SEO is Important, But Remember Your Visitors
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The Make-a-Wish Foundation of America recently completed a redesign of its web site. The not-for-profit organization saw some tremendous increases in the number of visitors to its site as a result of the redesign. Although the redesign wasn’t SEO-focused, there are lessons here that any SEO professional might find useful.
Let's start with the timing. Make-a-Wish launched its redesigned web site, completed by Digital Pulp, at the beginning of September 2006. The time of year is important, because Make-a-Wish is a charitable organization. Since competition for money from donors gets fierce around the holiday season, any charity worth its salt wants its site to be up and ready far enough in advance to allow for last-minute tweaking.
At the risk of sounding a little cynical (and I'm certainly not cynical about this charity!), I'd imagine this is especially true for Make-a-Wish. While the organization needs money year-round, its focus is on granting the wishes of children with life-threatening medical conditions. How many times have you heard someone say that "Christmas is really for the children"?
So what kind of results did Make-a-Wish see after the site redesign? Well, in the two months after it, the average number of online donations increased 85 percent. The size of those donations also increased, because the revenue from the visits nearly tripled. Could this just have been a function of the time of year?
It could have, but it wasn't. The organization also noticed a year-on-year rise in donations, from 1.19 percent of visitors to 1.45 percent, and an increase in the amount of money donated. That may not sound like much, but let's look at it another way - the number of visitors who actually donated to Make-a-Wish during the 2006 holiday season was more than 20 percent higher than the number that donated during the 2005 holiday season. Do I have your attention now?
Taking the percentages just a month at a time, the numbers are even higher. November 2006 saw 71 percent more web-related donations than November 2005. Not only that, but the site hit an all-time high for unique visitors in November 2006: 171,805. I don't have the full figures for December 2006, but "The way things are trending, it may end up being our best year ever," noted Mike Pressendo, Make-a-Wish's director of brand communications in an interview with MediaPost Publications.
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