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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.
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”.
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.
