Case study: Feature refresh

Strategic updates to content, info architecture, and copy for automated site scan reports

Context

The Site Audit, a flagship feature of Alexa, scanned sites and offered SEO recommendations. It targeted non-expert digital marketers and small-to-midsize business owners.

My aim was to revamp it by making the recommendations less technical and more relevant to the intended audience. This would help boost the low Net Promoter Score and increase subscriptions.

Screenshot of the copy deck & string matrix

Process

I audited, restructured, and rewrote the content, collaborating with Customer Support and subject matter experts.

I created a detailed spec/deck for developers, including functional details, and flagged dynamic elements in red.

Sample screens

Here are key screens from a Site Audit showing my updated content:

Copy choices

To make the "recommended action" summary serve as a to-do list, I rewrote the strings to focus on actions and moved details to the instruction pages.

Here are some before-and-after examples:

Original:

Add links to certain pages from prominent pages on your site so that search engine crawlers can find them.

Revised:

Add on-site links to important pages. See Reachability.

Original:

Make sure that the important pages on your website have titles that are 65 (or fewer) characters long.

Revised:

Shorten page titles to 65 characters or fewer. See Long Title Tags.

Original:

Redirecting too many of your sites [sic] pages to other pages wastes crawler resources and may result in a smaller number of pages being crawled.

Revised:

Replace redirects with direct links or reconfigure server. See Redirects.

Outcomes

Subscriber growth for the top-tier plan increased by 250% and NPS improved by 28 points within four months of launch.

The Site Audit remained a signature premium feature until Amazon refocused the entire business in 2022.