Dov Alpert

The Situation

Award Magic offers premiere awards travel planning service for booking flights with credit card points and airlines rewards. The existing website suffered from weak SEO performance, limiting organic traffic and potential customer acquisition. Additionally, the site was developed without UX design principles, likely creating friction points in the user journey.

As a bonus challenge, a lack of existing analytics or marketing data offered limited insights into user behavior and constrained the overall strategy, necessitating a comprehensive discovery phase to inform data-driven decisions.

Business Goals

  • Improve search engine rankings for key terms and queries.
  • Increase organic traffic and conversion rates.

Project Objectives

  • Conduct discovery research to identify key improvement opportunities.
  • Implement targeted UX and SEO enhancements.

Discovery

The discovery phase was critical in laying the groundwork that guided the redesign. By conducting user interviews, competitive and market analysis, SEO research, and a thorough site audit, I identified key SEO phrases, opportunities for strategic improvements, and uncovered insights that reshaped the challenge.

Competitive & Market Analysis

Key findings
  • The digital content space is highly competitive and capturing a larger share should be considered beyond the scope of the redesign MVP.
  • Most competitor content focuses on earning points and transfer bonuses.
  • There is a gap between sites targeting
  • Only a few concierge style booking services out there.
  • Concierge offerings require paid subscriptions.
Competitor Chart

Site Audit and User Interviews

Key findings
  • Layout and copy don’t meet current SEO best practices.
  • UVPs are not communicated in copy.
  • Ineffective CTAs and poor wayfinding.
  • Start Booking page creates friction and offers inadequate information.
  • Navigation fails to address pain points.

Perspective Development

Usability tests asking users to start and complete a booking allowed us to quantify the task difficulty.

We used information from the user interviews as well as what customer data we had to mockup personas. While the personas will go on to inform our marketing strategy, developing them highlighted two major variables and revealed a common challenge our users face, offering direction for the redesign.

Insights from usability tests + user feedback
  • Finding where to start a booking is easy.
  • Two tiers of service are on separate pages, making it hard for an unaffiliated user to compare.
  • Informational content is relegated to the blog, limiting accessibility and value for customer decision making.
  • Booking form is long and asks much, including to pay, before a decision to use service is necessarily made.
Graphing feedback from customers who booked with Award Magic
Take aways
  • Even with advanced points knowledge, finding the best value in the reward redemption system is time consuming. 
  • With only novice points knowledge, making the most of the redemption system can be overwhelmingly confusing.
  • Users who know what they want from the site can easily find it.
  • Award Magic has earned high levels of trust from repeat customers. 
  • Award Magic relies heavily on repeat customers and word of mouth. 

Reframing the UX Challenge

Our insights taught us that users new to reward travel or at earlier stages in the customer lifecycle struggle to gain value, underscoring the need for a more accessible and informative user experience. At the same time, we wanted to provide a streamlined experience for users affiliated with Award Magic or with advanced reward travel knowledge.

Additionally, customers expressed delight regarding their experience working with Award Magic itself and a preference for Award Magic over a credit card reward travel portals or other reward booking services.

How might we provide an accessible and informative user experience without detracting from the streamlined experience repeat customers enjoy.

Evolved Design Objectives

  • New Nav and improved wayfinding. 
  • Cohesive, modern design elements.
  • Keep it simple for in-the-know users.
  • Unaffiliated users should be able to easily discern who we are, what we offer, why they should become a customer, and how to use our services.
  • UVPs & USPs to the front!

Design Guidelines

  • Value proposition addressing user needs to the front.
  • Layout and content to address targeted queries and include targeted phrases.
  • Follow EEAT  protocols.
  • Prioritize pages most necessary in the user journey including the home page, the booking pages, the service page, and the ANA ticket booking page.

Design Results

With the aim of enhancing user navigation, streamline information access and search engine optimization, the redesign strategically reconstructed the website’s navigation and content structure, developed new interfaces for key pages, and created a new informational introduction page that doubles as a pillar page for future content expansion. The reworked pages include: home page, booking page, services page, and the ANA ticket booking page.

Home

We completely redesigned the homepage to include new Headers and copy to reflect the user journey, communicate Award Magic’s value proposition and boost SEO. We also added a carousel to draw the eye directly to easily digested value propositions.

We added two CTA buttons giving users the option of easy access to Award Magic’s primary booking service or learn more about reward bookings. And we added Award Magic’s most popular blog posts and Google reviews for added search authority and best practices.

Start Itinerary

Award Magic’s pimary service is reward flight booking. They have two tiers of service and the tiers existed on different pages. Analysis of research and feedback led us to redesigning these service pages to live on a single page, make comparing them simple and write copy that speaks to customer needs and our solution. We also added an FAQ section directly pertaining to the booking process for the unaffiliated customer.

Services Overview

The Services Overview page was redesigned so the description of each service spoke to the customer journey and communicate Award Magic’s Unique Selling Proposition for each service. The layout was improved for clarity and flow, and the UVP for each service.

Round-the-World Tickets

This page was redesigned so it would function as both an itinerary booking page and an informational page. The design incorporated a lot of market, SEO and UX analysis. The copy was written to speak to the customer journey of booking ANA round-the-world tickets. The layout was designed with both advanced and unaffiliated users in mind.

We added navigation so users can quickly jump around the page or immediately start booking, a carousel for the most important value considerations, and informational lightboxes useful for customers with any level of reward travel knowledge.

How It Works

This page was a new informational page created for the site redesign. It’s primary function is to enhance Awardmagic.com’s authoritativeness for SEO, as well as provide users with limited reward travel knowledge or users in the early stages of the customer journey all the information they need to know. The copy and layout were designed to tee up Award Magic’s key differentiators.

SEO

We followed EEAT protocols for site structure pages to improve SERP rankings such as blog content authorship and expanded bios, or various backend fixes.

We developed and launched a paid ad campaign pushing the Round-the-World ticket booking service. The campaign was also designed to test the resonance of some SEO phrases for future iterations.

Impact

  • Organic traffic doubled.
  • Award Magic captured multiple top ten SERP rankings.
  • The How It Works page captured the snippet for a targeted search query.
  • Paid ad campaign informed SEO strategy.