Redesigned Website Boosts Sales for Maritime Transport Firm

Posted on by Chief Marketer Staff


A revamped website better highlighting maritime transport firm Crowley Corp.’s range of services has boosted SEO and conversions.

The new site, redesigned by digital agency Roundarch Inc., led to total organic search referrals increasing 244% per month, and total non-branded keywords leading to the site rising 68% per month, says Mark Miller, director of corporate communications for Crowley.

Crowley Corp. is a privately held company with about $1.5 billion in annual revenue. Founded in San Francisco in 1892, the company provides shipping and logistics services primarily between the U.S. and the Caribbean basin. Its tugboats on the West Coast and in Alaska provide ship docking and undocking services, and also escort oil tankers through treacherous waters. Crowley also does ocean towing and barge transportation; has a salvage subsidiary; and does consulting work for the government and private sector firms.

The customer base is diverse, says Miller. For shipping and logistics, customers range from Fortune 500 firms like Coca Cola, Target and Walmart, all the way down to individuals who might need to have a vehicle or their household goods shipped to the Caribbean.

Not surprisingly, the sales cycle is different depending on the part of the business, says Miller. Leads often come from people checking the website for rates and vessels, who then might connect with a salesperson, and many large firms go through an RFP process. The marketing team also monitors import/export records to see who is shipping what, when and where. Marketing then determines when to take that information to the sales team for follow-up.

A Smarter Family of Websites
With the website, there was a great opportunity to identify cross-sell prospects, and thus better leverage the overall online presence. Building in mechanisms so visitors could easily see related services was crucial, says Frank Baldassare, project manager for Roundarch.

Crowley’s existing site prior to the redesign was nine years old and very outdated. For the most part, any change to content was a complicated exercise and couldn’t be done with any frequency. The main Crowley site is for the parent company, with links to subsidiaries such as Titan Salvage, Jensen Maritime Consultants and Customized Brokers. Each of these has its own unique brand and a specific position in the market. “These sites weren’t supporting the overall brand, and they needed to be tackled from the get-go,” says Baldassare.

Although a similar layout was needed for each site, a distinct design was required for each as well. The main Crowley site had a professional, open design, while Titan Salvage had to focus on the specifics of marine salvage. Customized Brokers focused on import and custom brokerage services, while Jensen Maritime catered to those in need of naval architects or marine engineers.

Baldassare notes that there was a need to create a link between the sites, a “soft landing page” built into the navigation of the main site that, for example, would talk about salvage before linking off to the subsidiary site. The look of the site needed to be updated to reflect the expectations of today’s business consumer.

“The old site wasn’t very graphically oriented, and was designed back when people hadn’t yet made the transition to broadband,” notes Miller.

Impressive visual assets are a key element of showcasing the success stories on the site, Baldassare notes. Users can see a good cross-section of examples, such as logistics solutions or transport efforts in Australia. “Various challenges and consistent user experiences can be brought to life for a wide potential audience.”

“The ability to point a prospect to a job similar to what they’re looking to do is very helpful,” says Miller. “If we know we can deliver a large, unusual cargo to a beachhead with float ramps in Angola, for example, that lends credence to the idea that we could provide that service in other places for other customers.”

The new design is built in a fluid framework that will allow the site to be adapted to screen layouts for different devices, such as tablets or mobile phones. “You need to adapt the site for the device it is being rendered on,” says Baldassare.

The Results
Search was another component. While some users knew of the Crowley name, the company also wanted to appeal to users who maybe knew them only for one service, but weren’t aware of other subsidiaries. Thanks to the open source eZPublish platform, now metadata on all pages can be optimized, so as keywords in the industry evolve there will be flexibility to adapt.

The new site went live early in November 2010. In terms of organic search referrals, a nearly 250% increase has been seen from users coming in from Google and Bing. And anecdotally, the company has heard from users that the new site is easier to navigate. Google Analytics was also used to help discover which pages on the site weren’t getting the attention the company had hoped for. In the discovery process, Baldassare and his team saw that people wanted to search by service, as well as by what area or industry they were in. The old sites didn’t allow people to slice and dice what they were looking for, Miller says. On the new site, a solution finder was built into the home page. Users who didn’t know where to look on the site could type in a few keywords, building a query that would then direct them to what they were looking for.

Baldassare notes that, in the new design, they tried to make sure most pages provide some sort of indicator as to where these services are being provided, with map images so geographics could be highlighted.

Some traffic for the site is being generated by social media, says Miller, who notes that Crowley has about 1,500 fans on Facebook. There’s also a prominent share component in the new site, so users (both customers and Crowley employees) can identify what pages on the site they like.

Email is used primarily for shipping and logistics customers to share service announcements “We haven’t done a lot of overly promotional marketing,” says Miller. “We don’t want to turn our customers off."
 

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