9 Quick Tips for a Struggling Website: Chris Lalor Case Study (And How He Increased His Traffic by 99% in 2 Months)
Chris Lalor is a life insurance agent who works from his home office in New Jersey.
… laid back, takes his time with clients, no B.S., and honest as the day is long. The type of guy you would want helping your own parents with an insurance purchase.
For many years, he helped me sell my leads generated on my sites, and did a terrific job. Unfortunately, I had to send these leads elsewhere, but Chris and I remained friends, and I vowed to help him generate his own leads.
So, with little technical “know-how” and having never written an article in his life, Chris started his website, LifeInsuranceShoppingReviews.com in Oct. 2013.
He’s had his share of triumphs and struggles in the past 2 years, but just in the past 6 to 8 months, he’s started to see the needle move.
I thought you’d enjoy a quick review of his site, and what he’s done to begin producing leads.
Want to get started building a website and generating your own leads? Click here.
Website Overview and Results after 1 Year
Chris’s site offers reviews of life insurance agencies such as SelectQuote, as well as insurance carrier reviews. It’s a WordPress site built on the Thesis theme, and as you can see, he’s had a bit of design work done to it as well.
Chris is also using the Compulife quoter in his right sidebar throughout the site to capture leads.
Out the gate, Chris spent about 6 weeks adding content to the site. He didn’t, however, spend much time developing any backlinks.
Here are His Traffic Results from Oct 2013 to June 2014:
Ordinarily, if I saw 1200 visitors to a site, I would estimate that site would have produced around 60 leads, as most life insurance sites convert around 5%.
However, Chris didn’t see results like this. He posts his leads to VAMdB and calls from there. Here’s an email he sent me in July ’14 about his success to date.
… so not only was his site converting at less than the typical 5%, but of the leads he was getting, most were bogus or not leading to sales.
He quickly got frustrated and actually gave up on his site from around January ’14 to August ’14. He needed immediate results so he tried his luck with purchasing leads.
He even interviewed with SelectQuote in early September, the very agency he first reviewed on Life Insurance Shopping Reviews.
Here’s an email he sent me sharing his frustrations with lead purchasing:
Getting Back In Gear: A 60 Day Push
In early September I wrote Chris urging him to get back on the horse, and to make one more big push on the site and promised him that he wouldn’t ever regret it.
Here’s that email:
He agreed, and began posting again at an incredible pace. From Sept. 2014 to Nov. 2014, he authored over 20 posts.
He also:
- re-wrote his home page
- re-wrote his about page
- edited many other pages on his site, adding content, improving the copy and such
I also helped him change his quote form from saying Name, Phone, and Email were ‘optional’ to ‘required’, as I felt this was harming his conversion.
9 Simple Strategies for Writing and Backlinking:
In addition, Chris started implementing some backlinking strategies from Brian Dean over at Backlinko.com. I sent Chris the following email in Oct. 2014 pointing out 8 of the easiest backlinking tips from Brian Dean, as well as my content schedule suggestion:
Hey Chris,
You still need more links to your site.
What kind of backlinking have you tried? Just blog commenting?
If I were you, I would follow this backlink article: http://backlinko.com/17-untapped-backlink-sources
For the next couple weeks, try just posting a couple articles per week but spend the majority of your time following this article and getting some easy, high powered links.
The easiest ones you can quickly grab links from are #1 (just get about 3 links, no more), #2, #4, #6 (you should only have a few of these, don’t overdo these), #9 (this is easy and will also give you feedback for conversion), #11, #13 (I haven’t tried this one but it looks simple and fast), #17 (did you already do this?)
Chris got to work on these 8 “untapped” backlink sources and between that and his additional content he wrote, he saw immediate results.
99% Increase in Traffic in 2 Months!
Prior to his big push, Chris averaged 331 visitors per month in July and August 2014. After his work in Sept. and Oct. though, he averaged 659 visitors per month in Oct and November 2014… a 99% increase in traffic!
How is Chris’ Site Doing Now?
Chris still has a ways to go, but as of the time of this writing (May 2015) he is now consistently getting 1500 to 1700 visitors per month and is generating about 70 to 90 leads per month. He’s writing new business from the site consistently now, and doesn’t have to depend 100% on purchasing leads.
Here’s a shot of his traffic from Oct. 2014 to Mar. 2015:
I want to reiterate that Chris is not very technical. When I approached him about starting a website and writing articles, he was very skeptical about his ability. He’s sort of an “email only” type of internet user. But I’m stoked for Chris that he expanded his skill set, put in the work, and is on his way to never having to prospect for new business again.
If you don’t know Chris, I highly recommend you visit him at LifeInsuranceShoppingReviews.com, and leave him a comment on one of his posts. Tell him I said hello and to keep up the good work.
Want to get started building a website and generating your own leads? Click here.
