The background
Tell me your story
Entremanteles is a private company founded in Cali with more than 15 years of experience in the planning and execution of activities; within its portfolio handles weddings, 15 years, degrees, and first communions, among others, are present in the main cities of Colombia and have with an excellent recognition by clients with a high purchasing power.
The challenge
What do they look for?
The company director asks me to find the best way to strengthen the M&O brand by restructuring its services with its website. Historically the company has had a great reception in the market with the organization of weddings, birthdays, and first communions.
Its primary interests are having a site accessible from any device, appearing in the first search results, increasing the number of potential customers arriving through the web channel, and having an English version for potential customers from other countries.
The approach
Digital product discovery
After reviewing the primary references, analyzing their competence, and evaluating their website, I realized that with the 5 seconds test, people did not quickly identify the core of the business.
The heat map of the site showed that most visitors did not exceed 50% of the screen, and the bounce rate was 85% per month; for this reason, should emphasize the events in the first quarter of the screen, followed by the three primary services that they wanted to promote, these spaces had to be administrable due to the temporality of the events they handle.
Throughout the navigation, many photographs should be present that would generate impact, reduce the texts to a maximum of 4 lines per block and perform a call to action in each section to request an appointment for advice with the experts.
The proposal had to adapt the historical content of the blog to the new rules of web positioning not to lose its index of authority and its historical qualification and not be punished by the search engines achieving better positioning.
The concept
The site must print luxury and glamor, generate confidence by showing its trajectory of more than 15 years and present its blog as a reference to be updated with the sector’s trends. All this should accentuate with high-quality photographs and video that conveys exclusivity and experience in organizing events.
The proposal is to show the happiness of its customers, to allude to the feeling by showing the emotion of all the dreams that they helped to fulfill, to handle close communication for a modern public, and to highlight the capacity to produce exclusive events with quality, fulfillment, and passion.
The design
Wireframes
Color Scheme & Typography
The development
Time to code
The site had to be managed entirely by the client, so WordPress was used as a manager. A child theme was developed for the interface taking into account that its structure was much more semantic and structured to favor discovery by search engines.
I made a list with the keywords in which the site was already positioned and those in which it wanted to expand coverage according to the degree of difficulty of the word and the degree of authority of the section. I edited the blog content related, and I managed to get the headers H1 and H2 to have the keywords.
An SEO plugin complemented this for handling the labels, the summary, and the ALT attributes of the images and the target words of the article.
Due to a large number of images, it was necessary to use services such as Tinypng and Smush to optimize the weight of the photos; I used a distributed CDN tool to improve the load in other countries and a cache plugin to reduce the consumption of mobile data.
I registered in Google My Business and added the geolocation point in Google Maps to improve local searches from cell phones; additional support was added via WhatsApp and a form for the applications of people with a greater degree of interest.
The solution
Solving problems with a digital solution
The cover has a gallery of 5 photographs that represents its primary services with its respective call to action. Three new sections of content were created, a whole part of image galleries of their events, a video section with the best collection of events, and an article section with the testimonies of happy clients with dreams fulfilled.
BOOM!!!
View project
Entremanteles
The results
A new channel to sell
This site made it possible to speed up communication with customers abroad by adapting it according to the language of the browser used. The keywords worked with the client allowed for better positioning by increasing the number of site visits and requests for additional information.
The access to the site from cell phones went from 48% to 62% in the visits of the month, the visits to the month went from 1K to 1.7K, with the opening of the support via WhatsApp increased the number of requests for information and telephone to call as prospects.
The site administration is much easier for the client, it was only necessary to do 2 hours of training, and things flowed.
Major learnings
It is complicated to explain to clients how URL changes work; even when the respective redirects are made, there are risks associated with backlinks, and the new sitemap of the site may take a while to propagate, so it is likely that they will begin to lower the position in some searches.
People expect that the next day of publishing the new site will increase the visits being the first in the searches; well, it does not work in this way; it was necessary to provide support for almost a month after and activate a small AdWords’ campaign, then from this, the site took off and returned to “ring the telephone of the office.” They were tense moments.
Something that sounds very obvious, but until then, I understood it was to keep in mind that when your client has a business that depends on seasons, it is not the same to do the SEO measurement in June as in December; this is the month where weddings usually are done and the events in Colombia, so the metrics must be variable in time.
Finally, SEO measurement tools are pretty expensive for the Colombian environment, starting at 60 USD a month, the most basic (almost a quarter of the legal minimum wage), these research costs were not present at the time of making the quote of the project, and Although I was very recursive of trying to get the most out of free tools or trial versions, this is something I should anticipate in projects of this type.
Future steps
The site could improve its ranking if the old blog articles are reduced tags and repeated titles, as well as short URLs and titles to avoid penalties in search engines.
Another proposed improvement was to buy an HTTPS certificate to improve the positioning and change to a better hosting plan to obtain a better response time in loading the site due to the high amount of image content they have.
