Building Trust in the Marketplace

The IABBB came to us to help them identify the root cause of declining site traffic, and develop a strategy and implementation plan to reverse this trend.

At the start of the project, traffic to bbb.org had dipped to an all-time low, with an average monthly unique session total that was roughly 50% lower than their previous high point.

Since 2015, we have been a trusted partner of the IABBB. In this time, we have worked with their team to modernize the brand across digital touchpoints, streamline experiences, and create an organically optimized website that meets the unique needs of each individual BBB while curating an improved user experience.

To kick off the engagement, we performed a comprehensive website analysis to determine the root cause(s) of declining site traffic and distilled our findings into six main issues:

1. Site Architecture & URL Structure
2. User Experience (UX)
3. Content Strategy & Duplicate Content Issues
4. Bad Link & Poor Link Quality Issues
5. Country Domains, Localization & Language Support
6. Brand Authority & Awareness

As a result, we recommended BBB should consolidate the existing 103 unique websites (one for each BBB territory) into a single North American website, with localization and unique content to support each individual BBB along with an enhanced user experience.

To ensure the consolidated website was successful, we had to focus on two primary elements—SEO and user experience. Our team leveraged an array of organic optimization best practices and techniques to maximize ranking potential and visibility for relevant search queries. Additionally, we knew we needed more information to craft an optimal user experience for BBB’s target audience of both businesses and consumers.

Research Modalities

To ensure we had the right information for the website update and redesign, our team leveraged the following research modalities to gather data:

• Intercept surveys (existing site).
• Analyzed business and consumer surveys.
• Reviewed website feedback submissions and chat logs.
• Conducted strategy sessions and interviews with key stakeholders.
• Competitive analysis of competitor and analogous sites.
• One-on-one interviews.
• Task-based user tests (existing design and new site prototypes).
• Collaborative design workshops.

This additional research allowed us to develop actionable business and consumer personas, user journeys, and empathy maps. These armed the team with the necessary perspective to solve the user experience issues on the site. We then developed the business strategy and functional requirements for the new design.

Focus on People

With the necessary research in hand, we developed a new site architecture plan and began working on the initial structural wireframes and functional prototypes. Next, we created over 300 high-fidelity designs for mobile and desktop devices built on top of a well-organized, fully documented pattern library to promote brand consistency.

We made sure to incorporate SEO best practices as we developed the website architecture, website requirements, and designs. This effort was supported by a comprehensive content strategy backed by thorough keyword and competitive research.

Throughout this project, we provided strategic consulting and successfully solved complex business problems for the BBB organization, including:

• An analysis of single vs. multi-location brand data, how to best collect and organize the data on the backend and present it on the frontend.
• Research-backed opinions on the overall direction of BBB and its ideal position in the marketplace.
• Strategic recommendations to attract a new generation of consumers with a different perspective of the BBB brand than previous generations
• Data management strategy and planning.
• Content management strategy, planning, and development.
• A complete overhaul of the existing advertising platform to transition to a more modern, flexible, and profitable advertising management system.
• Multiple analyses on the discrepancy between various “trust-factors” on BBB profiles.
• An analysis of all possible geolocation use cases and recommendations for handling each.
• A comprehensive chat strategy to aid in creating the best user experience for businesses and consumers.

By August of 2018, we saw year-over-year (YoY) increases of 33% in website sessions, 35% increase in website users, 53% increase in page views, and 30% increase in unique page views. Additional metrics illuminate further successes, such as the increase of repeat visitors and the number of pages indexed.

Projected Future Results

Traffic continues to grow as new sections of the website design are released and the data architecture and supporting business systems are continually enhanced. In the next 4-5 years, we expect to see a nearly 10× increase in total sessions.