Fred Hutch – Content Strategy
Content audit reveals opportunity to leverage Fred Hutch’s reputation as an authority on cancer research.
Challenge
Despite heavy investments in content by highly qualified medical experts, their content attracted little traffic.
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research is one of the world’s foremost cancer research organizations. The work they pioneer has literally saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of cancer survivors. Fred Hutch’s stories should be known by millions but, even after significant investment and the intense efforts of a top-notch writing team – including popular medical bloggers, former research professionals and award-winning science journalists – their website content was failing to attract a meaningful audience.
Despite a library of authoritative, detailed and exceptionally well written articles by highly qualified medical experts, most of this content attracted very little traffic. As part of our development of a global digital strategy for Fred Hutch, Wheelhouse DMG identified a novel way to promote the compelling stories Fred Hutch has to tell, to attract a more substantial audience – with the goal that others who are dealing with cancer might be helped.
73%
Increase in gifts from new donors (with online giving accounting for 89% of this increase.)
700%
Increase in the value of gifts associated with paid social advertising
100%
Increase in gifts associated with paid search
Approach
Focus on Featured Snippet placements to drive traffic to Fred Hutch’s library of authoritative articles.
Wheelhouse DMG performed a series of content analyses for Fred Hutch, gaining a clear understanding of their competitive landscape. We assessed how everything from taxonomy to UX to the rapid evolution of Google’s search ranking algorithm might be causing Fred Hutch’s organic traffic to lag. As we reviewed our full content strategy audit, we discovered actionable insights hidden in plain sight: in the search engine results pages themselves.
Wheelhouse DMG’s analysis showed that, just as in the offline world, Fred Hutch had tremendous online authority for cancer-related content. Given this leadership position and resulting authority, our strategy focused on a new and rapidly expanding element in search results called “Featured Snippets”.
Outcomes
Optimizing existing authoritative content helped drive 73% more gifts from new donors and trained their writing team how to optimize for Featured Snippets on their own.
In short order, the work completed by Wheelhouse began to bear fruit. Wheelhouse achieved dozens of Featured Snippets for targeted content, which led to dramatic increases in site traffic. In total, Fred Hutch has risen to the top of search results for over 27,000 average monthly searches, helping drive a 73% increase in gifts from new donors.
Wheelhouse continues to work with Fred Hutch, developing and shepherding digital strategy in the organization, including providing analytics strategy, architecture, implementation, reporting and analysis, and managing paid search and paid social advertising for key initiatives.
We also continue to support content marketing. In fact, as part of that work, we taught the Fred Hutch writing team how to integrate Featured Snippet opportunity identification and optimization with their own workstream. Cumulative Impact As with all digital strategy work, it is in the cumulative impact of this work that its value can best be seen.
“The foundation the Wheelhouse team built continues to serve the Hutch to this day, and I remain super grateful for the incredible collaboration and successful outcomes of our multi-year partnership..”
– Celeste Bernard, Sr Director UX Design
