SEO Campaign for Christian Nonprofit
- Search Engine Optimization
- $10,000 to $49,999
- January 2017
- Quality
- 5.0
- Schedule
- 5.0
- Cost
- 5.0
- Willing to Refer
- 4.5
"They set ambitious turnaround times and they met all of them."
- Nonprofit
- Michigan, United States
- 11-50 Employees
- Phone Interview
- Verified
Victorious improved site conversions and organic traffic for a nonprofit. The team pinpointed keywords to implement into the site’s backend and metadata and also advised on blog content improvements.
The engagement led to an overall increase in organic traffic and total site visitors. Victorious was very thorough in their keyword research and listened to the needs and opinions of the nonprofit. They offer competitive prices for an honest approach to SEO that is timely and consistent.
A Clutch analyst personally interviewed this client over the phone. Below is an edited transcript.
BACKGROUND
Introduce your business and what you do there.
I’m the mobilization director (basically a marketing director) at a large missionary organization that plants churches all around the world in areas that don’t have access to the Gospel, either because of language or lack of a physical church. We’re a faith-based nonprofit with about 3,000 missionaries globally. The headquarters is in Florida.
I’m part of that larger nonprofit, but the Bible institute where I work is only about 150 students and 30 or 40 staff. It’s part of missionary training. We’ve got two Bible institutes. One is in Wisconsin and one in Michigan. Our Bible institutes train future missionaries. My wife and I work at the first phase of missionary training with this organization called Ethnos 360 in Michigan.
There’s definitely an international side of things, but for us at the Bible institute, we’re looking more in the United States. The organization has training centers in 7 or 8 different countries. We aren't a hub for everybody coming in, but we are the hub for Canada and the United States. Our institutes each have their own sites. We actually just changed names, so the new website is e360bible.org.
OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE
What challenge were you trying to address with Victorious?
Our website’s SEO had a lot of issues. We had no overarching strategy and needed someone to help organize the backend. Ultimately, we wanted to increase our web reach to improve our lead generation numbers. Victorious was the first group that we used.
SOLUTION
What was the scope of their involvement?
Most of the work that we had Victorious do with us is for the website of our Bible institute. They redid our whole website. They didn’t design it, but from the backend, they reorganized and restructured it to better facilitate SEO. They went through the keyword research with us, which was very thorough. The other big gap in our website was the meta descriptions; we had absolutely no meta descriptions before. They implemented the keywords there too.
They also helped us figure out how our blog could be more effective for us. We didn’t have a strategy in place. With all the keyword research, we implemented more effective and successful blog practices. Blog management has been more on our end. We have our own content writer here. But Victorious evaluated the blogs we had done and suggested things we could change to help improve our rankings.
Victorious also gave us detailed reports. Every step of the way, they told us what they were doing and the effects that they saw so far.
How did you come to work with Victorious?
Even though I’m not super knowledgeable about SEO, I did a lot of my own research before hiring them. I’ve done several general SEO courses on my own, so I knew some of the things to look for. I wanted a company that had legitimate practices, not someone who manipulated the system. It’s called white hat and black hat practices. A white hat is good. A black hat would be moderately sketchy. We also had a small budget and needed to find someone to work within those constraints.
I looked at SEO companies for around 2 months. I looked at 10-15 different organizations that I thought could work with us. One of the main reasons why I picked Victorious is because they had experience in the faith based arena. We are unique in what we do and we wanted someone who had worked with nonprofits and faith based organizations before and could understand our needs.
How much have you invested with them?
We’ve spent around $12,000.
What is the status of this engagement?
We worked together from January 2017 until June 2017. We’re getting ready to hire them back again. The reason we stopped in June is because we were changing the name of our Institute. We wanted them to help us with the name change, and, budget wise we wanted to pause our allocation of finances to save for when we started back up under the new name. They will help us implement our name change in the SEO.
RESULTS & FEEDBACK
What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?
We’ve been really happy with them and the work they’ve done. Our results from this year compared to last year have been really good. I can’t credit them with 100% of these results because we built a new website and are more mobile friendly, but a huge percentage of it can be attributed to the work they did. There have been several Google algorithm changes, but because Victorious only implements white hat practices, we only ever saw a boost when that happened.
Actual statistics for our site's improvement included our organic traffic, which increased by 58% April 2017 compared to April 2016. Our total users from October 2016 to May 2017 increased by 48.3%. Our total sessions increased over that same time period by 51.32%. The organic traffic was largely due to them. The blog writing we did, which was based on their keyword research, helped influence our writing.
How did Victorious perform from a project management standpoint?
I was really happy with their overall responsiveness. They were good listening to our feedback. I could email them with something I wanted to talk about and I’d usually get a response in the same day. We were normally able to set up a meeting that week or early the next week if it was something that needed 30 minutes or an hour. If I had a quick question, we could usually talk that day or the next day.
They set their own timelines most of the time. We didn’t have anything that was really time-sensitive. They set ambitious turnaround times and they met all of them.
What did you find most impressive about them?
I’ve never worked with other providers, but I did my research. I found Victorious’ prices competitive and all the staff there are nice to work with. I’ve worked with people who wield their knowledge like a sledgehammer where I feel like I don’t have any input on my end. Victorious is knowledgeable but they’re also humble and not so conceited to think that they have all the answers. That’s what we were looking for. I was looking for somebody who could be competitively priced and who I could have a conversation with about our vision and goals. Humility and knowledge and understanding of their area was really good. They’re willing to listen and take the time to get to know who you are and what you’re trying to accomplish. I appreciate that.
Are there any areas they could improve?
I don’t have any areas of negative feedback. The turnaround time and the response time was good.
RATINGS
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Quality
5.0Service & Deliverables
"Google even changed their algorithm several times and it only helped boost our site because they approached SEO the right way."
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Schedule
5.0On time / deadlines
"We hit every timeline that we wanted. They did the keyword research on time. Everything was on target for us. They never fell behind at any point."
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Cost
5.0Value / within estimates
"I did my research. We’re not a big school or anything. We had pretty limited budget."
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Willing to Refer
4.5NPS
"I’d definitely refer them to colleagues, although I don’t have any experience as a large organization. If I was recommending them to a big organization, I’d have them look into how scalable they are.