Meningitis Research Foundation - seo

Objectives

The following objectives were set for the search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign:

• Increase organic traffic from search engines
• Improve the quality of organic traffic
• Enhance the search engine visibility of the website
• Raise the level of income through the website
• Increase UK traffic to become number one over US traffic
• Improve the websites positions in Google for “meningitis” and other related terms

Strategy implementation

• In-depth competitor analysis was carried out in order to fully determine MRF’s main competitors and the activity being carried out by them. The research revealed that the MRF was competing directly against hundreds of high quality health and charity-related websites including Wikipedia, the NHS, BBC Health and the Meningitis Trust website.
• Following keyword analysis, the next step was to construct the website’s information architecture to reflect the charity’s requirements and SEO best practice.
• Once the website was designed and built, internal optimisation was carried out to ensure all pages met the necessary SEO requirements.
• Content optimisation has started and relevant targeted keyword phrases have been added in the visible HTML text. On topic analysis was carried out to identify and add any missing topical elements of content.
• Title, Meta description and keywords optimisation was undertaken. Titles and Meta description are used by many search engines to compose snippets for search results pages. It was prepared with unique, highly descriptive and well-formed content and checked against the top 10 snippets in search results to ensure that it stood out from the competition and delivered the most relevant response to searchers.
• Many URLs were rewritten to include keywords and improve click through rate (CTR) by making URLs bolded in the search results, whilst also helping to increase relevancy and keyword density across the site.
• Permanent URL re-directing of old URLs took place to make the transition from the old to the new site smooth without losing any existing traffic.
• An XML site map was submitted to Google Webmaster Tools account in order to monitor the crawl process.
• Internal links were optimised to ensure that certain pages were emphasised.
• An inbound links optimisation campaign was started to help fine-tune existing inbound links and improve anchor text quality. At the end of this campaign, all trusted inbound links will point to the most topically relevant page featuring the correct anchor text.
• The new optimised website was recently launched and on-going content optimisation continues.
• On-going SEO assistance is being provided to the MRF

Results

• Organic traffic from Google to the MRF website went up by 65% in a few months - from 3,275 visits during the w/c 23rd November 2008 to 5,409 visits during the w/c 31st Mary 2009. Yahoo organic traffic has also gone up by 63%.
• This increase can also be demonstrated by an uplift in average page views. Prior to the campaign the MRF website was receiving an average of around 12,946 page views per week. It now gets approximately 23,895 page views – up by 85%.
• The quality of organic traffic has also improved dramatically, with traffic from some of the main keywords up by over 109%. For example, during the w/c 23rd November 2008, organic search sent 1,087 visits from search engines via “meningitis” keywords. A few months later, during the w/c 7th June 2009, search sent 2,267 visits from search engines for the same keyword, indicating a 109% increase in traffic for this targeted keyword.
• Prior to the campaign, the MRF website was in position number five for “meningitis”, number ten for “meningitis symptoms” and not featured in the top 100 results for other major keywords such as “tb meningitis”, “listeria meningitis”, “fungal meningitis”, “salmonella meningitis” and other keywords. However, shortly after the re-launch of the new optimised website it got to number one for “meningitis” beating Wikipedia, BBC, NHS and Meningitis Trust websites. Positions of other keywords also improved and the MRF website nearly always features in the top two or three results for targeted keywords.
•  Geo targeting has improved and UK traffic has increased by 219%. For example, during the last week in October 2008 the website received 1,021 visits from UK. During the first week in June 2009 the website received staggering 3,255 visits from UK.
• The time spent on site went up by 111%. Visitors spend longer time on the site, click through more pages and interacting with it more extensively.
• On average organic listings in search engines now bring 80.98% of the entire website traffic.
• Online donations are showing a significant increase in June 2009 compared to May 2009, up by 450%.
  

Client testimonial

Harpinder Collacot, head of communications & campaigns, MRF: “The agency has been instrumental in assisting us in taking our rather sterile website and e-communications and humanising to ensure greater engagement with both the public and health professionals, which has resulted in a much more dynamic user experience.

“Our members have responded very positively to the new website, engaging with it to provide their own stories, as well as accessing our material. The site is now an incredible resource for patient experience and has been commended by other organisations in the patient association field. We look forward to being able to gather detailed data on our users and understand their needs better. The agency has developed a powerful resource, of which we are very proud.”