Before & After: Website Refresh
5 SECOND SUMMARY
- The team at Auto West approached us in June looking for support in bringing their site up to scratch.
- In just a few short months, the site has gone from zero to hero, with a marked increase in rankings, a cleaner and more user-friendly design, and a more straightforward menu structure to help customers (and Google) navigate through the site.
- We’re only partway through this project, so we’ll share even more improvements in a full case study soon!
Promising early results for Auto West Paint Supplies
Auto West is an established bricks and mortar business, and with a little nudge in the right direction, they have already recouped a significant percentage of their web design investment.
At the time of writing, net sales are up 120% compared to the previous 4 month period with online traffic and rankings all trending in the right direction.
We’re still working on this project, but it’s encouraging to receive client feedback like this just 4 months into a website project:
“We clearly have a market we can hit strongly as I am already seeing an increase in our online sales.”
The Project So Far
Auto West Paint Supplies is a spray painting supply and equipment business based in Jamisontown. The team first contacted us in June looking for support in getting more products added to their website.
Rather than jump straight into adding products to a slow, poorly laid out, and somewhat broken site, we suggested focusing on fixing the structural and design issues with the site first.
This would give us a robust, functional, well laid out and visually appealing framework to build on, ensuring that all the hard work of adding hundreds of products would be geared for maximum impact.
In just a few short months, the site has gone from zero to hero, with a marked increase in rankings, a cleaner and more user-friendly design, and a more straightforward menu structure to help both customers and Google navigate through the site.
Here’s the story so far:
- June: We have our first conversation with Auto West about revitalising their very basic website and turning it into a new online revenue stream to complement their 3 established bricks and mortar stores.
- July: Work starts – the focus is on making the online store function properly and look professional, following eCommerce best practices.
- August: Content is systematically added to the site and the overall structure is simplified. Image sizes are reduced and menus are expanded to cover all product categories.
- September: The fresh re-skinned design is rolled out and navigation is improved to make things easier for customers.
- October: Rankings for key terms show great improvement: ‘automotive paint supplies’ jumps from position 25 to 7, and ‘paint shop equipment’ from position 57 to position 4 as shown in the graphs above.
- Site speed has improved significantly too with performance scores jumping from 71 to 91 without a heavy-handed SEO approach: we’ve simply been adding content that helps customers understand the products and brand more thoroughly.
Take a look at these before and afters:
About page
- Significantly more text on the page with proper heading structure and internal links. The heading explains in plain language what the business does.
- Icons immediately show the key value propositions of the brand.
- All the benefits of shopping at Auto West are covered: great range, technical support for the trade, colour matching service, and training to help DIY enthusiasts get a great result.
- Brighter and more dynamic look. Images on the About page are more appropriate and include a shot of the bricks and mortar store to build confidence and trust.
Before:
After:
Shop page
- There’s no ‘before’ shot here as the shop page wasn’t working.
- We created a product menu bar to easily navigate through the menus from any page.
- Product filters make it easy to drill down by category or brand.
- A specials banner draws the user’s attention to sale products.
There’s plenty of work still to do here, but we’re beginning to really showcase the range with additional content such as brand-specific pages like this one for 3M.
Training page
- Some simple tweaks have made this page more interesting to read and much more polished.
- The information has more ‘breathing space’ and the video is at the top of the page above the fold, so it’s the first thing the reader sees.
- The training dates table was a poor quality screenshot which we’ve replaced with a clean HTML table.
- The overall flow is better, leading the reader through a hierarchy of information as they scroll down the page.
Before:
After:
A new addition:
‘The Garage’
- The new knowledge hub section allows Auto West to showcase how its products help customers. A collection of existing annual car calendars was broken up into individual posts, giving each vehicle the attention it deserves.
- As well as contributing to SEO thanks to the inclusion of specific car names and colours, these blogs show the aspirational and beautifully polished finished product that customers are looking to achieve.
- This section provides the opportunity to further build on SEO and showcase how items like spray guns are used. Big images show visual proof of the quality of Auto West’s paint and coating products.
- This part of the site can also be used as a library of evergreen content that can be shared on social media.
Early wins… with more to come!
Overall the site is really coming together visually, the user experience is vastly improved, and the hard numbers are trending up indicating there is a real opportunity for the online store to provide a healthy and consistent revenue stream.
Stay tuned for a full case study when the site is complete!
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