Moz Keyword Clusters

Background

Keywords are another important area of SEO strategy that involves an understanding of how people search for your business, product or website. Marketers who specialize in Search Engine Optimization want to know what keywords they can associate with their business to increase their chances of being found on search engines.

Situation

Our customer success team provided us feedback that users had a hard time organizing their keywords in their campaigns. Campaigns were projects within Moz Pro that allowed customers to track their SEO strategy over time using the various research tools in Moz Pro. When it came to keywords in campaigns:

Users could track their keywords within their campaigns.
An existing labeling system was in place, but our product did not provide an easy path to utilize labels for organization.

The big question we had was how could we improve the process for organizing keywords in campaigns? The first area we decided to focus on was the campaign creation workflow and the process for inputting keywords to track in your campaign.

The old campaign process provided a large group of keyword suggestions based on the URL the user enters. Users could continue with these suggestions, delete them and input their own keywords, or skip this step altogether. There was an opportunity to add a label, but the label is applied to all of the keywords.

According to the feedback from our customer success team, users typically had different groups of keywords and wanted a form of organization to track these different groups. Some users resorted to creating multiple projects tracking the same URL with different keywords to see how the groups performed. Having an ability to organize keywords into groups could allow users to track performance of different keywords.

A user scenario example:

You are a marketer working at The Home Depot and you want to see how keywords for tools compare to keywords for paint.

Tasks

We decided to approach this project in a lean manner by bringing together product, engineering, design, and a member of the customer success team into a room to collaborate over this problem. Our session involved reviewing existing data, sketching, group discussions regarding our constraints, and developing a potential solution to explore. The meeting concluded with a clear user flow of refining our campaign flow’s step for adding keywords.

We had four defined user stories from our collaboration session and I was tasked to build wireframes to conduct user research. Our customer success manager arranged quick interview sessions with 15 participants to measure the reaction to the workflow of providing keyword suggestions in an organized manner. We got positive feedback and discovered correct terminology. Originally we had assumed the term, ‘Topics’ was a way to label the group of keywords, but the actual industry term for grouping similar keywords is “clusters.”

After doing research, we expanded on the user stories. We went from 4 to 16 user stories which expanded on functionality. I took these user stories and built a customer journey map to visualize the workflow. Users would enter a term they want keywords for which would provide cluster labels. After selecting cluster labels, each label would have a series of suggestions that relate to the cluster. Customer have the option to also manually enter their own keywords within the label group.

I aligned the user stories to the user flow to make sure everything was addressed. This helped us see potential edge cases and ask additional technical questions.

After the user flow and customer journey map, I built out the second iteration of wireframes. These wireframes were fleshed out to explore the different edge cases discovered in the customer journey map. These wireframes would also be used by the engineering team to implement a working prototype to test with users.

Actions

I led a usability study with the prototype and set goals to make sure users understood:

what keyword clusters were
the process for selecting keyword clusters
How to select or enter keywords for each cluster
Identify any weird issues

I conducted 8 usability sessions with 1 pilot study and 7 Moz Pro Users. All had varied experience using Moz Pro and created at least one campaign. All participants were asked to complete a series of tasks within four scenarios and we measured success based on the completion of the tasks. We had a very positive outcome and great feedback on what improvements we could make before our final release.

Results

I presented my findings and recommendations to the engineering team and the prioritized updates prior to release. We tracked success by looking at how many cluster labels users create, if users delete their campaigns with cluster labels and any additional feedback we collect from the success team.

This was my last feature I released at Moz!

Takeaways:

I really enjoyed starting this project with a lean approach as it allowed me to integrate myself early in the project definition and strategy phase.
Creating the customer journey map was another success for me as it helped me see edge cases early on and make sure all user stories were addressed.
Lastly, the usability sessions for this project validated testing for future projects as we had great feedback on testing a relatively complex feature.

Things I would do differently:

Have more weekly meetings during the implementation phase to have more consistent communication in person with the developers.
Start envisioning how we can better structure labels within user campaigns.
Currently users can filter these labels in tables but we don’t provide opportunities to visualize the data.

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