Seomonitor had four research tools which were external, some where free and some were only available to paid users. The first thing I did was do a UX Audit to understand the concerns with the current tools and how it can be optimised. These were the problem identified.

The job to be done was to help SEO professionals find new keyword ideas by searching for a topic, domain or URL. The main goal was to help SEO professionals find these keywords fast.
A typical user works with 5000 keywords, so everything should be fast and efficient. The team considered the following actionable metrics during the design process;

The job to be done was to help SEO professionals research and experiment new keyword ideas to better understand their impact and add the relevant ones to their campaign rank tracking. Keyword Research provides monthly search volume and ranking data insights for the keywords. This product is a light-weight of our Rank Tracker which provide daily search volume and ranking data insights. The team considered the following actionable metrics during the design process;

The onboarding experience is a critical first step in ensuring users find value in our research tool. Initially, we faced challenges with a 35% onboarding completion rate and high drop-off. Users reported difficulty understanding how to set up their first project, resulting in lower activation rates.

To address this, I streamlined the onboarding flow by introducing a simplified step-by-step process with visual cues, and descriptive copy. Additionally, I added a ‘Quick Start Guide’ to help users achieve their first milestone faster. User feedback highlighted the ease of the new process, with 90% rating the onboarding experience as very intuitive.

Discussing systematic approaches with engineers for a better experience. Had regular syncs with the front-end engineers about highlighting systematic patterns as it would reduce the time spent on creating components pixel by pixel, as this is a light-weight of an existing product. This made my design process faster and also made development faster for the engineers.

Experimented with simple layouts in alignment with the current visual language of the application as well as other directions which were not systematic. One thing that made the design process faster was leveraging existing components from the existing in-App products, to design systematically. The team had several demo sessions with stakeholders to review and rapidly iterate. The most challenging part of the process were the constraints as we were building for a data intensive application and this required a continuous cycle of iteration. One thing that helped was the daily syncs with the team for status update, to constantly be aligned.


After several months of collaboration, research, testing and iteration, the research team was ready to ship the new and simpler SEO research experience. But, because we were working on a product that would have costly implications for both our business and that of the customers, we knew shipping a complete product might lead to disaster. We looked at our options and data and decided on users who were still using the deprecated keyword research. We needed to target them to give us valuable feedback in order to make improvements, catch bugs, and ship incomplete features without completely disastrous effects.

Early signals were promising: Users liked that they were able to discover keyword ideas in the application, navigate to other products of the application, all from a single interface.