Challenge
BTA was tasked with rebuilding the WordPress theme for the Greater Morgantown CVB website, TourMorgantown.com. We identified the primary goals as:
- Increasing conversions for key metrics including hotel bookings, newsletter signups, PDF downloads, and phone calls to local businesses.
- Creating a better user experience, specifically on mobile devices. This included creating responsive layouts for the various page templates utilized across the site, including better navigation and site search, and making the site more accessible and easier to use with screen readers and keyboards.
- Updating and optimizing site copy to increase organic search traffic (SEO).
Strategy
The BTA Web Team set out rebuilding the site on a new framework using the best practices for accessible and responsive design.
Key components were updated like the Event Calendar and Deals and Discounts archive to allow users to browse and search using a mobile-friendly interface.
The team did a complete content audit and updated key pages and blog posts to drive new users to the website.
In order to gauge the performance of our changes, we implemented event tagging and built a custom reporting dashboard to get real-time feedback on user behavior.
Results
Thirty days after launching the new theme, the following metrics have improved over the same period in the previous year:
- 125 newsletter signups have been generated, an increase of 34%.
- Page views are up 15.62% across the site.
- Pages per sessions are up 8.34% overall and 8.78% on mobile devices.
- Organic traffic is up 5.81% overall and 5.01% on mobile devices.
- Visits to local hotels and lodging properties are up 246%.
- 448 phone calls have been generated for local businesses.
- 468 searches have been made.
