MY ROLE
Scale Pages is a Webflow based app to create multiple landing pages for programmatic SEO that I started building as a passion project.
I worked with the stakeholders like web designers and SEO consultants to define the product vision. I managed the product as it passed through the various stages of defining vision, conducting user interviews, building strategy, product design, and initial MVP.
My responsibilities extended to coordinating a diverse remote team that spanned timezones. The product has made it from idea to beta launch.
PRODUCT
The complete vision for the platform is made up of two major aspects – SEO and landing page design. The landing page is basically a template that gets attached to customized content based on an SEO strategy.
For example, many businesses target keywords like this- best coffee in SFO downtown
For someone running a chain of coffee shops in 100 different towns it can be a huge task to build 100 landing pages and keep them updated with new content. That's where Scale Pages can help. It helps businesses scale up their landing pages without losing control over their maintenance. It also helps them target newer keywords with just a few clicks.
EVOLUTION
The idea to build a SaaS to manage multiple landing pages came from large web-based companies such as Tripadvisor, Thomas Cook, Nomad List, and others that generate thousands of landing pages targeting long-tail keywords.
The idea was to make similar use cases available to smaller businesses who can't afford to keep a development team to maintain these pages.
The next step was to decide on a platform. We decided to build the SaaS around Webflow. As it turns out, Webflow has a powerful CMS API and extensive documentation that is easy to navigate.
There were numerous advantages to use Webflow, but the following stood out to me:
- A consistent design and experience for visitors to the websites
- The ability for our marketing team to change the design of the project’s pages without the engineering team’s help
Our requirements were:
- Create new CMS collection items with a defined slug
- Add various content such as text fields, rich text, and images to each item
- Use the multi-reference feature to connect two separate CMS collections (for reasons explained in the next section
After a quick read through, we knew that we could execute the project flawlessly using Webflow.
Structuring the CMS collection accurately to suit our project
Before we could send data to Webflow, we first had to create the right CMS collection structure for our project.
Our project had two key components:
1. Individual pages and their associated data - the keywords
2. Landing pages that would contain one or more keywords
Storing the information about each keyword and the landing pages in one collection proved to be cumbersome.
Thankfully, Webflow’s CMS has an item called multi-reference field, which allowed us to quickly reference items from a different CMS collection and display all its data within the parent collection.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
As a product that I built from scratch with the help of one developer and one designer, it taught me how to plan time and resources efficiently.
I put in a lot of effort to interview website builders, understand their preferences and balance it with the requirements of SEO specialists. Having two different target groups as users gave me the ability to balance between competing priorities.
This process taught me how to balance the creation of a complete "perfect world" product while understanding the barebone features required for a successful MVP.
It strengthened my understanding of UX, giving me the ability to work start to finish with a talented Product Designer who helped to push the product vision forward.