How to use your website to market your mobility service

Today, an online presence is essentially a required component of a successful business, and that includes mobility services. It provides a service with credibility, the opportunity to establish a compelling brand, a way to educate potential riders about the details of your service. It also provides a straightforward way to disseminate any apps or resources needed to use the service.

At Spare, it’s important to us to support partners in all facets of running a successful mobility service, and that includes marketing. In this blog post, we cover some of the key benefits and things to keep in mind when creating an effective mobility service website.

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Create focused service landing pages

A landing page is a web page that users can “land on” after clicking on a link in a newsletter, a social media post, or an advertisement. It’s typically a standalone, focused webpage that plays a specific goal within a marketing plan, whether that’s to capture leads through data collection or to encourage visitors to buy a product.

Whereas a homepage or other general web page may provide a more holistic view of a company and funnel users to various different parts of a site, a landing page is a one-way street, directing visitors to take a specific action.

When it comes to mobility service marketing, the goal of a landing page may be to get users to download an app, purchase a transit card, subscribe to a newsletter, or book a ride.

A comprehensive landing page should educate riders about the five Ws (and one H) of your service:

1. Who is the service for?
2. What kind of service is it?
3. When is the service available?
4. Where is the service available?
5. Why should people use your service?
6. How do riders access the service?

Once you have briefed visitors on the details of your service, you can prompt them towards the page’s goal via a Call to Action (CTA) — a signup button, a form to fill out, etc. We’ll talk more about CTAs in a moment, but first, let’s cover the basics of getting people to your website in the first place.

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Capture organic traffic with SEO

There are a few primary categories of website traffic:

• Paid: visitors generated via paid ads.
• Direct: visitors who come to the webpage by typing in the URL.
• Referral: visitors who get to your page by clicking on a link on another website.
• Social: visitors that arrive through a social media platform.
• Organic/Search: visitors who find your page by using a search engine.

Strong organic traffic is generally earned by achieving a high ranking on search engines such as Google or Yahoo Seach. If you run a ride sharing startup in Nashville and your company is in the top ten results of the search terms “Nashville rides,” you’re likely to receive high numbers of organic traffic. This is very valuable because it’s unpaid and also generally results in consistently targeted traffic, including people who are already interested in your service.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process by which companies increase their web pages’ ranking on search engines, boosting their organic traffic. It’s a fine balance of meeting human user needs while also satisfying the search engine algorithms that determine the value of a webpage.

Here are a few SEO tips to boost mobility service website’s organic traffic:

• Keep an eye on loading time. If your page is very slow to load, you are likely to lose points with both people and Google.
• Publish high-quality content. Blog posts tend to perform better in terms of SEO than landing pages because they have the space to provide more in-depth content on a specific topic. But by consistently publishing content that targets relevant keywords, you can direct visitors to landing pages via your blog post’s organic traffic.
• Use headings wisely. Headings not only improve readability by breaking up content into clear sections, but they also help signal your page’s topic to Google.
• Provide outbound links. By pointing to external websites, outbound links can give your content credibility by incorporating trustworthy, legitimate sources.
• Build a profile of inbound links. When another website links to yours, it doesn’t only generate referral traffic, it also improves the credibility of your site by signaling to search engines that other sites trust yours.
• Keep your site relevant. Search engines won’t prioritize content that seems out of date. Updating your website every so often, publishing new content, and ensuring your site is free from broken links are all ways to ensure your site stays fresh in the eyes of Google.
  

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Boost traffic with pay-per-click advertising

While developing streams of organic traffic is a valuable part of website marketing, most companies can’t rely on SEO alone. Pay-per-click (PPC) is a form of online marketing in which advertisers pay a set fee for each click that one of their ads receives. The most common type of PPC is paid search advertising, where ads appear in the results of search engines when relevant keywords are searched.

PPC ads are often a great solution for generating paid traffic because you retain control over how much you’re willing to spend, they produce results much faster than organic traffic (it can take months to rank for competitive keywords), and you can target them at specific groups of people who will likely be interested in and benefit from your mobility service.

Mobility services that decide to employ PPC should also AB test their ad images and copy in order to continuously improve their click-through rates.

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Improve your website’s conversion rates

Establishing consistent, strong traffic to a website is only half the battle. Encouraging people to take meaningful action once they get there is the other half, and that’s where conversion rate optimization (CRO) comes in. Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who take a specific action on a webpage. It’s an important factor to measure as a low conversion rate can result in lost leads and revenue and high acquisition costs.

Measuring CRO

So how do you know whether a webpage has strong or weak conversation rates? Start by defining exactly what the page is meant to do. If it’s to download an app, then the conversation rate will be:

The total number of app downloads, divided by the total number of visitors to the page, multiplied by 100.

Once you’ve defined your goal and conversion rate, you can get to work on CRO. While this process will vary from service to service, a few CRO best practices include:

• Clearly state value proposition. This comes back to the “why” of your service: why will it add value to a person’s life to rely on your mobility service?
• Craft a strong CTA. Whether your page has one or multiple goals, a visitor’s next steps should be immediately clear. If they want to learn more about your service, where do they go? If they want to use your services, how do they do that? Ensure your page presents a clear path forward.
• Eliminate friction. If you want visitors to sign up for something, keep the form as short, concise, and relevant as possible. Don’t ask for information you don’t absolutely need.
• Display social proof. How many people are using your service? What do they have to say about it? Social proof can include reviews or media coverage and instills a sense of trust in potential riders by tapping into the natural human desire to follow the actions of our peers.

The best way to determine how to improve conversation rates is through AB testing various variables on your home page. For instance, test CTA A against CTA B for a set period of time. If there’s a clear winner, you can analyze why one CTA outperformed the other. If not, you can determine what isn’t working and begin a new test.

While we strongly encourage mobility service providers to not overlook the importance of an online presence, you don’t need one to launch your service on the Spare Rider app, an easy solution that lets your riders book and track rides. To find out more about how Spare can help your mobility service, drop us a line at [email protected].

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