Wellcome Trust SEO Case Study
We started with a demanding brief: audit four Wellcome Trust websites, and present a Quick Wins report on each covering SEO, PPC and web analytics, all within just 2 weeks.
Two days per project were initially allocated, one for research and the second to present my conclusions to the relevant stakeholder teams. Much of the second day for each site was spent running hands-on training to get their staff up to speed quickly on new tasks including AdWords campaign management, onsite SEO optimisation (they already had loads of links) and analytics analysis. Additional time was spent with their main web analyst, as part of the plan was to help Wellcome Trust to smoothly transition from Urchin 5 to Google Analytics.
Wellcome Trust started to use Google AdWords to promote many of their websites for the first time. Additionally, soon after they were accepted into the Google Grants program, which meant that, as a registered charity, they’d receive £10,000 of Google AdWords advertising for free. – Their staff were trained up on AdWords just in time to capitalise on Google’s generosity.
Their improved understanding of keyword research and onsite search engine optimisation, including meta description and title optimisation lead to an immediate increase in traffic to some existing pages and helped several new sites to get off on the right foot. Additionally, better on-page optimisation may have helped to improve AdWords Quality Scores, aiding their PPC campaigns.
Finally, by introducing Google Analytics and assisting their migration from Urchin, we enabled more of their staff to see the success of their campaigns for themselves meaning that they could react within hours to tweak their campaigns, rather than waiting for weekly/monthly reports. This freed up their web analyst to do less reporting and more actual analysis, making everybody happy.
Wellcome Trust received hands on training, tactical advice and assistance defining their SEO, PPC and web analytics strategies, despite never having formally planned (never mind executed) many of these strategies before. By braking my time into several short blocks of two days each, Wellcome Trust had time to implement the recommendations from our first day’s work on each site, using the second day to review progress and hand-over the running of each campaign to their internal teams. While strictly speaking most of this was ‘only delivered to the brief’ it’s probably also worth bearing in mind that the brief was greatly expanded by Wellcome Trust in our preparatory meeting, after we made it clear that we could cover a lot of ground in 8-10 days (if they’d let us), and proceeded to suggest several other things we could do, which Wellcome Trust accepted.
Wellcome Trust: http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/
Quotes/testimonials
From LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/londonppcseo
“Anthony is a true expert in the field of search engine marketing with a huge depth of knowledge. He is an asset to any company’s online marketing strategy and delivers excellent results.” January 14, 2010
Top qualities: Great Results, Expert, High Integrity
Dale Langan, Welllcome Trust
“Anthony proved really flexible, committed and dedicated to the project over an extended period. His knowledge regarding his subject (search and seo) is excellent and I would be happy to hire Anthony for any other contracts and would recommend his services.” January 16, 2009
Top qualities: Expert, Good Value, High Integrity
Neil Hamilton, XchangeTeam
