Young Lives vs Cancer reach more people through SEO

Young Lives vs Cancer (formerly CLIC Sargent) helps children and young people (0-25) and their families find the strength to face whatever cancer throws at them.

We have worked with the team there for several years. Each project we’ve done has helped them reach more people impacted by cancer, and made them aware of the help that’s on hand.

The challenge

One of the ways Team Young Lives wanted to improve their visibility to new audiences was by improving their page ranking using SEO.

So if someone affected by cancer needed help and was Googling terms to find that help, Young Lives vs Cancer would turn up in those search results more often, and that person would be able to access their support.

The team already had deep expertise in lots of useful themes and topics around cancer. They knew they could draw on this knowledge to show up in exactly that kind of situation, and bring more potential supporters to their website.

What we did

We decided to start with the content they already had on the website, and optimise this before looking at new content.

We carried out a number of audits on their current content.

These included:

A full technical audit – we highlighted a range of issues impacting the visibility of the site on Google.
Google Search Console audit – we uncovered a high volume of broken links, 404 pages and spam URLs, as well as a need to improve mobile optimisation.
Content audit – we identified key opportunities for pages to move up the search rankings with on-page optimisation and provided a detailed set of optimisation reports.
Keyword research – we created a detailed keyword optimisation document, highlighting the key search terms that visitors were searching for. We applied this to the content audit to develop our in-depth on-page optimisation plan.

We discovered that their scope of content topics was a little limited. So we planned and delivered a content workshop. This brought together colleagues from around the organisation to brainstorm new opportunities and create various topics and themes for content.

What we achieved

The workshop went down a storm. In particular, the team liked the pre-workshop “primer” document that we sent out before the workshop. They said it really helped them to understand what the workshop was about and why they were involved.

The workshop itself brought together stakeholders who would not normally have been involved in a project like this. This created a real mix of people, and led to great discussions and ideas.

We went into it hoping to create one year’s worth of content ideas. We ended up being able to create a plan for the following two years!

We also created a deployment roadmap for the website improvements and updates they would need to carry out to improve their website’s performance.

All this left Team Young Lives with a long term plan to reach more people affected by cancer through SEO.

“Platypus Digital helped us take SEO from strategy and performance analysis, to a tangible application for our website content. Through the brilliant workshop they conducted, our Services Team was able to help shape our future content. This has made it super clear why we want to create content, to help support children and young people with cancer who are searching for answers following a devastating cancer diagnosis.”
Nathaniel Newman, Senior Brand and Marketing Communications Manager

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