LIVE Website Assessment

About the episode:

Today I'm shaking things up and walking you through a LIVE website assessment! The Revive Brand + Website Assessment is a service I started offering in early 2023 and it’s one of my favorite things where I walk through your website and give you practical copy and design tips so you can book more calls on your site and sign more clients. Today I’m taking you along with me as I comb through the website of a past client AND I get to show you the improvements we made in her redesigned site. In this episode, I’m unpacking what red flags were on the old website, and how I addressed them by creating a new website that gives her clients a dramatically improved experience. If you’re tired of throwing spaghetti at the wall when it comes to your website and are wanting a fresh set of expert eyes on your website, my Revive Brand and Website Assessment is the perfect solution. And listen to the end of the episode for the Black Friday special going on from Nov 21–Nov 25.

What you’ll hear:

  • The importance of identifying red flags on your website and where client experience can be improved

  • The most important thing to include when someone first lands on your site

  • How to highlight what sets you apart from the competition

  • How to give your potential clients clear and easy CTA’s throughout the site

  • What to keep in mind when it comes to your website - yes it’s about your brand but it’s also more importantly about your clients’ success

  • The AFTER of changes we made to this site and how it’s now set up for success

  • Best practices and tips for your own website so you build trust and can sign more clients

Episode resources:


  • Hello, hello. I am so excited you are back with me for another episode of Rebrand with Ruthann. I'm so excited that you're here. Today, I'm gonna be doing something pretty different. I'm going to be doing a live brand and website assessment to a website. And I'm really excited to do this because I can show you things I look for when I'm going through a site, what changes can be made. Definitely some great advice if you have a site, things to make sure you have on your own site.

    So I think this is gonna be a really great episode, a really helpful, practical, giving you tips that you can hopefully make your site more effective as well. So I'm really excited to try this, so let's dive in. I will mention that I am, this is a service I offer called the Revive Brand and Website Assessments, and I am going to be having a special offer, and so I want you to stick around till the end so you can hear about that offer, and take advantage of Black Friday and all that kind of thing.

    So let's dive into the site.

    So the site I am reviewing is for Justified M2 Solutions. I don't normally work with companies in the oil and gas industry, but this company is special. Melissa Adams is the co-owner behind this woman-led company and I love that they're making waves as being a woman-owned company and providing outstanding service in a male-dominated industry. Melissa and I had the pleasure of working together on her personal brand about a year ago. And it was just such an honor that she came back to work with me for a second time on her other business. And so this is the site I'm talking about today. I'm going to be reviewing her old site. And this is kind of cool because I would love for you to go to the show notes of this page on my website at rartspace.com/podcast and you can see, you know, before's and after's of this site that I'm talking about and you can see how it was before and changes I made and you know, the afters and all that kind of thing. So I'm excited for you. This is gonna be more of like a show and tell type of episode. So yeah, so that's a little bit about Justified M2 Solutions and a little bit about the company. And so we are going to be reviewing the site.

    Okay, so when you come to the site, I have a screen capture of the full site, and it is a one-page scrolling site. And so there is a navigation, and it is underneath the hero banner on the site. And so if you click on one of those, it'll just scroll you down to where that section is on the site. So I think it's, looking at this type of site, it's kind of like a landing page with links that you can hop down the page to. I think it's better if you have pages embedded in the site that you can open into a new page. It just keeps it more interesting. I feel like it keeps people more engaged in the site and it allows people to really click around and learn more about you and that kind of thing. If they're just scrolling down and that's all that the site is, they're likely to leave the site faster and not stay around as long.

    And whenever people do leave the site quickly, if they're on the site for only 30 seconds or 45 seconds or under a minute or something, that impacts the bounce rate. And so if you have a higher bounce rate, that means people are leaving the site faster and that impacts your SEO. So it's really important that people are staying on your site, you want people clicking around, you want people, you wanna have a low bounce rate on your website so people are, you know, that.

    When you have a lower bounce rate, that means people are finding the content interesting, engaging, they're clicking around, they're reading your information. So you definitely want to have a lower bounce rate on your website in general. And this is something I encourage you to check out if you have a website and you have analytics or you have Google Analytics. Checking out your bounce rate and just seeing where it's at is a good rule of thumb.

    You know staying under the 70% is good. You don't really want to be in the 80 or 90% bounce rate so I recommend that.And just to let you know a little bit about bounce rate, 40% or lower is considered good. And if you have a bounce rate of 55% or higher, it's normally, there can be things that can be improved for sure. So you want people to be, like I said, staying on that website as long as possible and consuming your content and giving people really good value. So going back to this website.

    So when you come to the home landing page, you're gonna see a really dark overlay photo with the logo. And it just says, justified M2 solutions, operations, sourcing support. And that's pretty much all you see for that hero image. And there's no calls to action. It doesn't explain what the company is or what they do until you scroll down a little bit. It says, 25 years combined oil and gas industry experience. That's kind of like the heading, and then it goes into a little bit more detail about the team and how they provide unique on-call operation support services. If you keep scrolling down, you get to advantages, which is a different section, and it talks about project efficiency and communication into boxes. If you're scrolling down some more, it talks about our services, and then it goes into operation support procedures, and on site support utilizing our vendors or yours. And so if you're not in the oil and gas industry like myself, some of these things can seem a little bit like the wording is a little...jargony.

    Now, if you are not in the oil and gas industry like myself, probably some of these words can like go over your head or it can kind of seem a little jargony. And so that was something I really wanted to change when I worked on this site was trying to make it really simple. And obviously you do want to use phrases that people in the oil and gas industry use, but you also want it to be for normal people to understand it when they're going to the website as well.

    Overall from this site when you look at it something that really stood out to me when I first saw it was There's no describing what justified m2 solutions is right away And that's something that needs to happen within five seconds like you need to come to the home page Well within two seconds really you have to see what the company is and know who they are and what they do and Then you want to have a call to action so that was another thing was the calls to action

    There is not a call to action in this old website. If you scroll all the way down past the about section, there is a contact section, and then there's like a request info section, but there's really no calls to action in this old site, which is a huge red flag to me, because you wanna have calls to action at different points in your website journey on the homepage, on the about page, on the services page. You wanna have them everywhere so people can take action whenever they're ready to take action. And you just want to give people that opportunity to make those clicks. Something I also noticed was, and this is kind of a copy, this is more of a copy suggestion, and this is what I do whenever I do Brand and website assessments. I try to give copy feedback as well because I do think copy is so important to a website.

    I believe the design is incredibly important, but the copy is also incredibly important. And so copy-wise, something I noticed on this site was it's all about justified M2 solutions, which makes sense because that is their website, but you really wanna make it about your customer. Yes, it's about the company and what you do and how long you've been in business, but it's also about your customer and how you are solving their problem.

    And I always go back to building a story brand by Donald Miller, such a good book and resource if you need help with your copy and making your copy customer centric. I think that is such a good resource and I highly recommend it. And so that was another, another huge tip I had as I worked on this website was I really recommended making it customer focused and how can we make it about the customer and how could we really highlight that we are the perfect solution for this type of customer. And the final thing I noticed just, so like the first main thing was not describing like who the company was right off the bat, which is something you need to do. Second thing was calls to action. Third thing, making it about your customer. And fourth thing, just giving it that really professional, modern look and that really like exudes experience and trustworthiness that is incredibly important too. So those are the main things I noticed as I went through the site and things that I really recommended to them as I went through and made changes. And now I would love to, and you'll have to go, like I said, you'll have to go to the show notes page and see because I would love for you to see what we did. But I would love to read off a few of the changes that we did make and how we did that in the new site. So now when you first go to the landing page, it says operations consulting and sourcing support, providing producers service they can count on for daily operations. I just feel like, and there's a really clean, bright photo and it's lighter, it's easier to navigate and it's clean looking.

    And that's what I really wanted to showcase was the experience, the professionalism, making it clean and easy to read, easy to navigate, easy to understand. And so that was in the main banner. And then when you scroll down a little bit, it says, we're committed to excellence, integrity, reliability. So it's like setting their business apart, like what sets their operations sourcing support apart. And so we highlighted that. And then when you scroll down a little bit more, it says your project managers depend on quality service providers, how we can help. And then there's like three little check marks of like different things that they do. And then there is a call to action. And then it goes down into, we care about our clients. And let's see, number. And then it goes into, we care about our clients. And this section talks about three different ways their clients receive support from them. And it really highlights how they stand out as a company and it really highlights how they stand out as a company amid all the other companies in this industry. And I love that we really highlighted that and made it clear and easy with like little bullet points, a little like check marks so people can like scan it really easily, the headlines are really big. And I think that's something that's really important in a website is having your headlines really big, making your content skimmable so people can skim through.

    And then they have the option to really read the content and like look into it more if they have more questions or want some clarity, then they can go in and read like the smaller print. And then something else we added throughout the site was testimonials. I feel like this is such a great way to display that expertise, that trustworthiness, that you know, how great your service is.

    are with really good testimonials. And so we definitely incorporated that into the site, was just putting them throughout the site, was these little testimonials with like five stars above it. It just is a quick way for people to see like five star support, this is the company who can help us. And then at the bottom we have trusted by, and then there's logos of the different companies who have worked with them.

    And this is a great way, again, to build that authority and trust is showing people, especially if you're in this industry, you know, I've never seen some of these logos, but if you're in this industry, you would know immediately that this is a trustworthy business because they have worked with this big, you know, company in this space.

    RuthAnn (14:05.058)

    And then going to the services page, you know, I definitely wanted to, you know, highlight that they have been in this industry for a long time, a combined total of 30 years, and they have a team. And so we were highlighting the team and how it's women owned, which was really important, I think, and to help them, you know, position them as a company that's doing things differently, and a company that really is, you know, cares about their clients and is making a difference.

    And then, so that was in the services page. And let me go to the about page, I thought it was really important to highlight their team because they do have a team and that was something they wanted to do,was like share who is in the team and they wanted to share their story. So when you go to the about page, the first thing you'll see is a picture of the two co-owners standing in a construction site and it says not your average team in the oil and gas industry get to know us.

    Which I think is a great way to highlight that this is a woman-owned business in a male-dominated industry. And when you scroll down, you can see our story and it has a little timeline graphic of when they founded the company and how they have really exponentially grown from there. And then below that, it says by the numbers and then it has like, it has three different big numbers and it says 56 number of clients served 1877 jobs completed.

    56 number of clients served, 1,877 jobs completed, and 12 number of fully executed MSAs. And then it goes down to all about the team and they have an individual page for each bio, an individual scrolling page for each bio. And yeah, I just love how we did this. It really like gave credibility to who this business is, to the women behind this business and how they care so much about their clients.

    And I just love how we set up this about page. And so throughout the whole site, we tried to make it clear, easy to understand, modern in design, those big headlines, dynamic in color palette options. And we did use their original branding, but we definitely wanted to use colors that popped, but all use colors that popped, but also

    giving it that clean white space as well. So it looked really clean and modern and easy to navigate and throughout the site as well. So I was just touching on the things that I mentioned before was, you know, we had a really strong introduction as soon as you land on the homepage. We incorporated those calls to action throughout the site on the homepage about services, and we gave it that really professional, modern, polished look that really showcases their experience and trustworthiness and expertise. And this was just such a great fun project to work on and something that I don't normally work on like I mentioned, I don't normally work with companies like about this in this industry.

    And so this was a really fun project for me. And I really hope this was beneficial to you that you can kind of see like, these are the changes I would make. And this is what we did.

    And again, I would love to encourage you to go to the podcast page, check out this episode and see the befores and after, and then you can really get an idea of like what this looked at, what this looked like and the changes that we made. And you can see them for yourself. And I would love for you to check that out.

    So this episode showed you a behind the scenes look of my Revive brand and website assessment. This is something I love doing. I just started offering this service this year and I just love it. And it really gives people so much value. And these are changes they can implement themselves or they can hire me for. And so this week from November 21st through Saturday, November 25th for five days, I am offering my Revive brand and website assessment.

    as a Black Friday special for $99. So the Revive Assessment is where I review your site, give you practical tips and strategies in a Loom video so you can watch it on your own time, and it just gives you tips for what you can do to improve your user experience and get more clients to book. And bonus is this $99 can go towards any of my brand and website packages if you choose to work with me.

    And as an extra special bonus, you get seven days of Voxer access to me after your video assessment is delivered. So if you wanted to make those changes on your own, you can message me and get feedback and make real progress to your business goals and make your site so much more effective so that your ideal clients will book with you and you can grow your business. Don't forget this deal is happening now.

    So jump on this offer by going to rartspace.com/assessment to sign up today. I really hope this episode was helpful to you and encouraging and that you can make changes in your own website. I'm so excited to hear from you.

    Don't forget, this deal is happening now, so jump on this offer by going to ourartspace.com slash assessment to sign up today. I can't wait to check out your website and review it for you, and so until next time, I'll see you next week. Don't forget, this deal is happening now, so jump on this offer by going to ourartspace.com slash assessment to sign up today. I cannot wait to review your website for you, and so make sure you sign up. And until next week, thank you so much for listening.

 
RuthAnn Rafiq

Passion for art, design, people and intentional connections.

http://www.rartspace.com
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