Case study: Optimisation ‘cheap train tickets’ NS (Dutch National Railways)
I’m Kimberley, content manager at Crossphase. Over the past six months, I worked on the ‘cheap train tickets’ project at NS (Dutch National Railways). I helped them:
You’re an involved team member, with good communication- and planning skills. What you deliver (for example, a site analysis) is thorough and pleasant, because you also give advice.
The old page about cheap train tickets mostly contained expensive destinations. It also didn’t have discounts and promotions, whereas research showed that the customer expects those to be on the page. And there was a lot to gain in terms of search engine optimisation: the page and the meta tags weren’t optimised for the key words the audience used.
Together with my colleague, a data marketeer from Artefact, I made a roadmap to optimise the page. We used the data to map the improvements to give this page a boost.
It all started with gathering the data to get an overview of the current situation. What are the current numbers of the page? What is the SEO-structure and what metadata are we using? But also: what is our competition doing?
After we analysed the performance of the page, we could make the first improvements. We started by showing promotions and discounts that were relevant to the customer. Afterwards, we changed the SEO structure and the meta description.
After publishing the improved page, we had another look at the Google Analytics data. Did the changes have a measurable positive impact? Absolutely: the amount of visitors rose and the page got a higher ranking in Google.
A big success, but we can always do better. That’s why we also experimented with a new design for the page. Using our earlier results, I thought about the layout and delivered the copy and visuals.
Sadly, it wasn’t possible to build all the improvements in the CMS (Hippo), that is why the developers built a new design outside of this system. This version functions as an A/B test next to the new and improved page, to decide which page works best. NS will choose either the optimised page or the new design.
And after that? It became essential to keep analysing the page ‘cheap train tickets. And to update it with relevant content when visitors asked for it. Because a page is never finished!
