Becoming the #1 converting page in the logged out experience.
The overarching goal for the SEO team is to make Nextdoor the research destination for new movers. You can gather stats from many different sites, but little to none give you insight about the neighbors and what they care about. Nextdoor is uniquely positioned to pull back the curtain for new movers, but our current neighborhood pages were not fulfilling their potential.
Role: Design Lead
Problem
Before this project, Nextdoor’s logged out neighborhood pages were sparse, repetitive, and performed poorly, leading to high bounce rate and low rank on search engines.
Goals
User
“When I’m considering a neighborhood, I want reliable, hyperlocal information so I can make informed decisions.”
Search engine
Provide searchers with rich, unique, and useful content that helps them quickly evaluate whether a page is valuable.
Business
“Drive a higher conversion rate by showcasing Nextdoor’s differentiated value to potential members.”
Outcome (v1)
The entire page was re-designed to improve the user and SEO experience, resulting in a 6.9% year-over-year conversion increase. This was a big win for the team and Nextdoor.
Approach
During the design exploration phase, I worked closely with product and research partners to ensure we were meeting the needs of our most active non-neighbor group: movers.
The priorities of the page were to include dynamic, engaging neighbor content, rich cross-links, and a map.
However, when Nextdoor went through a redesign, bounce rate increased, which would lead to a negative impact on our SEO rank if this continued for a period of time.
What we learned
Updating the page to use large format media layouts is best for engagement - we did not have this in our design system at the time, so it was an intentional deviation that worked in our favor. The design system team ended up adopting this format in their next iteration of the system.
SEO design is unique, and requires a different approach to prevent bounce rate from increasing.
Providing value upfront showed non-neighbors how Nextdoor can be a unique tool to deepen their community knowledge and give back.