In this post, I’m going to be looking at http://www.wilsoninvestigations.com/ to review its overall design, layout and conversion potential, from the eyes of an experienced web developer. I will also make suggestions on how to make it easier to convert more customers.
The first thing I’m noticing on this page are the unique navigation tabs that say “Read More” on them and have a right pointing arrow. They are well done, but I’m not sure if that’s where you want the attention to go at first.
The reason people are going to pay attention to this part of the website first is because the rest of it all blends together. My first piece of advice would be to make the contact us page one of these tabs if you want people to click on that information right away to get in touch with you. That, or make the phone number on the top right a link to the contact page as well. In general, most local sites underplay these elements too much, when they should be emphasized.
The content on these pages is well written, and that’s great. However, people on the Internet tend to have short attention spans. You may want to take a lot of this information and make it a little less dense and add some graphics. There is little to visually interest a visitor. One suggestion that can kill a few birds with one stone would be to add a video to each page, which allows the viewer to watch and listen, rather than read through a large amount of text. This improves time on site and also makes it easier to convey your message.
The home page content is a bit thin and probably isn’t going to help much with ranking. Search engines prefer sites which have a good amount of information and not simply a list of links. As a private investigator in the Houston, Texas region, I would guess that private investigator houston is the main term which the home page should be targeting. However, although there are several variations of the term “private investigator” used on the home page, “private investigator houston” is only used once. I would recommend increasing the use of the exact term, plus add some more content to the home page.
Another thing on phone numbers. When the contact us and phone number on the pages is placed contextually in the information, I’d recommend using a header tag, such as an h2 one so you can make it larger than the text. I see that it’s bolded, but that doesn’t really draw your eye to it when there are other things that are as well around it.
It’s great that this private investigator offers a lot of services, and that there are so many to look at on the services page. One idea may be to take what the most common services are and place them near the top of these lists. I assume that is what they did with the buttons on the homepage with the arrows, but if someone comes to the page at the services area, due to how many pages there are there, it would help to make sure they know of the most popular services before anything else.
I like the contact page. It is straight to the point with phone number available and a map. People are going to appreciate not having to go to Google’s map page and get directions because they can do so right from this page.
The ‘about us’ page is okay as well, but as I go through these pages, I notice that the text is rather small, or it just looks bunched together. I would advise making the text a little larger on this about page because there is a lot of white space as it is, and people on mobile devices will appreciate not having to zoom in.
On the whole, there need to be more photo images on this website. Web users expect good imagery and images also help to convey your message via a different pathway than text is conveyed. As this is a private investigation business, it is understandable that there may be limitations on what images can be used, due to the nature of the business. But if you don’t want to have a picture of yourself on the site, then a simple alternative is to use stock images or, at least, get a picture of the building. Pages with nothing but text are very difficult to look at and will usually have poor user engagement, leading to higher bounce rates.
Overall, the website is decent and does its job. But it is definitely missing a few things. I’d probably end up using this service if I had to find a private investigator, but only after I did a little research on my own first. A big improvement would be to make the pages more user-friendly and quicker to go through. Looking at the website stats through Google Analytics to see how long people spend on the website gives a very good idea of whether visitors enjoy the site and find it interesting. If time on site averages less than half a minute, then you have some work to do.