Sharsheret works to improve the lives of Jewish women, men, and families living with or at increased genetic risk for breast or ovarian cancer. They’re able to save lives through educational outreach and through personalized support.
After working together for many years on various web projects, Sharsheret partnered with our team at Cornershop to build awareness about the increased risks of breast and ovarian cancer within the Jewish community and get more eyes on their work and resources through a search engine optimization (SEO) retainer.
Sharsheret was struggling to appear for the search terms that mattered most to their organization before partnering with our team. Their website has tons of helpful resources for those at a higher risk for breast and ovarian cancers, but those searching for these types of resources were not finding their way to the Sharsheret site.
So we set about changing that.
Initial SEO Audit
Kicking off our SEO retainer, we conducted an initial audit of their website, focusing specifically on SEO. Then, we got to work optimizing Sharsheret’s top pages for both search engines and the real people visiting their site. Our initial work included:
- A discovery phase to learn more about Sharsheret and the issues they’d experienced with SEO thus far
- Keyword research focused on pinpointing the best keywords for each page and optimizing page content for those target keywords
- Resolving technical issues that impacted SEO, such as broken links and redirect chains
- Fixing important metadata issues, including updating meta descriptions, page titles, and SEO titles
The initial audit and the changes we made based on it build a solid SEO foundation that we could build upon through future work.
Goal-Based Strategy
With the initial audit and optimizations finished, we worked with the Sharsheret team to develop a long-term strategy rooted in measurable goals. Those goals for the first quarter of strategy work included:
- Improving the number of keywords in the top 10 results by 10%
- Increasing search visibility by 5%
- Increasing website traffic from organic search by 5%
We built Sharsheret an SEO strategy around these specific goals, revisiting the strategy monthly to ensure we’re on track to meet goals and take advantage of new opportunities as they appear.
We expanded on the work that we began through the audit, updating a wider range of pages across the site. Our strategy also included:
- Drafting new pages and blog posts to target new high-value keywords
- Targeting pages ranking in the 11-20 placements to gain big wins through incremental updates
- Refreshing keyword research periodically to keep up with search trends and pinpoint new opportunities
- Focusing on fixing critical crawler issues and preventing both visitors and search engines from landing on 404 Page Not Found pages
Real Results
In less than a year, we saw Sharsheret’s domain authority, a metric created by Moz to predict how likely a website is to rank in search engines, go from 41 all the way to 48 — a big leap for that metric in particular, especially in a short period of time. All the updates that we made, both big and small, cumulatively resulted in the website as a whole being more likely to appear in search engine results pages.
We also helped them rank for even more keywords. In January 2022, Sharsheret was ranking on the first page of results for 23 of the keywords we’re tracking. By January 2023, that number had increased to an incredible 76 keywords ranking on the first page of results.
SEO can be a slow process, often building over many months before seeing meaningful results. However, our work over the course of a year was able to boost the Sharsheret website and spread their mission and life-saving resources to more people at risk for cancer.