Moz Link Explorer

Link building is an area of search engine optimization that involves developing a strategy and managing how other URLs link to your website. This is a common area to marketers who manage SEO strategy for their companies or clients. Moz Pro was one of the first to offer a solution for this area of SEO called Open Site Explorer. We were able to crawl the web for link data related to a given URL and provide users data on who links to their website, what links do competitors have, scores on their link strategy, spam links, and other important information related to link building strategy.

Team

Situation

While this product was revolutionary when it first hit the market, the tool itself didn’t go through any major changes after it’s release. We gained many competitors over time such as Ahrefs and SEMRush who offered similar products with larger data sets and fresh UI that made Open Site Explorer feel outdated. Our backend team was able to improve our data but we wanted to do more than that. Our goal was to build a better Link tool with a fresh and new UI that would win customers back to Moz.

Examples of competitors:

Tasks

Research

The first step in this project was to better understand our users. The project manager conducted user research to better understand a typical workflow for link builders. The participants in our studies had experience using Moz at some point of their career and were active in link building. The PM collected feedback and we worked together to explore ideas through low-fidelity wireframes. Keeping the wireframes at a low fidelity helped us focus more on the information architecture of how we presented the data. We placed the wireframes into a clickable prototype and presented them to users in a second round of user research to see how they would react to these ideas.

Build

After testing our first clickable prototype, we moved on to higher fidelity wireframes to explore the look and feel or specific features. We converted these wireframes into another clickable prototype to use in a third round of testing to see if participants could:

These wireframes would also serve as artifacts for our engineers to start implementing the new Link Explorer. 

Actions

We were close to launching the product when we decided to do one more round of testing. Rand, the founder of Moz and our main stakeholder invited the team to join him in meeting two agencies in San Diego who specialized in SEO strategy. I identified this opportunity to do more usability testing. I worked closely with the PM to create a usability script so we could measure success.

These sessions were deeply informative as seeing the participants use Link Explorer revealed that they struggled validating how our product could fit into their workflow. We captured issues our participants encountered and noted what workflows our participants mentioned were important. This experienced caused us to delay our launch by 2 months. 

Back in Seattle, I gathered the team to review the workflows we captured. We prioritized which workflows Link Explorer needed to accommodate before launch. We were able to use these workflows to identify recommendations to improve the product. 

Once these changes were made by our engineering team, we brought in 20 more participants into the Moz office from five different agencies to conduct a final round of usability studies. We measured success by making sure participants could complete the tasks that were based on the top workflows we identified.

Results

We continued making final improvements after conducting our final round of usability studies and did a wide release in April 2018. We had a successful launch and our metrics showed we won customers back.

My biggest takeaways from this project was showing our team the importance of testing and making sure user stories were defined more clearly earlier in the process.