Project Overview

SEOpal provides small businesses and agencies alike with real-time updates regarding changes to do with their website’s online presence, as well as information regarding various SEO-related issues and how they can fix them. Having noticed a growing interest for self-service SEO tools in the market , we felt we needed to capitalise and develop a tool of our own that could stand out amongst the rest. This project covers the product process from its conception, through to its development and initial launch.

Role
Product Manager, UX/UI Designer

The Problem

How can small businesses remain informed about changes to their website’s SEO performance, so that they can quickly identify where and how they can improve their business’ online presence?

Market Research

In conversation with various existing Insites clients, it became abundantly clear that problems had arose around keeping SMB customers “up to date” with the SEO changes they were making to their websites. At present, it wasn’t particularly easy for our clients to keep SMBs informed around all the good they were doing for them, which was frustrating for our clients as they wanted to do a better job in “proving the value” to their SMBs. On the flip side, it was equally frustrating for SMBs themselves, who often felt in the dark about how their SEO performance was progressing when in the hands of the agency.

With these two pressing issues from both the agency and the SMB, we knew that we had to produce a solution that equally suited both parties. Ultimately, it would be a win-win for both the reseller, and their SMB clients, who could stay in touch with the ongoing changes to their business’ online performance.

As we already had a free online tool for SMBs to directly receive an SEO report, known as Nibbler, we conducted a competitor analysis to see how it stacked up against various competitors in the space. We felt Nibbler was somewhat comparable to what we envisioned SEOpal being - direct to SMBs, and a summary of their SEO issues. Due to this similarity, we felt this was a valuable opportunity to assess what ground we had to make up in order to transform Nibbler into a strongly competitive product known as SEOpal.

From the analysis, it was clear that our existing free tool had a lot of ground to make up if it was to compete with others in the field. However, this was invaluable in influencing how we wanted to shape the future of our product, and forge a niche in the market that would set us apart from the rest.

Understanding the User

With the research we’d collected, we created personas which represented the distinct user segments we wanted to target with this product. This practice allowed us to empathise with our prospective users, and helped inspire use in developing a user-centred solution that matched our product vision.

We also felt ready to start ideating possible solutions, and envisioning what a better experience for our users would look like, so we created user journeys to help map out this experience. Here’s an example of a user persona and user journey we crafted, representing the SMB customer segment.

With this new and improved user journey, we wanted to provide small businesses with not just an SEO report, but the opportunity to receive ongoing notifications concerning their business performance and website rankings. It was vital for us that we provided users with recurring value, rather than a one-off report, as this would prove instrumental in greatly improving user retention and conversion rates.

Vision & Strategy

With SEOpal, we set out a vision to create a flexible, multi-faceted tool that could suit all of DIY, DIFM & DIWM models. From our research, we knew that there was an audience in each of these markets, and so our strategy revolved around creating a tool that could suit the needs of each of these audiences.

In the wider landscape of our company, Insites, we also envisioned SEOpal being the final phase of a 4-step process which would complete the customer journey between an SMB and a digital marketing agency. We knew this was particularly important to existing agency clients of ours, who had expressed a need to keep their SMBs engaged in their services beyond the initial SEO report provided to them. As an agency reselling this product to their SMBs, there was also a major incentive from sales teams to use this tool as an opportunity to upsell any products & services that an SMB currently hadn’t purchased.

As part of our strategy, we outlined the core challenges we faced in getting this product off the ground, and accompanied these challenges with key initiatives we would take in order to overcome them. These challenges and initiatives largely involved how we would appeal to each and all of the customer segments we wanted using our product. Here is a brief representation of one of the key challenges and initiatives we outlined.

Product Launch

To effectively bring SEOpal to the market, we first wanted to have SMBs using it through a beta phase, as well as have agencies use it to understand both perspectives of our target customers. To achieve this, we built a website in which we asked users to join our waiting list. We utilised our Nibbler traffic as a lead generation tool to feed SMBs into the new SEOpal website, as we knew this was a reliable source of leads suited to using SEOpal.

On top of this, we pilot tested the platform with one of our key prospective stakeholders, so they could onboard a select group of test users, and get a feel for the platform as an agency.

We started by launching a beta, in which we asked users to join our waiting list through our website. With this launch, we sent users a survey after one week of signing up, to obtain their feedback and make iterations to the platform. It was important for us to get this user feedback as soon as possible, so we could make quick progression towards achieving product-market fit while holding talks with various prospective stakeholders.

From the survey we distributed, we received some insightful results that reflected a positive overall user experience, and some key takeaways that influenced us in how we shaped specific areas of the product.

In assessing this quantitative data, we wanted to use these statistics as benchmarks to improve upon. For us, these pieces of data represent key indications of active and effective usage - it’s vital that users understand and digest the information provided to them around SEO, and just as important for them to follow this up with meaningful action.