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Meerkat is a financial services provider that provides services such as debt management, funeral cover and savings plans for South Africans.
Through education and support, they help their clients do more with their money, stay out of debt, and take care of their families. Meerkat uses HubSpot Marketing Hub Pro and HubSpot CMS Pro.
This is an award winning project!
MO Agency won an award for this project - Platform Excellence. 🚀
We won with a HubSpot CMS Hub (website) implementation.
HubSpot awards this to a partner who provides massive value and demonstrable results for a client and demonstrating their expertise and excellence in delivering a single hub solution.
It is only awarded to two partners every year in all of EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa.)
The brief
Initially, the project aimed to assist Meerkat with rebuilding its website in a short space of time on HubSpot CMS.
Meerkat is a startup in an incredibly competitive and established industry and their website needed to effectively communicate what Meerkat does while providing conversion opportunities.
MO Agency was asked to help rebuild Meerkat’s Website in HubSpot CMS Hub, with a focus on ensuring it was completely modularised, editable and easy to set up tests etc. while also updating the look and feel and improving the overall UI of the website.
The challenge
The main challenge for the Meerkat team was that the original HubSpot CMS website was difficult to edit and maintain. Optimisation opportunities for conversion rate optimisation (CRO) were limited by poorly designed website and templates.
Optimising SEO
The debt, insurance and saving industry Meerkat operates in is extremely competitive and paid ad activities are very expensive. Improving Meerkat’s organic ranking was critical to help increase visibility and ultimately decrease the reliance on paid media.
To make matters more difficult, Meerkat’s competitors are big insurance and banking brands with large budgets. To be competitive the website needed to be fully SEO optimised, requiring more copy, while still being relevant to their target audience.
Lack of qualified leads
Limited on-page SEO optimisation was being done for website pages and existing blog content, new blog content that the client was creating was not aligned with the original SEO strategy in place and multiple, irrelevant CTAs were added.
There was also a reliance on the call centre to qualify and convert leads created from the website and digital activities
Integrating an online quoting system
The website had to cater for an online quoting system that Meerkat had developed in their customer portal, and the experience needed to be seamless for clients.
Overall UX Improvement
The overall UI and UX of the website needed improvement. However, efforts were focused on advertising on social media and not on improving website performance.
Using our boilerplate template as a foundation, we were able to quickly redesign the look and feel of the brand, making it more professional and visually appealing to users while quickly getting the development phase done and ready to go live.
Providing relevant and valuable content
While users were coming to the website, there were minimal conversions on the main product pages and blogs. Unqualified leads were being generated from the website which impacted the number of sales the call centre could make.
Primary goals
- Design and develop the new website with a quick turnaround time.
- Improve the SEO on the page and the UX of the website
- Increase the amount of organic traffic.
- Increase the overall conversion rate of the website.
- Ensuring the website is fully customisable for the Meerkat Marketing team
The solution
1. Improve SEO on page and UX
A new SEO strategy was created that informed the website content that was created. A key focus was on developing copy that articulated what each service offering is and the benefits to customers and creating simplified conversion journeys to improve conversions from the site.
2. Increase conversion rate
During the design phase, a key focus was on providing additional visibility to key Calls to Action and reducing the friction a user would have to go to by implementing the online quoting tool on key pages through Calls to Action.
Multivariate tests of the CTAs were created so that we could identify which copy options and designs improved conversions, which could be implemented on future pages.
3. Improve blog UX and UI
By updating the blog listing and article page design we were able to improve the UX and UI. A focus was made to improve the readability of the blog articles and implement multivariate CTAs to improve conversion rates. Tests were run between different types of CTAs (Image and button CTAs).
4. Improve the overall UI of the website
New designs were created for key pages of the website, and using the boilerplate template MO developed assisted with the quick development time as well as ensuring best practice was used for both design and development.
Our Process
To create the new website the following steps were required:
- Write new copy based on the SEO Strategy that defines what the product is, and emphasises the benefits to potential customers.
- As some of the products are misunderstood, e.g. debt review, the copy was reworked to show the benefits while educating customers.
- The SEO strategy guided what type of content should be created providing more structure and guidance for the Meerkat Marketing team.
- During this process, new designs were created for the website, to speed up the rollout templates for the service pages. A key focus was professionalising the brand and creating additional conversion opportunities.
- Development of new pages in HubSpot using MO’s boilerplate template. This helped speed up the development process as modules were already built and only needed customisation.
- The additional flexibility the boilerplate template provides has enabled the Meerkat Marketing team to make updates as needed to website content.
- Example Pages:
- HubSpot Multivariate CTA creation to test different formats and copy options to create data.
- Pre and post-SEO audits using the SEO tool in HubSpot.
- After the website was launched, additional functionality from the secure site was added, greatly slowing down the website. We used the SEO tool to identify the errors and worked through these consistently to improve the performance of the website.
- A/B tests and Multivariate CTAs were created to generate insights as to what performance is
the best which has been rolled out to campaigns and blog content.
The results
- Organic Traffic and conversions have been improved year on year:
TYD: (98.40% increase in sessions; 28.57% increase in contacts generated)
Previous Year:
- Total Website Improvement:
2023: (64% increase in sessions; 12% increase in contacts)
2022 - Interaction as a whole has increased: CTA visibility and Clicks have improved
- Increase in blog performance Year on year:
Increase in blog views:
Our Impact
As the project neared completion, our team already started seeing results. More qualified leads are being generated due to more information being available on the website, enabling call centre agents to focus on closing deals as opposed to qualifying content.
The marketing team was now able to edit the site as and when needed, providing the team with more independence.
The in-depth SEO audit provided insight into what people are searching for and what information needs to be included on each page to assist with conversions. This also allowed the business to press into the power of SEO and rank above its competitors on Google without overspending on its budget.
Insights from the call centre team were gathered from the agents to highlight additional information and FAQs that were needed for each service page.
We also rectified multiple technical issues that existed on the website that was being caused by the integration with their secure portal.
