Medium Blue had one goal in mind: helping its neighbor, who just happened to be the city’s oldest non-profit animal welfare organization, increase its online presence. Working on a pro-bono basis, Medium Blue offered to optimize the Atlanta Humane Society site in order to increase website traffic and awareness through improvements in organic search, adoption numbers for dogs and cats, and the number of monetary donations and volunteers. In order to uncover the focus of their joint SEO campaign and online public relations efforts, Medium Blue collaborated with the AHS to chart a course of action to target the necessary audience and raise the public’s awareness about its various events.

PROGRESS

Medium Blue began AHS' SEO campaign with research into its industry, kicking off the campaign by writing and optimizing keyword-rich copy and testing iterations of website elements, such as color, layout, and verbiage. The online public relations aspect of the campaign involved optimized press releases and expert articles that were submitted to applicable industry portals. These tactics worked in tandem to garner additional links - and thus visitors - to the website. As traction in the search results improved with the chosen keyword portfolio, Medium Blue examined ways to improve the user experience, adding website conversion components to the site. After analyzing the feedback for dog and cat adoption numbers, Medium Blue discovered that, although the “Adopt a Dog” and “Adopt a Cat” pages accounted for approximately 37% of all page views for the site, they were not a focal point on the homepage, and visitors still had to click through to see this information. From this data, Medium Blue restructured the AHS homepage to showcase available dogs and cats prominently.

RESULTS

At the time of benchmark in August 2008, it was evident that AtlantaHumane.org was being dominated on the search engines by its main competitors, receiving only 6,691 search-referred visitors. By December 2009, once the impact of the online public relations and SEO campaign had taken hold, traffic levels rose to 21,289 search-referred visitors, a 228% improvement. In addition, the average time spent on the home page increased 30%, and page views increased 9%. 115 new rankings were attributed to the site, a striking comparison to the 21 rankings at baseline, representing a 447% improvement in the number of rankings across the top five search engines (Ask, AOL, Google, Yahoo!, and Bing). Before website conversion recommendations were implemented, the AHS received 91 adoption applications. In July, the AHS received a record 292 applications. Currently, the organization receives an average of 180 applications per month, a 98% increase from baseline. Considering the economic downturn and its effects on pet care and ownership, these increases are remarkable.

ADVICE

“Medium Blue has gone above and beyond to help the Atlanta Humane Society,” said Cathy Sleva, VP of Development. “Because of the company’s generosity and other donors, AHS animals have received thousands of dollars in donations.”