CaringBridge
How CaringBridge grew user acquisition with a holistic search strategy
CaringBridge is a nonprofit which offers free online health journals for sharing health updates with family and friends all at once. In 5 years partnered together, Uproer has been able to steadily increase organic and paid search conversions at a significantly lower cost CPA with a holistic search strategy.
Our Search Strategy
From the beginning, CaringBridge has been driven to build a community of support online. Their Resource pages present inspirational stories from real people going through health journeys. Because of this, we created a search strategy that began with SEO content and expanded into paid media over time.
We supplemented that with a more refined non-brand strategy that leveraged a free Google grant for upper funnel awareness. We explored low-funnel keywords for patient websites, feature-focused keywords, and other high-potential keywords. And through that process, we grew performance to some of the highest levels in account history!
We interviewed stakeholders to uncover what types of health concerns CaringBridge users are most often encountering- Discovered that the CaringBridge audience is largely cancer and caregiver focused, and that sites are started by both patients and family members.
- Created “health journey” topic hubs, starting at the Discovery stage to Coping & Healing stages.
- Targeted high-volume keywords from the family and friends perspective, with topics like “What to Say to Someone With Cancer.”
We used a Google grant to fund brand search, so our out-of-pocket spend could focus on more incremental tactics.- We leveraged $40,000 in grant spend for top-of-funnel, traffic-driving efforts.
- We financed brand spend with a free Google grant for nonprofits.
- We tested new initiatives with the free money before we brought them into our out of pocket account.
We used a UGC prompt system to create human-focused content that resonates with readers - Wrote prompts for each article that were shared via the CaringBridge Facebook page.
- Collected responses and stories from the prompts on Facebook and incorporated them into articles. Used responses as a source for content ideation and a way to tap into the CaringBridge audience.
- Used new blog comments to refresh existing articles.
We expanded into low-funnel non-brand search, which was a new tactic for the client- We tested keywords like “patient websites” and “caregiver calendar” to highlight key features and encourage users to start a CaringBridge site.
- We took a long-run toward improvements and worked with internal data teams to demonstrate the value of our efforts.
- We collaborated as a team to support our SEO efforts with content-focused campaigns.
We incorporated calls-to-action into our content to convert readers- Created a sign-up form CTA box and added to all blog posts to capture leads.
- Linked to other high-converting landing pages like “How it Works” in each blog article.
We continually tested our approach with deliberate, large scale tests within the accounts.- We conducted regular tests to demonstrate the incremental value of non-brand search.
- We measured the overlap between new efforts like performance max and our existing brand and non-brand campaigns.
“I have worked with Uproer for almost 2 years now and I could not be happier. This agency is smart, talented, efficient and knowledgeable. Couldn't ask for a better partner!”
— Beth Betcher, CaringBridge
+250% increase in Paid Search conversions
By increasing search marketing performance holistically, CaringBridge saw significant growth in conversions at lower acquisition costs.
- 1,200% increase in SEO blog traffic throughout the engagement
- 53% Y/Y increase in conversions across SEM & SEO
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