Is it
possible to become one of the go-to websites for your industry within a mere 7 months? It is if you’re Adobe XD, and you strategically develop an extensive SEO and content strategy prior to its
launch.
As one of the newer design tools in the UI/UX design space, Adobe XD needed to do some investigating before launching Adobe XD Ideas. They conducted
in-depth keyword, competitive and content gap research that enabled them to prioritize the topics that UX/UI design professionals were searching for online. They merged and updated existing Adobe
assets; while focusing on developing thought leadership content directed at UX/UI design professionals, in order to increase Adobe XD’s authority and expertise in the field.
For maximum impact, they optimized SEO for page speed, schema markup and internal linking. And most notably were able to connect with and garner extensive organic reach from established
authorities in the highly competitive niche community. All of this, along with a fully integrated promotion strategy, resulted in a campaign that drove more than 25K downloads and increased
traffic, keyword rankings and brand awareness within the first 7 months of the Adobe XD Ideas launch.
Challenge
Adobe XD sought to become a trusted
authority in UX/UI design by creating a digital landscape that would educate and motivate designers. This would prove to be a daunting project since it is a highly competitive marketplace, and even
though Adobe is an established brand in the industry, the Adobe XD platform was still considered a challenger brand in the UX/UI space. It faced formidable competition with InvisionApp, Sketch and
Figma; three of the leading digital product design platforms that had been servicing the UX/UI community for years, so the XD team turned to NP Digital [NPD] for help. Chad Gilbert, Director of
Content Production at NP Digital, explains,
“When we were planning and looking at what the competition is doing…we were able to see that Figma and Sketch really go
hard on content around their brand; “how to’s” around how to use their specific programs and tools, but then the InvisionApp was really more about this editorial community push that
we wanted to learn from, and then create one even better for our audience.”
While planning, they also discovered some competition closer to home. Multiple Adobe domains were
producing and publishing XD content, so, in essence, they’d be competing against themselves. In order to help mitigate that, Nikki Lam, Director of SEO at NP Digital, tells us they conducted an
audit of Adobe’s different platforms.
“We had to do an intense content audit to understand what content could potentially be competing…Part of that process
involved migrating content from other Adobe platforms onto one platform that really was going to be the best place for UX/UI designers to go and get the best information.”
And
that “best place” was the Adobe XD Ideas website.
Execution
When NPD was hired on to launch the new website, Adobe
XD Ideas, Gilbert says their first priority was getting Adobe to stop producing and publishing XD content on multiple Adobe sites.
“That was the number one most important
thing to get off the ground, so really getting all the additional teams that ran…the other properties that Adobe owns that had some XD content on it; we needed to align with all of those teams
internally.”
“We worked with different teams at Adobe to take that content, migrate it to our new platform, refresh it to make sure that it was up to date, optimized
for SEO, and worked well with the other content that we were going to have on Adobe XD Ideas,” adds Lam.
A task that can prove challenging when working with a large
corporation like Adobe, but one they were able to circumvent fairly quickly due in large part, according to Gilbert, Becky Ruden, the principle product manager at Adobe Product
Marketing.
“Thankfully we had a point of contact, like, Becky, who was able to…say, look, Adobe, this is what we need to do if we want to compete with these,
the juggernaut of Invision App and these darlings in the space [Figma and Sketch], here’s what we need and Becky was able to help push through.”
“We have a
small, but scrappy team. Right from the beginning we aligned on a process and we stuck with it. Everyone is clear on who is doing what, and we keep the lines of communication open,” says
Ruden.
Aside from refreshing and redirecting content from the Adobe domains, the NPD team had to determine what new content needed to be created for the site.
“At the onset of the campaign we worked with Adobe to identify eleven pillar topics that they really wanted to become an authoritative voice within; wire framing, app design,
prototyping, user research, user testing, those are some of the big ones,” according to Lam
In order to rank well and become a trusted voice within these eleven pillars,
they not only needed to create an abundance of related content each month but to also work with established authors within each of these topics.
They immediately contacted writers
in UX and UI design with whom the Adobe team had worked with previously. To extend their roster, Gilbert says they also reached out to writers at major design publications to not only create content
but help promote it as well.
“Ultimately, that was what was able to garner us so much success in the organic space because when Becky and the XD team came to us it was
very much an SEO organic community play; meaning…we weren't going to have all these “buy now’s" and “click here’s”. It was very much an upper funnel play at first,
which was able to garner all of this great new traffic.”
Having enough content wasn’t their only focus, they also needed to make sure the content was well optimized
for search and user experience. A process, that according to Lam, required a detailed SERP [search engine results page] analysis.
“For every question we're trying to answer,
we’re looking at what Google sees as authoritative and relevant to make sure that we're answering the questions in enough detail…We need to understand the sub questions that users have
and make sure that we're really hitting the mark with every keyword that's relevant to that topic, optimizing for search from a technical perspective; so making sure that the articles are loading fast
when users reach the content, [and] that it's discoverable by Google.”
For the official website launch, Gilbert reports they had about 150 pieces of content, including a mix
of new and refreshed Adobe migrated articles. They leveraged Twitter as their primary channel for promotion, with a small amount of paid advertising.
“Most of this promotion
that was I guess more bang for our buck, was this organic outreach to very niche design publications that we were able to information share…We would give them some content that might be a fit
for their audience, and likewise, we would be able to look at some of the content that they were pushing out on a regular basis and cross promote in certain ways.”
A crucial piece
of their strategy was building links between this content and theirs on Adobe XD Ideas. As with most industries, fighting for space on page one of Google is extremely competitive and it was essential
to implement any SEO tactic that would help them take up more room. Lam tells us they also leveraged schema markup to enhance their Google listing.
“We tell Google via this extra
snippet of code what we put on the page, those are questions that are answered on the page, and then Google reads the code and then enhances our listing to show the questions and answers right in the
SERP…so we optimized a lot of our pages for those FAQs. And they ended up taking up anywhere from like 30 to 50% more space on page one. So not just how do we get to page one, but once we're
there, how can we take up even more space and be more visible.”
The NPD and Adobe XD teams create new content each month from the SEO aspect; a strategy that is continuously
changing according to Gilbert.
“One month we might be going hard on wire framing specifically, but then all of a sudden our prototyping experience and information that we
have might be lacking, so what can we do there to beef it up? What information can we add in there and what kind of SEO schema markups…that we can highlight. There's lots of different schema
code and opportunities in SEO, and the SEO team is able to ascertain these are the levers that we should pull.”
Results
The Adobe XD Ideas
campaign achieved significant positive impact early on; with product downloads, website visitors, and keyword rankings all experiencing increases:
- Drove 25.2K download
starts in the first seven months
- Exceeded monthly traffic goal by 73% and yearly traffic goal by 19%
- Exceeded traffic expectations in the 1st
quarter by over 27% without paid promotion
- 6% CVR for clicks to Adobe.com; exceeding 5% target
- 648% growth in page #1 keyword rankings from end of
November to June
- Secured Page #1 on Google above top competitors for primary keywords
- Acquisition of 65 Google “Quick Answer Box”
Featured Snippets in seven months
- 108 publishers engaged via digital PR outreach efforts and 98 placements live within the first seven months
- 24%
of referral traffic from Digital PR efforts came from new audiences who hadn’t previously visited Adobe.com
- Launched and grew XD Ideas newsletter email list from 0
to 2,543
Key Takeaways
Ruden says it’s not always about starting from scratch when you launch a new website.
“Adobe XD had great content already. It just needed to be consolidated onto one domain and refreshed to include the SEO juice it needed. You don’t always need to develop net new
[content]. See what you already have that you can repurpose and make stronger. We were able to hit the ground running quickly by that approach.”
Gilbert also stresses the
importance of leveraging and collaborating with other communities.
“That's what made this promotion really special. It's crazy to me that I'm working on this Adobe XD
account with the editor in chief of UX Planet, for instance…he promotes the content that he writes for us, as well as content that other writers on XD Ideas are drafting for us, because it's
information that he knows is useful, it's legitimate, it speaks to his audience. And so we've kind of baked in this almost organic promotion machine, if you will, with all of these writers that we
started to work with and that have created relationships with.”
Both emphasize the need for flexibility.
“Being nimble and going with what the data is
saying and not being tied to a specific plan that six months down the road might not garner the results that we anticipated…we need to show [the client] the data and then of course help them
onto a different track, if that means, or figuring out how we come together in a new way,” Gilbert says.
Ruden adds, “Implementing quickly is key. SEO takes time, and
the more tactics you can implement as quickly as possible, the more successful you’ll be.”
As for what’s next…bringing users down the funnel.
“We've started to do more work on some of these bottom of funnel product pages; starting to connect the dots of how we're going to get users from XD Ideas over to certain product pages
when it makes sense,” according to Gilbert. “When do we utilize thought leadership? Maybe career advice to get people down the funnel. So all of that is stuff that we’re starting to
think about, and we're going to lean in heavily for 2021.”
New Website Launch as a Challenger Brand by NP Digital for Adobe was recognized for
marketing excellence in the Search Marketing: SEO Campaign category at the 2020 OMMA Awards.