Case Study - Teach-YourselfSpanish.com
Project
Website Usability
About Teach Yourself Spanish
Teach Yourself Spanish is a wordpress blog that helps people tackle the difficulties of learning a new language on their own.
The blog provides lots of resources for people new to Spanish and also sells some affiliate products such as interactive Spanish courses and workbooks.
Website Problems
- From the analytics it was clear that the bounce rate of the site needed to be decreased, as a lot of people were leaving without viewing much of the useful content
- Also time spent on the website needed to be increased, as many visitors were simply unaware of most of the content
- Making the site more usable by improving the layout of the blog was linked to both of these problems and had to be changed
The Solution
The three problems outlined above are all interrelated and could be solved by the addition of better targeted content and making important parts of the blog more obvious to visitors.
Decreasing Bounce Rate, Increasing Time on Site - Targeted Content
To start with it was clear from the initial analysis of the site that a lot of the paid and organic traffic to the blog was coming from the key phrase "beginners spanish" as well as the primary key phrase "teach yourself spanish".
Nowhere on the blog was the phrase "beginners spanish" used in a prominent way. Even though the blog contains a lot of content for beginners it was not clear to visitors, without them taking the time to read the content, that this was what they were looking for.
Content such as Spanish phrases for beginners, the Spanish alphabet and basic pronunciation was created specifically to target the users who came to the blog using the "beginners spanish" key phrase. Of course this new content was placed under the heading Beginners Spanish and features prominently on the main navigation for the blog, which also increases the on page SEO.
Blog Structure and Usability
Changing the layout of the blog was more a matter of site structure and usability alterations than any design techniques. The new structure features separate pages for the blogs most trafficked posts as well as menu trees for greater content exposure and ease of use.
By placing the categories of the blog posts at the top of the website users were now able find the content they wanted faster and also become more familiar with the site structure.
Result
The result is a 16.41% bounce rate decrease and an increase in time on site to 2.12 minutes from an initial 1.26 minutes. Teach-YourselfSpanish.com benefited from some simple site structure and layout solutions but most importantly by providing content specifically tailored to the visitors needs.
