When we inherited the U.S. Army’s recruiting site, goarmy.com, the site had grown wild—massive, duplicative, and unfocused. Content reflected the Army’s priorities, not those of recruits.
Goarmy.com hadn’t seen significant updates in over a decade, and that included SEO strategy. The site was built around dated principles of separate pages for each keyword, rather than deep pages that covered topics in depth.
This, combined with a tendency to use the site as a “dumping ground” for content from various constituencies, led to a site with over 10,000 pages that provided little actual information about joining the Army.
Thus, Battle of the Bulge was born—a massive one-year project to streamline the GoArmy experience and connect prospects with the information they were seeking. The client’s primary goal: improving qualified traffic to the site and improving conversions. Our goal: building a website that owned the conversation around joining the Army.
Our goal was to create a website that spoke to prospects’ needs and concerns about joining the Army and to expose more Gen Z audiences to the variety of careers available to them should they join.
In interviews with the target Gen Z audience, we found that the site was not meeting their needs. This generation is accustomed to instant access to information. The Army site was slow, and scattered taxonomy made information difficult to find.
Gen Z is mobile, but the site wasn’t ready for modern search. Pages weren’t mobile friendly, though 80% of traffic was mobile. Separate “m.” pages created bloat, an inconsistent user experience, and a website that wasn’t friendly to search engines.
Gen Z prioritizes the real. This generation watches real people all day—playing video games, shopping, trying on clothes—real is what’s in. They want to know what Army life is really like: Will I make friends? Will I be deployed? Can someone like me make it in the Army?
GoArmy was not being real. When questions were addressed, it was with sales-like “Talk to a recruiter for information” non-answers.
We ran “proof of concept” tests, adding FAQs and schema to a “Requirements to Join” page. Our team pulled the FAQs from People Also Ask and added them to an existing page, along with honest answers from Army experts. Just this step was a leap of faith from Army leaders, who had to become comfortable with answering eligibility questions that can field ambiguous answers.
Shortly after the update, the “Requirements to Join” page shot up to the most visited page on the site from search, a position it maintained until redesign.
We also had to communicate the necessity of speed and mobile friendliness. We sped select pages up with AMP and tested responsive pages. Even the smallest changes delivered tremendous results, convincing the client to sign off on a revamp.
Nearly 91% of content gets no traffic from Google. We saw this firsthand with GoArmy. Bloated taxonomy, lack of sitemaps, and slow page loads meant search crawlers couldn’t find valuable pages on the site, leaving ample content that had never been crawled or indexed.
With two SEO strategists and two content strategists, we created plan to change all of that.
We began consolidating “thin” content into information-rich pages that covered each facet of joining the Army and fully answered prospects’ questions about the process.
Search data, analytics, and user interviews helped us recognize content resonating with target audiences and the gaps we needed to fill. Some content, like pages about weapons and vehicles, drew in traffic but did not convert, primarily appealing to military fans instead of prospects. Drawing traffic was not enough—anything that did not advance recruiting had to go.
The rewritten, consolidated, and technically upgraded site rolled out in segments, with the final segment going live in March 2023.
We reduced the site by 95%, down to 445 URLs. This caused consternation to clients, as they feared that less is less and that they would lose traffic and rankings by eliminating pages.
Instead, the opposite happened. As we consolidated and prioritized content that answered user questions, Google began recognizing GoArmy as an expert on the brand. This was shown in a 16% YoY increase in captured answer boxes. The content on GoArmy is now more findable on Google and has increased keywords in the top three positions by 27% YoY.
Improved site reputation has carried over to the new face of search, as the site is capturing 78% of available AI Overview results for top keywords.
Most importantly, the slimmed-down site drives more traffic and conversions. Organic visits surged 28% YoY (7.6M vs. 6.1M), while conversions increased by 48% YoY (130K vs. 88K). Both were well above our goals, showing the pent-up demand that the site had not been meeting and our skill at addressing audience needs.
Through a less-is-more strategy, we focused the Army on the content that matters to their prospects and created a recruiting website that performs beyond expectations.
