Pinbot

Better visibility

In Tri-City, aglomeration of three cities based next to the northern coast of Poland, there are many local businesses who want to gain new clients especially in the holiday seasons.

Pinbot is a website offering local businesses help with their SEO and better visibility in the sea full of fishes.

The beginnings

My client offers services dealing with SEO, i.e. the optimisation of pages taking into account the search components of Google's web browser. Its services include various activities for improving and managing the Google My Company profile.

During our first meeting, I gained knowledge how the world of SEO works and what the market situation is in the city where the client works. My client is a freelancer collaborating with several local businesses offering gastronomic, touristic and general services. Many of his clients were unaware of the importance of positioning their business. His main aim was to show his offering helping local businesses to reach more customers.

SEO is a not common knowledge

When looking for new services or checking out a company, we usually use several sources, both online and offline. One of the most common and trusted ways is to use Google's search engine. The website offers and is constantly improving the Google My Business tool, which plays a significant role in SEO by providing current information about a company, showcasing services, location on a map and managing reviews, among other things. As many as 50% of customers trust online reviews as much as referrals from loved ones, and 81% of them read reviews on Google.

After consultation and desk-research, a hypothesis was hatched that not many small business entrepreneurs know of the existence of SEO let alone its importance.

Hypothesis: Local businesses do not know what SEO is and how it affects their business

Aim: To create a website that reaches out to customers and offers them solutions for better visibility in Google search.

Helping out

Drawing the inspiration from others I relied on a national and global competitive analysis, including both large companies offering many solutions beyond SEO and smaller national businesses. The analysis included Whitespark, Brightlocal, Zgred, Visible and Localiq. Each company was examined against client guidelines, which can be seen in the graphic below

Through the analysis we drew inspiration and ideas for our product, including:

• FAQ section at the end of the page
• Free audit option with good explanation what it is and what benefits it gives
• Pricing options but considering personalised pricing after consultation
• Education resources (articles, blog)
• Chatbox
• Link generator
• Price converter

The inisight helped with finding solutions that could easily help and educate business owners.

Meeting points

After gathering SEO tips and knowledge, I moved on to building a Customer Journey Map based on client collaboration and customer experience. The most important thing at this stage was to establish touch points and encourage the client to take advantage of a free audit of their business so that they would consider further collaboration and convert one of Pinbot's offers.

How do we make it work

In the ideation process, we focused on the structure of the site and content through brainstorming. While looking for a solution for your local business it’s important to have delivered easy solutions. We developed the idea of a free Google My Business Profile audit in preparation for further delineating the path of the process, developed FAQs for the subpages and cut down on the idea of effectively showing the offer in an understandable and accessible way.

In addition, we tackled the marketing side by developing initial ideas for customer loyalty.

The main aim was to come up with a clear structure for the website with easy and understandable language providing the offer for clients who didn’t have much experience with SEO before.

User Flow

To get a good idea of the layout of the page and the positioning of the most important elements, I created a User Flow, which can be found below. It contains the general layout of the page, detailing the free audit trail.

The first glance

In the modeling stage first sketches started. For the testing I prepared wireframes that were discussed with the client.

After approving of the sketches, I focused on the visual design. My client’s preference was my guide to come up with a friendly, easy to read typography and matching colours.

Easy navigation and friendly approach

After sketching we tried out our website. Testing was conducted on two people face to face. For our test we made sure to choose people who had a little knowledge of what local SEO was but were willing to learn. In the scenario, they imagined themselves to be owners of a small cafe in Gdańsk whose business wasn't prospering and wanted to improve their visibility in internet. Our emphasis on the website was a clear, easy promotion of services. Participants confirmed that they had very small problems with finding the information they needed, they declared to understand each section presented on the website. A problem occured on section dedicated to 'Free audit' where after choosing the option 'Can't seem to find my business, check here' they couldn't go back to the search engine after reading the cues. For that matter I included a button returning to the previous search.

Bright future

My client’s preference was my guide to come up with an easy to read but bold typography and matching colors for the visual look of his service. We established a color green as it brings friendliness and encourages growth in hope it invites business owners to take a closer look at their work’s prosperity and goals.

More possibilities

The initial work on the website was finished as my client was content with having his service presented online. Although this process of our collaboration was closed, the new door opened and we discussed further plans that include projecting a mobile application of Pinbot with an account access for the customers who chose long term offer. The plan is to create a chart dashboard with all business informations and option for owners of multiple business to manage their raports on how their businesses prosper.