Our Location
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
The Project
SEO Minion – it is a simples browser extension that can help SEO specialists with all of their daily tasks, such as on-page SEO-analysis, links, and hreflang tags checking, google search results page simulation, and much more.
The Challenge
The main challenge was collecting enough usable information, about competitors and the target audience. Since there weren’t enough tools for analyzing competitive extensions, we started to check them one by one by installing, and trying the functionality.
Exploration
The Axeman Tech team had fairly extensive and affluent experience in the SEO niche, along with a massive array of connections in their professional network. So we started with surveys, and short interview calls with SEO-specialists from all around the world, asking them about daily work tasks and the functionality they might need.
Wireframes
Once we summarized all the answers, comments, hints, and advice, we went to the stage of preparing the clear information architecture. After some iterations, we came up with a low-fidelity prototype that could suit our needs.
Detailed Design
On the first screen of extension, the user can access the main menu and pivot table of redirect links. Here we can analyze all on-page SEO details, check the title, description, canonical links, and get the render of all the headlines from the page.
The next two options do work exclusively with links on the page, including internal and external links, as well as broken links with various technical parameters and attributes.
And lastly, we developed two features that help emulate the work of Google search results pages. Using the first one, you can check how your link will be printed in the search results using the title and description variations. And the second one allows you to try search queries with different languages and countries options.
Takeaways
Working on this kind of browser extensions helped me to came up with some important takeaways:
– it’s not always possible to find the right suitable tool for research and analysis;
– close communication with target users can bring you a lot of useful insights;
– extension design involves more points that can appear at first glance.
– you need to be very clear about each feature that influences on work of the website inside the browser.
