Human Resource Consulting Firm Website Review Case Study [Video]

Content and the quality of it is one of the most important factors of a highly-performing website. If you can't successfully and thoroughly explain your products or services and they value that they bring, why should a website visitor consider them?

But it's not just having content, it's having content that can be easily navigated and understood.

In this case study, we're going to look at the website for HR ROI Consulting of Concord, New Hampshire and how the have a lot of good, high quality content, but maybe there are some areas and opportunities for making modifications that would improve the performance of their website at turning visitors into customers.

Video Transcription:

Today we're going to look at a website for a business consulting company. You can see I'm on the ZeroToDigital New Hampshire Business Ranking page and I've filtered by "business consulting". We can look at HR ROI Consulting, LLC out of Portsmouth, NH.

They're the top company we have listed here so far in our ranking database. Ranked about 5 million globally and 65 search indexed pages. Their website has been around since 2017 which is pretty young - at least for how old the domain name is.

So, let's take a look at their website. I want to get a first impression. You can see after a couple of seconds of delay, we got this little popup. It looks like they're using an existing software service which is helpful and time efficient.

It looks like it's a newsletter signup for webinars and HR updates. It's great that they're telling you what it is and how we can subscribe. If I just know that I want to sign up then great, otherwise, you may need to sell me a little bit. So, if there was some sort of bulleted list of the values that I can expect to receive, or reviews from existing newsletter subscribers that might be helpful.

But, overall, it's good that they have some sort of lead generation process like this.

Their home page, we obviously see the big logo and a little tagline - "People. Strategy. Success." It's good to have something like that whether it's a headline or part of the logo - it helps to identify them, who they are, what their mission is.

Their navigation is pretty small. From a design standpoint, it looks like there are a lot of things that are just sort of floating. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but from my perspective, I like things to sort of have their place. So, this logo is sort of floating in the middle. We have the social media links on the side, a search button on top, navigation links ... I would kind of like to have some sort of solid structure.

It looks like the social media links go to their pages. I've said this before, but when someone is on your website you don't want to send them away to your social media pages. Social media exists to bring people in - you're meeting people on social media where they are. People spend time on LinkedIn, Twitter and Youtube, so that's where you go to find them and bring them back to your website.

So, we don't necessarily want to send them away. Sure, if they become a customer or prospect or something and we want them to participate in a group that we have set up, that's fine. But that's for later. For now, we should focus on converting them to customers.

We do have a contact us form that's part of the same plugin which is good. The phone is good, but I wouldn't have the social media links here.

Let's scroll down the home page a bit. The headline about partnering with organizations, that's great because you're being upfront and honest about what it is that you do. It can be hard to understand what the purpose is sometimes - HR ROI Consulting, but what kind of consulting do you offer? That can mean a few things, so it's good to be direct about what you do.

In this case, if I'm an organization that has employees, then great - maybe this would be a good fit for us.

It looks like we have some content about who they are as a company and consulting firm. Their experience and then a little about what they offer.

It looks like we have some sort of fixed feature with this header but it takes over quite a bit of the page.

So, their content tells us what we can receive, different services, when they might make sense for us to partner with them - if we're experiencing decreased performance or morale or are overwhelmed with managing HR solutions of our own, etc.

They have plenty of call-to-actions. Here's another button - "Let's discuss your solutions". Another up here - "Contact Us". Over here on the plugin as well. That's great that they're making it really easy for someone to take the next step. For the most part, they might be a bit generic so maybe don't convert super well. Contact up top in the navigation is good because that's what people look for.

Let's scroll down - they have a list of their partners with recognizable logos and companies such as the Greater Concord Chamber of Commerce, NH Center for Nonprofits, etc. It's great to have organizations listed that people might be familiar with so that they can better relate to HR ROI.

Maybe, before today, I had never heard of this company before, but I've heard of these before and the University of New Hampshire and the Business and Industry Association of New Hampshire. So, it automatically sort of puts you within that group and identifies you as trustworthy even though anyone could put any of these logos on their site.

But it's a clever tactic to do on your website.

Then we have a footer with a few more floating sections. A little more credibility with the Better Business Bureau badge saying that they're accredited so that's good.

Looking at the home page, I would say they have a lot of call to actions which is a plus, they tell you right away what they do, and they have a list of recognizable partners which makes them relatable. Those are positive things.

Let's look at a service page - "Human Resources Consulting".

Let's see what this page looks like. A ton of content here - a lot of text. And it's hard to scan the text because it's so wide - edge-to-edge. This is probably 1,200 pixels wide. When you have a lot of text, I find it's helpful for it to be narrow so that a user can look side-to-side and quickly scan it.

It looks like they're trying to relate - "are you finding HR responsibilities are increasingly challenging to juggle?" They're relating to what the challenges are that companies face. They're telling us to consider them as a partner for solving those problems. They're telling us why - exceptional service, expertise, resources, etc.

That's good to explain the service and why they're the best fit for it. Another call-to-action is great.

Then it looks like they explain more about what is involved in their services. One thing I would say is that there's a lot of content here to do something with. Look at all this text. That's great - a lot of websites don't have content or this much of it.

So, I look at this and I think that there's a lot of text/content that we can do stuff with. I'd break this down into different sections, make the text more narrow. The headlines are good, the lists are good even though it looks like the formatting is a little different.

But I would break it apart with visuals and images, or maybe different types of content - for example, reviews or frequently asked questions or whatever it may be. Try to break this apart.

Maybe it might make sense to put some of this content on different pages, or on the same page and different sections will give you the feeling of navigating to different pages.

And make sure that this content is in a certain order that makes sense from a sales perspective. So, if you're HR ROI Consulting, you want to take people who visit the website from becoming aware of your business to interested in what you have to offer, to becoming hooked and signing up as a customer, or contacting you and becoming a lead or a prospect.

So, make sure that the content is organized in such a way that it gives an overview and helps as the user advances through that though process of "oh yeah, that sounds interesting" or "it sounds like a good fit for us" to "how could we not consider them because of their experience or they offer this benefit?" to "I'm going to contact them".

Think of that mindset. Don't just put a bunch of text - and I'm not saying this is just a bunch of text - but it's important to have that mindset, when you have a website, of what the purchasing process is for the user and what our sales funnel should look like to match and convert those users to customers.

Let's look at another page - I'm thinking that a lot of these services will be similar as far as the design is concerned. Yeah, less content but the layout is still the same.

Again, I don't like how big the logo is. When we're scrolling back up it's taking about half of our page and gets in the way.

Events - it looks like they have some good opportunities - some ongoing activities and other events via Zoom - it looks like they're pretty much all Zoom meetings. It looks like they value and place an emphasis on having these meetings and webinars like we saw in the popup call-to-action that we saw at the beginning.

It looks like they partner with the University of New Hampshire which is great because it gives them that credibility, so that's terrific. Let me just see if I were to click on this button - looks like we just get sent to the generic contact form which isn't ideal.

Let's try this other event - looks like we get sent to a page on the UNH website with event information and a signup, so that's good.

Let's look at the blog page. It looks like they post maybe once or twice per month. It looks like the content is good and relevant to their business so that's good. I usually say that content marketing or content creation is one of the best long-term marketing tactics that you can have for your website, primarily for search engine optimization purposes. Over time, your website will gain in quality and search rankings and that can send traffic to your website for years to come.

One last page, we'll look at the contact page. I like the options - phone, email and form. Different users will have different ways that they'd prefer to contact you. The map is good if you'd like to visit.

It looks like they have some sort of public relations thing here as they talk about how they sponsor the Center for Wildlife. Not sure if I would put that on the contact page.

Overall, I would say that it's great that they have a lot of call-to-actions, you don't necessarily want to have them everywhere - it could be a little annoying - but whenever you introduce or talk about something, you can follow it up with an action step for the user. That's helpful for the user and for the company since you're not just looking to provide information. You want the user to act.

I would say it looks like they have a lot of great content. They could probably use some design tweaks to help the user navigate through the content better - absorb the content without looking at page after page of text.

I would tweak this top section with the navigation so it doesn't look like the links are just floating and the logo is taking up so much of every page.

These social media links - I wouldn't be promoting these either. If you want to have these on your website then put them in the footer or on the contact page after everything else, but don't send people away from your website.

But I think there are a lot of great things here for the HR ROI website.