Increasing Engagement with a Blog Redesign for Discover Bank
Blogs are an indispensable tool for direct marketers when it comes to content marketing. With a robust content platform, companies can dramatically increase inbound traffic, build brand trust, inform retargeting, and more accurately measure intent.
Discover Bank asked MCD to redesign their banking content blog, Modern Money. The redesign was initiated to modernize the look and feel of the blog and create a more editorial experience while improving user engagement and increasing time spent on site. Knowing the majority of search traffic was coming to the site on mobile, we ensured the redesigned site was not only responsive, but also optimized for the smaller screen.
KPIs included increased site search and social shares, higher engagement once on the site, and a decreased bounce rate. Since the blog re-launched in November 2017, the team has seen a decrease in bounce rate, higher organic rankings and increased time spent and pages viewed. The redesigned blog has played an instrumental role in their SEO strategy and increasing consideration on the site.
We began the assignment with testing to gather a baseline of users’ impressions of the existing blog. We also asked participants to review inspirational sites to get early input on future enhancements and new functionality. Building off the findings from our initial testing, we began finalizing the wireframes and building concepts to validate with users. Once aligned on a direction, we finished the concept phase with additional user testing.
During the design phase, we looked for new opportunities to engage users on the homepage and explored additional pathways into article content. We featured high-level listicles and quick quiz content on the homepage and category pages, driving users into relevant articles in new ways.
To create a more ownable visual direction, we took stock photography and collaged them together to create unique, composited images that represented individual articles. These were essentially small art projects used to highlight targeted content. To keep a consistent look and feel across the site, this unique visual style has been carried through to our native ads within blog articles.
In addition to the front-end presentation layer of the site, we improved the overall usability and management of the administration layer by providing new widgets and controls to make the ongoing maintenance and management of the site a breeze.
Since the launch of the redesign, Discover bank has seen:
- Non brand keyword clicks are up on average 105% monthly
- Organic search (SEO) traffic is up on average 83% monthly
- Page views per visit are up 30%
- On average, blog conversions have increased 41% monthly