Designing for SEO
Role: Product designer
Timeline: 12 weeks (& ongoing)
Tools: Figma, Adobe
Team: 1 product manager & growth lead, 2 engineers
Company: Lessonpal
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is crucial for small businesses like Lessonpal to drive organic traffic to the platform.
As a product designer working on this project, my goal was to make design enhancements to Lessonpal to make it more discoverable and user-friendly.
Initial concept and wireframes
I sketched some quick wireframes on my iPad, capturing the sections that I recommended we include on our page. Once the team was in alignment, I shared these wireframes with our engineering team so that they could prepare the backend.
Designs & Iterations
I worked with our product manager and growth lead to come up with SEO optimized content (utilizing the correct keywords) to include on the page. I then designed the first version of our subject landing page. We used this as the template for all subjects on Lessonpal.
Iteration 1:
We were happy to see this version of our pages getting indexed, but unfortunately it wasn't up to the mark. We were seeing a 70% bounce rate, a 2% click-through rate from search results, and a 1 minute average time spent on the page.
I continued iterating on the designs to include dynamic content. I learned that dynamic content can help increase user engagement, freshness, and keyword variation, leading to improved search rankings and user experience. It also encourages longer visits, more shares, and better indexing which can help boost the overall page performance.
Iteration 2: With more dynamic content
The new iteration of the subject landing page along with efforts from our engineering team (to optimize the backend to improve loading times) led to a significant improvement on performance compared to the first version. Our bounce rate decreased to 50%, our click-through rate surged to 5%, and the average time spent on the page was now 3 minutes.
In addition to subject landing pages, I designed our sitemap and location, subject & location and tutoring jobs pages. As a team, we submitted 1.52 million pages to be indexed, out of which 1 million got indexed, significantly improving the organic traffic on our platform. Within the span of 4 months, our organic traffic increased 10x - From ~10 user sign ups per month, we were seeing ~100 sign ups per month.