you’ll end up finding lots of these kinds of websites.

Anyway, it was for this reason that we wanted to differentiate the website so that people can see and know exactly who they are dealing with, and we then went onto re-inforce this information, that it is indeed a local company, in the way that we set the site up to show in the results.

The Click Through Rate Method

Obviously Yorkshire Clearances wanted to rank in Google for various keyword phrases like “house clearances Keighley,” “house clearances Leeds,” “house clearance Ilkley,” etc for all of the areas that are local and that they do indeed cover.

However, we also wanted to make sure that when people saw the result in Google they would know that this is indeed a local company, which would make them far more likely to click through to the website.

So how did we do this?

First of all we created a page for each location i.e. a page for Skipton, one for Leeds, etc.

Next we used a really useful technique on each of these pages, namely to use a local number for each place (so the town or city dialling code was used) and to make this visible in the results in Google, like in the image below (click the image for a bigger version).

Finally we made sure that whenever someone clicked one of those results and landed on the page for a specific location, that the right phone number showed up on the relevant page.

In this way people looking for a local company first of all saw the local phone number in the results, and so were more likely to click that result, they then landed on a page that also showed the local phone number, and they saw that it was indeed a local firm that cared about them as people and wanted to deliver a sensitive and professional service.

So you have the perfect combination of SEO (the rankings), encouragement to click through to the site (the phone number in the results), and conversion rate optimisation (the personalised message on the site, plus the considerations that the company make to the client).

So there is an idea that you can use to improve your own click through rates for local searches and your conversion rates too. If you’d like our advice or comments on your website regarding click through conversions, conversion rates, or SEO then please contact us for a free, no obligation chat.