Case Study
Website Relaunch Helps Non-Profit Grow Organic Traffic More Than 50%
The Story
A non-profit that represents a mid-sized city contacted Workshop Digital to assist during a website migration. As the de facto marketing agency for the downtown district of their city, the organization works with business and community leaders to:
- Promote events, local businesses, and downtown development.
- Share demographic data and other valuable resources.
- Incentivize businesses to move into the hyper-targeted region.
The organization was in the process of relaunching their website in conjunction with the announcement of a local event lineup. Working together with a development agency, we were initially hired to help ensure a smooth relaunch.
The Challenge
When our engagement first began, our client’s main goals included driving traffic to their website and building awareness as a thought leader in their geographic location. As a small non-profit, our client faces competition from local news outlets, newspapers, and other publications, as well as from other competing subregion and neighborhood organizations.
Our client organizes and promotes several popular events throughout the year. While they see a high volume of seasonal website traffic during these events, we wanted to level out traffic distribution throughout the year and drive users to pages that may otherwise be overlooked. One of our biggest challenges was connecting the content of their website to their audience, as many webpages were neither keyword targeted nor aligned around search volume.
The Approach
The first part of our engagement centered on the goal of driving traffic to our client’s website. Because we were brought onboard during the final stages of the website relaunch, we focused on the SEO essentials of the project, which included:
- Crawling the development site for major SEO discrepancies.
- Setting up redirects so that existing URLs were pointing to new pages.
- Ensuring page titles and meta descriptions were populated, targeted, and accurate.
Following a successful website launch, we began ongoing strategy work. Our main focus was to ensure that web content was targeted and aligned around their audience. This found us improving site structure by creating new pages and content. And it saw us working to identify opportunities to improve on-page SEO elements, which included improving keyword targeting and internal linking of existing pages.
Focusing on site structure not only identified pages with low search volume, it helped widen the net of organic search traffic. We wanted to ensure that users were engaging with the site across conversions like online donations and ticket purchases. To better understand user engagement, we tracked pages per session and implemented A/B testing to help modify messaging.
The Results
Our client saw a boost in organic traffic following a successful website relaunch. Improving site structure helped identify pages with lower search volume and distributed traffic evenly across the site. In fact, we saw more than a 50% year-over-year (YoY) increase in total organic sessions. We also saw growth in organic traffic to non-event pages. For example, a page that promotes economic development saw more than a 35% increase in YoY organic sessions, while a page that promotes the city’s art district saw more than a 100% increase.
After seeing the value of our long-term efforts and vision, our client increased their scope of work. In doing so, we’ve been able to serve as strategic partners and drive long-term initiatives. Moving forward, we’re continuing to create new webpages to drive specific initiatives.
