Searching for change
The Relationship
LBi was engaged to work with Oxfam GB in January 2009 with the objective to raise online awareness of the work they do to help the worlds poor cope with the effects of climate change. We aimed to drive natural search as an acquisition channel for their retail businesses on terms where Paid Search was not hitting Cost Per Action (CPA) targets. We followed this up with work that promotes the adopting of Oxfam as a sponsorship target for the 2010 London Marathon.
The Work
LBi worked in partnership with Oxfam to identify which terms would drive the most traffic to their website. We also delivered a series of recommendations to optimise the architecture and content, both on and off page, of oxfam.org.uk in the form of two technical search reviews, one for the main website and one for the Oxfam 'Shop' site, which sits on a separate platform. We followed this up by doing similar work for the 2010 London Marathon site.
The Outcome
Our work for the Oxfam 'Shop' and the charity gifts department (Unwrapped) has seen the brand feature in Google UK at number two for second-hand clothes and number five for charity gifts in just three months, having previously been outside the top 1,000.
This success has resulted in Oxfam more than doubling their spend on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) after three months, and engaging with LBi ePR services to promote 'Shop' across the digital sphere.
For the 2010 London Marathon sponsorship our work boosted the rankings of the landing page which was previously not even indexed on Google UK to inside the top three for the two search phrases [london marathon 2010] and [2010 london marathon]. This boost in positions has resulted in doubling the amount of monthly traffic to the page Year On Year (YOY) and, crucially, increasing the number of applications by nearly ten times.
