Bloomin

Manufacture & E-commerce
SEO & User Experience
August 2023-September 2023
The Challenge
Bloomin works with a third-party development company that is in charge of hosting their Wordpress websites along with plugin updates and monthly site maintenance. They want to make a change to update their UX on their website along with their SEO presence online.
Project Overview
With Bloomin, what you say grows! Known as The Seed Paper People, we have integrated some of the best practices in paper making with our own homegrown innovations, and are recognized as the world’s foremost authority on this specialized commodity.

In this project, I will talk about how SEO and UX co-exist together and how they balance each other in a way that seemed impossible for the average user. SEO and UX co-exist together because of how the web functions now. The question is not how we can make your website function, but how can we make users come to your site and stay?
The Takeaways
I was in charge of boosting their SEO marketing and rankings along with fixing up any slugs, meta descriptions, user experience and platform responsiveness while teaching how to work among these tools so they can manage it themselves.

Role

Web Designer

Team

Creative Director, Kevin Arnold
Resources
Website
A desktop showing Bloomin Seed Paper with their products falling around the desktop mockup.

Introduction

So I knew what SEO was and I knew what was UX design was but how did they co-exist? This was a project that was challenging and interesting because it taught me a lot on how SEO and UX can co-exist together.

In this research I was more focused on how SEO can effect Bloomin. I break down my research in three categories:

  • Performance and Website Loading times
  • SEO
  • User Experience
PageSeed Insights Before I worked on Bloomin Seed Paper
PageSeed Insights Before I worked on Bloomin Seed Paper
PageSeed Insights Before I worked on Bloomin Seed Paper
Total results on Page Insights before I worked on Bloomin Seed Paper

Website Performance

A lot the loading times and performance had to do with their coding and how the code affected the website like image sizes, media queries, and slugs.

  • All websites need to cater to what Google wants in order to thrive in the digital marketing space.
  • A slow website leads to a high bounce rate. And, if your bounce rate is high, Google will likely not treat your website kindly.
  • As you can see your performance (5.9s) holds a very key to people visiting your website and how much loading times it takes to render your website.
  • Your main concern for these results would be less HTTP requests, websites do not need HTTP anymore and it takes too much data.
  • Another thing I saw was image uploading space. When your images take a lot of time to load you may encounter slow loading times.
  • You can reduce this by changing the sizes of your image and keeping the DPI to 300 or using a different format rather than .png.
  • Png tends to be really heavy in data.
  • Plugins also are a key to slowing down your website.
  • The code used in your Wordpress website, if there is a messy code within your website it can actually slow down your website performance.

SEO

When it comes to googling “Bloomin” in the search engine; you are the second link below“Bloomin Branding”. I have tried words such as: seed paper, biodegradable seed paper, plant seed paper, wildflowers seed paper and you are either 5th search or on the very last on the first page.

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  • FIxed 67 pages of images and added slugs and meta descriptions/alt descriptions.
  • Changed 20 pages of Categories for their Products to fix meta/alt descriptions and added slugs along with the proper titles.
  • Added Breadcrumb titles, canonical urls to the mobile.
  • Improved the Titles of Products, Blogs, and Body Text
  • Added Images and alt text to boost SEO.
  • Breakdown their Menu to make it cleaner and easier to navigate.
  • Add a sitemap and footer.

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User Experience

By fixing the SEO their User Experienced followed. I believe SEO and User Experience co-exist because of how they both use common accessible user friendly methods to help consumers find your website.

Key Points

I gave Bloomin 20% more organic searches than before.

User Experience improves your SEO naturally.

Their site is made mobile friendly after working with the css.

Clear CTA buttons on their site.

A sitemap to make it easier for users to navigate along with breadcrumbs when on mobile.

Mobile Friendly

Given my background in web development, I do have experience in it. I have worked in Wordpress for quite a long time, I think back since 2010 at least. So I know the struggles what business owners and users go through when it comes to navigating Wordpress and the PHP, HTML, CSS. I don't particularly like working in front-end development but I can especially if it is requested upon the client and it isn't too tedious coding.

I was tasked to fix up their css for their images and media queries. I did a bit more than that though because it was like, while I am here. You can see the before and after code below.

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Before
After

Thank you Kevin for supporting me in this project. This project has given me a different insight on SEO and UX and how they co-exist within each other. I believe if I was given another chance to work with this company again I would focus more on their website design to make it a bit more appealing to distributors because right now it still reads as a Seed Paper Retail Shop when they are a manufacture organization.

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