At the time, our lean design team consisted of just me and one developer, juggling multiple projects. Over six months, I spearheaded the design and delivery of a template library, handling project management, planning, scoping, and the launch of the MVP. Despite our small team, we set ambitious goals, so I collaborated regularly with George, my developer to manage estimates, scope adjustments, and achieve key milestones.
Without a performance marketers or content strategist to lean on, I also took on the task of developing and implementing a content and SEO strategy, consulting with Karbon’s VP of Marketing and VP of Design for guidance and feedback as required. Following the launch, I worked on platform enhancements, including integrating the platform with Karbon’s desktop app to improve cross-platform engagement.
During discovery, I learned that globally there are hundreds of thousands of different search queries containing terms like ‘monthly accounts template’ or ‘best practice bookkeeping process’ every single month. Karbon already had over 300 workflow templates providing exactly what our target audience searches for, so the potential to maximise SEO juice was enormous.
Not knowing a whole lot about SEO, I read up on some case studies where similar workflow tools had achieved success with a similar solution. A key part of what made my SEO strategy a success was deciding early to capitalise on organic search terms by creating page content structures that injected popular keywords.
I was headstrong that keywords must work in harmony with a clear hierarchy and useful copy. I chose to use popular category tags and template suggestions to inject additional keyword juice, whilst also creating useful browsing pathways—so the content is developed for both SEO and conversion.
To give an example of the impact, if you search the term ‘weekly reconciliation template’, it now ranks #1 on the first page of results. And this is just one template—now imagine the power that could be harnessed with over 300 templates and counting.
Another strategy I used to capitalise on organic search was to create template hub pages, which we termed ‘Template Collections’. I strategised with Karbon’s Head of Marketing to identify priority template groups—that is—the templates that best align with our ideal users, and the templates that get the most searches. This helped determine the highest priority types of templates to promote.
Instead of just relying on the individual template pages to rank in search results, we built collection pages that house the best templates available for that group or category. As a result, we had upwards of 20 landing pages that provide a massive amount of relevant and useful content and rank by the masses.
I took inspiration from popular app stores to create modular patterns and components optimised for scalability and discoverability. These can be stacked and interchanged to curate—and in some cases automate—new collection pages at scale.
With over 300 templates to sort through, this approach helps users find templates faster, as it clusters themed templates together, and creates streamlined browsing pathways by nesting collections within collections within collections.
To support the enormous content migration, I wrote content specs and guides to support the team responsible for uploading hundreds of templates and meta data to our CMS, to help maintain consistency and content quality across the site experience.
I was determined to get a superior product to market, but we bit off a lot, and being such a small team, I needed to shift goalposts and reduce scope along the way. Post-launch, I looped back to make many platform enhancements though, including reducing the time to bulk import templates into Karbon's app, from days to seconds.
Historically, uploading a template to Karbon was a painstakingly manual and time-consuming process. I collaborated with our product engineers to integrate the marketplace with Karbon so customers can freely flow between platforms.
This led to an instant influx of template imports, and an increase in the number of imports per session. Meaning customers are implementing more templates in their workflows and minimising churn, as the more workflows they have and use in Karbon the stickier they become.
