Zest pillar page rebuild

The problem

Zest sells software for measuring employee engagement and social climate. Its main article about its social climate barometer, the "pillar" page that other content points to, was getting traffic but not converting. It sat at around position 12 in search results, and readers were not asking for demos.

Reading it, I found it had been written for search algorithms rather than for people. Readability was very low and the calls to action were aggressive: the main one, reserve a demo, was too strong for readers who were still learning about the topic.

What I did

1. Rewrote the article for readers. The aim was readable text that answers a reader's questions, instead of text written for search algorithms.
2. Softened the calls to action. The offer matched where the reader was, rather than asking for a demo straight away.
3. Built a free questionnaire generator. A small web tool that creates a social climate survey from a company's goals, built on Zest's own methodology. It gives the reader something useful before they are asked for anything.

Tools, and how they fit together

The article lives on Zest's own site. The questionnaire generator is a web tool I built in HTML, CSS and JavaScript and linked from the article.

Who I worked with

Zest's marketing team was the client. Zest's Head of Marketing, Sandrine Dervin, has given a written reference for my work (in French, on the home page).

Result

Search position rose from around 12 to 2. The page produced two demo requests in its first 30 days. For context, Zest's product costs roughly €10,000 a month.

Limits

Two demo requests is a small sample, and the page was changed in several ways at once (the rewrite, the softer calls to action and the generator), so the result cannot be credited to any one change. I did not run a controlled test.