Joshua Memorial Foundation: SEO Case Study

Client: Joshua Memorial Foundation
Product: Nonprofit that teaches water safety awareness and supports other nonprofits in the same.
Campaign: Web development, web design, search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing

Background

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention states the number one cause of accidental death for children 1 to 4 years of age is drowning. The Joshua Memorial site provides information about water safety and drowning prevention. The foundation’s main objective is to prevent drowning accidents through early childhood education and the promotion of infant and toddler water safety training courses.

Challenge

What do you do when you’re a nonprofit just starting out and have a great new website but not enough online traffic? We can tell you what the Joshua Memorial Foundation, a Nebraska-based nonprofit specializing in water safety courses, water safety literature and drowning prevention awareness did. They asked for help with their search engine optimization.

Their site was fairly optimized when their SEO campaign began. Since we had designed and developed their Joomla-based web site, we knew it had been built to be “search engine friendly” and wouldn’t run into the roadblocks of a poorly developed web site. Still, their web site had the following issues:

• Low link popularity and search engine saturation (pages indexed in the search engines)
• Not enough conversion points
• Low or no rankings for keywords that searchers might use to find their site

SEO Strategy

Over several months of optimizing their web site, we now see dramatic results. We targeted their web pages to go after local search terms like “water safety courses nebraska” and “water safety nebraska”. We also completed a link building campaign, which improved the site’s link popularity (or “votes”) for the site which results in more traffic and higher rankings. Use of social media, blog posts and article marketing has also been part of our strategy.

Results

The search engines are now referring half of the overall traffic to the site. Take a look at the numbers:

• Unique Visitors +33%
• Number of Visits +182%
• Repeat Visitors +56%
• Total Page Views +100%

Keyword: water safety courses nebraska
Google Ranking (before SEO): Not in Top 50
Page in Google (after SEO): 1
Google Ranking (after SEO): position 5 & 6 (out of 289,000 results)

Keyword: water safety nebraska
Google Ranking (before SEO): Not in Top 50
Page in Google (after SEO): 1
Google Ranking (after SEO): position 3 & 4 (out of 281,000 results)

Keyword:  water safety book
Google Ranking (before SEO): Not in Top 50
Page in Google (after SEO): 1
Google Ranking (after SEO): position 6 (out of 9,880,000 million broad results!)

Keyword: child water safety nebraska
Google Ranking (before SEO): Not in Top 50
Page in Google (after SEO): 1
Google Ranking (after SEO): position 4 (out of 137,000 results)

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