The Client
Paychex provides solutions for payroll, human resource, and benefits outsourcing; its 12,000 employees serve more than half a million small- to medium-sized businesses nationwide.
The Situation
The team at Paychex was challenged to drive unprecedented growth in inbound payroll opportunities. It had been five years since paychex.com was redesigned; an updated website and a new CMS would allow the company to align with best practices in user experience design, SEO, conversion rate optimization, and personalization. To best scope the project, the team conducted an extensive round of interviews with key stakeholders, ranging from service to product marketing to IT and partnered with user research firm Rivet CX Group to conduct customer research and interviews.
The Challenge
Migrating the website and upgrading to a new CMS had to be carefully balanced with qualitative and quantitative data to ensure traffic – specifically organic traffic – and conversions did not decline. The team had to ensure the journey to this outcome was strategically planned and executed. With a key focus on the end-user experience, driving each new and repeat user to ultimately convert qualified leads and improve customer satisfaction.
The team also needed to work to achieve cross-functional alignment among its marketing, IT, sales and service colleagues and work through both resource constraints and timeline shifts. The project also represented a shift from the website being IT-owned within a hosted environment to a marketing-owned environment in the cloud.
The Solution
Following a review of seven leading content management systems against a matrix of more than 20 requirements that included a heavy emphasis on SEO, the team selected Drupal to power its content management and the Acquia Platform to provide an agile, best-in-class environment to support impactful, data-driven strategies for the new website. The development team can continuously deliver high-quality code with the Acquia Platform, and can more readily provide third-party vendors access to the code base and devops, something that previously would take months of facilitation through the IT department. Designers and writers also have access to a user-friendly platform to easily create and publish pages without taxing development resources.
The Results
The site launched following multiple rounds of quality assurance and testing. A phased rollout helped ensure a successful launch along with careful monitoring of SEO and site performance in collaboration with SEO agency, Outspoken Media. The launch helped improve improve site speed from an average of more than six seconds a page to under four seconds a page, which was done by taking advantage of various aspects of Drupal to simplify the delivery of the content/code on each template. SEO rankings achieved previous levels following an initial, short-lived dip. Year over year traffic increased by 113 percent, and organic traffic grew by 126 percent.