Minuteman Press

Addressing the UX and SEO issues resulted in a 615%

increase in lead generation over a five-year period and a

64% increase in organic traffic.

Project Type

Website Redesign

Project Type

Printing

Minuteman Press of Lindenhurst website homepage on an iPad

The Problem

Minuteman Press of Lindenhurst needed to revamp their website. Minuteman Press International provides all of its franchisees with a generic website. The generic website that Minuteman Press International provided its Lindenhurst franchise with was filled with user-experience issues and very poor search engine optimization.

During the preliminary research and discovery phase, I conducted interviews with users, Minuteman's staff and primary stakeholders. These interviews lead to many discoveries that shaped the direction of the project. One of the biggest discoveries and challenge, was that I would have to use the same Firespring CMS that the website was currently using. Minuteman Press International, contracts Firespring to host and maintain all of their websites.

Firespring uses their own proprietary CMS that is antiquated and provides little customization. The lack of customization that the Firespring CMS provides the Minuteman Press franchisee led me to focus on the content itself verses altering the visual presentation of the website.

Old Minuteman Press products and services list

Content Audit

Diving deep into my audit of the existing website, I discovered entire sections of the website, with amazing and relevant content, which were either hidden from the user or were disabled by Minuteman Press International. Not only was their hidden or disabled content, but MMP International also created an entirely separate website called ShopMinuteman. The ShopMinuteman website showcased various unique products such as Promotional Products, Apparel, Pens, Bags and more. These products were not located on the main website and Minuteman Press of Lindenhurst had no way to edit its ShopMinuteman website.

Major Discovery

The other major discovery was that Minuteman Press International had not setup any interaction between its franchisee websites and Google. No Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Business Page and even more shocking no XML Sitemap or Robots.txt file. Luckily, I was able to convince Firespring to enable the XML Sitemap and Robots.txt file for the 900+ Minuteman Press franchisee websites (but sadly I was not able to convince them to create a 404 page).

Finally, there was no internal search feature within the Minuteman franchisee websites. After several phone calls with Firespring, it came to my attention that a search feature was created but never activated on the Minuteman franchisee websites. Fortunately, they decided to enable the search feature on all websites.

SEO Flaws

After utilizing the Screaming Frog SEO Spider software to conduct a content inventory and identify any SEO gaps, I decided to start revamping the Minuteman Press of Lindenhurst website by editing the product pages. I worked with the client to rewrite each product page and to create a new headline based on a keyword that was selected from our keyword research. Not only did I add an H1 tag to each page, not a single page had an H1 tag, but I also filled-out the title, meta description and social sharing tags for each page.

The dropdown menu was so long that the user had to scroll down to the bottom of the page to see all the products.

I decided to completely reformat the Products and Services page. The Products and Services page was just one long alphabetic list of products. With help from the client, I grouped all 43 products and services into seven categories. I then created a grid layout that displayed the product or service’s name and a thumbnail image, which help the user to identify the product or service they were looking for. For products with items, just as bags or pens, I created new sub- products pages. These new sub-product pages contained a thumbnail image, product name, short description and a get started link.

I streamline the main header navigation by removing irrelevant generic pages such as Documents Library, Departments, Employment Opportunities and Equipment. I also dramatically changed the Products and Services main header navigation sub-menu from an extremely long list of thirty-two products, which was so long that the user had to scroll down to the bottom of the page to see all the products, to a list of seven categories that I previously utilized on the Products and Services page.

New Minuteman Press of Lindenhurst design templates page

Biggest Success

By far the most successful section of the website, and the biggest driver of organic traffic, has been the News and Articles blog. While conducting the content inventory, I discovered an entire blog section that was hidden by Minuteman Press International. Minuteman Press International posts a new article every week, but didn’t allow the user to see the post. Then, after a period of time, they deleted the oldest post from the website. I decided to create an entirely new News and Articles blog using these posts and formatted them with a more visually pleasing semantic presentation. I then created a new section of the homepage to showcase the two latest blog posts.