Jumping out of a perfectly good airplane may seem like a bad idea to some, but for the team at Skydive Central North Carolina, it’s all in a days work. Based out of Laney’s Airport in Maiden, NC, near the western shores of Lake Norman, the company provides tandem skydiving for thrill-seekers and bucket-listers alike.
At just 33 miles away, Skydive Central North Carolina is the closest Drop Zone from downtown Charlotte and draws folks not just from the local area, but many routinely make the drive from as far away Asheville, Greenville and Spartanburg. With great views of the Lake, foothills and the Charlotte skyline, they offer some of the best, most scenic skydiving in the Carolinas.
While the Wilkerson Family have been in the skydiving industry for generations, they officially opened their own shop in 2015. It’s never easy breaking into an existing market, so when owner Kelvin Wilkerson Jr called me up asking for some help with Skydive Central NC’s existing online presence, I was excited to oblige.
New small businesses are often on a budget, but that doesn’t make their goals any less important to them. While this project was on a bit of a smaller scale than some that I’ve recently been a part of, I knew I could help transform them into a formidable online competitor in the local skydiving market without costing the owners an arm and a leg.
The main priority: a boost in search ranking. Kelvin knew his poor rankings under relevant search terms was hurting his ability to acquire traffic, and in turn costing him market share. I got to work overhauling the site from the ground up to be more SEO-friendly. This included ensuring all HTML tags were organized appropriately and page load times reduced. We made sure all elements of the site were accessible to visually impaired users, and worked to make the existing site structure as mobile friendly as the existing design allowed. Once the basics were taken care of, we began to tweak the content itself to feature more targeted search terms.
Optimizing for search engines would certainly pay off over time, but I knew there was more to be done.
A high ranking on Google is a great goal, but usually when a company asks for SEO help, what they’re really looking for is a way to make their website generate more business for them. Getting people to the site is obviously a crucial step in that, but it’s all for nothing if the site isn’t converting those visitors to actual customers. Without a definitive plan to identify and address the needs of visitors, a website is nothing more than an online brochure.
The most successful website owners seek to understand how visitors interact with their site, and are continuously working to improve the user experience.
After spending more time analyzing not only SkydiveCentralNC.com, but also many of the competitors in the local region, I began to see some shortcomings. Without the luxury of focus groups or test cases, I put myself in the shoes of someone searching for a company to do my first jump with and coming to the site for the first time. Not only were the links to book a jump hard to find, the process to book a jump was overly cumbersome. Just as bad, there was nothing about his site that would make me choose his company over his competition.
After further discussion with Kelvin, we agreed that while more could and would be done to improve his domain authority, a more holistic approach to improving his website from a user perspective would likely go a lot further towards creating customers than solely trying to push his site up Google’s results.
Keep in mind that Skydive Central NC had employed someone to build their existing site not long before they contacted me, so committing (a not-insignificant amount of money for a small start-up) to a revamp so soon couldn’t have been an easy pill to swallow. It says a lot about Kelvin and his commitment to his company’s online success that he was willing to go out on a limb and trust that an overhaul was needed.
Using our previous work as a foundation, I stressed to Kelvin that a lot of what we needed to be really successful already existed – a great product, positive reviews and an awesome reputation – we just needed to package and present those ideas more effectively so that the site’s visitors would not only get that message as well, but find it much easier to use the website to make their booking.
After sitting down and discussing next steps, we identified the areas to improve. This meant going back to basics to identify their target visitor and figure out what SkydiveCentralNC.com needed to provide those people in order to convince them to book a skydive.
When you have the type of business where people are literally putting their lives in your hands, you can imagine that potential customers will be extra thorough in their research before making a commitment. We both felt strongly that without creating a degree of trust and confidence through the website itself, they’d continue to see lackluster results. So we set out to accomplish that in several ways.
- New wireframes and user prototypes to ensure optimum usability.
- Give the site an updated look to improve perception of the company.
- Ensure the site provided optimized experience for mobile users (responsive design).
- Create more visible and consistent calls to action throughout the site.
- Refocus the home page content and layout to emphasize social proof: Draw from their many positive testimonials on social media and stress the company’s perfect review scores on both Facebook and Google.
- Strive to build a larger social media review footprint – specifically on Google – so that the rating score is displayed to searchers in Google’s results.
- Display certification crests in high visibility areas on the site to establish credibility and emphasize the team’s vast experience and qualifications.
- Use vibrant colors and images to convey excitement and fun while stressing safety, family atmosphere, location and affordability in the content.
- Develop specific content to preemptively overcome objections or perceived competitor advantages.
Once these goals were accomplished, our next challenge was figuring out ways to market the company more effectively online.
Kelvin felt that he was losing a lot of business to competitors who were offering discounted jumps on Groupon. We agreed that a great strategy would be to create a new landing page advertising how Skydive Central NC will match competitor’s Groupons to draw in searchers looking for competitor discounts. We created a corresponding Google AdWords campaign with that focus further augment the campaign that turned out very successful.
I’m very proud of how the new website has come together. Not only do the bright and vivid visuals convey the fun and exhilaration customers can expect, but Skydive Central NC has enjoyed huge improvements across the board:
- Google ranking now in top five results for various high quality, relevant search terms in the target geographical areas.
- 600% increase in web traffic year over year. Previous site had been generating 5000+/- visitors. In the year since, the site has been enjoying 30,000+ visitors.
- Most importantly, a sizable increase in new customers.
When visitors come to the Skydive Central NC website, they now have the confidence and the information they need to make the leap (pardon the pun) from visitor to customer. If you’re a local in the market for the thrill of the a lifetime with a great skydive operator who treats everyone like family, book your adventure today!