The Challenge
EWG was new to SEO and was looking to increase visibility for their cell phone radiation report and increase donors. They also need to streamline their web promotion process and want to increase the number of prospective donors in their donor database.
The Strategy
To prepare for the launch of the cell phone report, Katherine streamlined the strategy for producing research products. She:
- Evaluated and had the organization adopt Central Desktop.
- Trained internal writers, her team of 4 and 14 unpaid interns on SEO.
- Fixed the GA implementation across the sites; and
- Implemented a monthly reporting process.
Her integrated digital strategy for the launch of the cell phone radiation report included:
- Optimizing landing page copy.
- A product led SEO process optimizing the cell phone database and generating dynamic optimized pages for every cell phone in the database.
- Multi vertical press outreach with an embargo.
- Media room with assets for editors to use.
- Optimized Google Adwords campaign.
- Social media outreach, and
- Email push to the existing list.
She also pushed for load testing the servers as the site seemed to be having issues with normal spikes in traffic.
Post launch she led the charge to:
- Find a resource to set up load balancing to bring the servers back online.
- Change hosting and re-architect the servers, and started a plan for a redesign of the site (and upgrade of the Drupal version) to ensure that it could scale with increased traffic load.
The Results
Traffic to www.ewg.org increased by 85% in just the first four months.
However, when the report was launched in September 2009, the servers were overloaded and went down for 4 days.
The site still received over 1.2 million visitors to the website in one month (up from 300K). And the report became a top traffic driver for six months post-release.
