GreenGrowth CPAs
Website Redesign
Upon taking my roles as Chief Marketing Officer at GreenGrowth CPAs, one of my first projects was to rework and update the firm’s website. The website I inherited was built on outdated technology, did not follow a coherent SEO or UX/UI strategy, and failed to elevate any of the company’s selling characteristics.
For this project, I took a hands-on approach, developing all layouts myself, completely rewriting each page, developing a new service taxonomy, and creating new ways to engage visitors.
The goals of the new website were to:
Elevate thought leadership through a new content management system and dynamic engagement strategies
Lower bounce rate and session length via UX/UI strategy
Drive organic search performance via SEO/SEM best practices
Best represent the scope of services presented by the firm
Increase rate of visitor conversions
Before and After
To understand the scope of the task ahead of me, it is essential to see the poor shape of the website in its previous state. The old GreenGrowth CPAs website was built on a generic WordPress form that was not optimized for current web performance. As a result, load times were slow and overall poor web performance limited SEO performance.
Additionally, the blog was housed outside the website’s architecture and hosted on the firm’s CRM system, HubSpot. As a result, web traffic and SEO performance were not directly correlated with the home website, limiting organic traffic.
Finally, the over look and feel of the old website was so dated that it did not convey a sense of modern capabilities and was an essential part of the overall brand refresh.
Elevating Content
Developing content and thought leadership was a core principle of the GreenGrowth CPAs value proposition. This concept was under-supported by the old website’s blog, which was only accessible after 3+ clicks, was not searchable, was not organized, and did not help readers navigate or understand the content provided.
To fix this, I focused on highlighting content throughout the website. First, I reworked the content library and rebranded the library to make it a content destination, creating the Cannabis Business Knowledge Base. Next, I included content sliders just below “the fold” on the Home Page, and on every Service Page.
Additionally, I created Cannabis Topic Hubs around key ideas relevant to prospective clients. These pages group content under these ideas and included new SEO-rich text.
A Resource Destination
To continue driving SEO performance and organic web traffic, I wanted to create a reliable resource center that would be useful to visitors, while also driving SEO/SEM performance. To accomplish this, I developed the Cannabis Market Map section of the website.
At the center of this page is an interactive map that provides details about each legal cannabis market in the United States. Hovering over and clicking on a state brings up a Snapshot of that state’s legal market and our proprietary analysis and rating of the market. From that pop-up, you can also click on a button that takes you to a landing page for each state. Those landing pages allowed me to implement targeted SEO strategy for each market, while also providing essential details about that marketing, including:
Licensing structure and fees
Tax structure
Links to state regulatory bodies
And much more
Boost to Performance
The new GreenGrowth CPAs website was launched the first week of September, 2021. In the months that followed we saw a dramatic increase in web performance. Key metrics that improved include:
Daily Unique Visitors increased by >100%
Home page bounce rate lowered by 30% to <48%
25% increase in organic traffic
Website trending positively on 1,000+ new keywords
