Overview
After over 100 years of offline market dominance, the Better Business Bureau found itself facing overwhelming online competition in 2008. As Yelp and Yahoo! Local experienced explosive growth, BBB.org was virtually invisible to search engines, making it more difficult to show value to its Accredited Businesses and impacting its membership retention rates.The time had come to invest in a new website.
The Challenge
Three foundational issues needed to be addressed prior to undertaking search engine performance overhaul:
- Technology: Lack of visibility on search engines was a symptom of a fractured technology backbone that had resulted from numerous independent franchises operating autonomously.
- Content Quality: The focal point of the website, the member Reliability Report, was offering little more than sharing a score, which was significantly less than you could find using competing sites.
- Metrics: Without a properly implemented metrics system, it wasn’t possible to judge whether future optimization efforts would be effective.
Our Process
Centralize key content via a common URL within a shared experience and eliminate unnecessary sub-domains.
Deploy data driven Search Engine Optimization across all static and data-driven content.
Improve the core usability and usefulness of their flagship product, the BBB Reliability Report, by integrating video, detailed complaints, enabling customer reviews, and adding social media functionality.
Deploy a single web analytics solution across 95% of franchises tracking against a set of shared key outcomes, utilizing SEO best practices on all relevant pages.
The Benefits
Since launching with Verified there has been a 700% increase in traffic across more than 100 web properties, which have been aggregated into a single core user experience. This equated to 78,000,000 new visitors in 2012, which would have cost roughly $40,000,000 to acquire via pay per click. Since the end of 2010, after a period of exponential growth, web traffic continues to grow at a rate of 35% every year.
Furthermore, the number of businesses becoming Accredited by the BBB has begun to grow year over year since 2010, up from a four year recession that led to our work together in 2009.
The Results