Problem
The Mortgages Learning Center, Zillow's mortgages blog, had pretty severe usability issues. It had about 80 articles in just two categories, organized into no particular order. And there wasn't a way for customers to discover more content. The articles didn't link to one another, there wasn't a clear navigation, and it lacked suggestions for other relevant content.
The blog was also poorly designed. It was created with an internally created yet unmaintained CMS that required dev work to make any changes -- which hindered any work towards improving the content or design.
The articles had a good amount of organic traffic, but the bounce rate was ~80%. That meant that customers were not pleased with what they were finding in these articles.
Additionally, one of the main goals of these articles was to convert organic traffic into mortgages customers. Yet all of the articles had the same ad, which was not targeted to the specific readers of each article.
tl;dr: I had my work cut out for me.
Improving the Content
I collaborated with designers, an SEO manager, and developers to redesign the blog into a well-organized, on-brand Word Press site.
First, the content needed some love. I began by identifying missing topics by conducting a competitive analysis and considering high search volume long-tail keywords.
Then, I created a new taxonomy that organized content into 3 user personas and 9 categories that represent where the user is in her shopping process.
Next, I added custom tools, targeted ads and upsells for our products to each category and article. To the right is a glimpse of the massive Excel sheet that I used to identify which articles went in each category, and which upsells went to each article.
Finally, I edited all of the content, SEO-optimized the content using Optimize, interlinked all of the related articles, and hired a freelancer to create all of our missing topics.
Improving the Design
Next came the design phase. I worked with a UX designer and a WordPress development team to redesign the blog, which is now being used as a template for other content hubs across Zillow. I also came up with custom tools for our blog, such as the ability to create ads within WordPress and a rate table tool that uses our mortgage API to pull in the latest rates.
Building the site
I coordinated with a California-based WordPress dev team to build the new site. I provided direction and details they needed via documentation, Jira, virtual meetings, and countless Slack messages. In addition to the content and structure of the site, I also provided tracking details so we could measure metrics and SEO meta data.
Once the WordPress dev team finished coding our new site, it was time to port over the content which, unfortunately, was a manual task. At the time of launch the Mortgage Learning Center had over 100 articles, so I gathered a team of 10 volunteers from other teams to help out. I created a how-to doc that outlined the steps they needed to take to publish on WordPress, and provided a spreadsheet that indicated with upsells to assign to each article, which category each article belonged to, and more. We finished in a little over an hour, and my team mates thanked me for being so organized and making this tedious task very simple.
Results
The Mortgage Learning Center has more than 500,000 unique visits per month, it generates about $600,000 in revenue per year, and the current average bounce rate is ~30%.