Website: www.causeiq.com

Cause IQ provides web-based information and tools to help accounting firms, consulting firms, financial services firms, fundraising companies, technology companies, and other providers grow, maintain, and serve their nonprofit clients.

Building Better Traffic: Optimizing landing pages to drive high quality leads

Cause IQ had solid growth in organic traffic year-over-year, but was looking to optimize the quality of that traffic to bring in highly qualified leads. In addition to widening their top of funnel engagement, they wanted to improve their landing page user experience and email marketing strategy to nurture leads towards becoming customers.

Big Wins:

• 430% increase in the average number of monthly search impressions

• 260% increase in organic traffic goal completions

• 9 Whole Whale suggested articles now ranking in the top 1-10 spots of Google search results

What we did

Defining a funnel of engagement

Cause IQ already had solid traffic that was growing year over year. But how was that traffic working to drive more qualified leads into Cause IQ’s pipeline? Whole Whale helped Cause IQ define their marketing funnel to clarify which metrics indicated success for them at the stages of awareness, interest, engagement, and action. We also provided recommendations on lead scoring within HubSpot so Cause IQ could automatically determine which of their subscribers were marketing qualified leads based on their specific engagement with the Cause IQ website and marketing content.

Laying the groundwork with analytics and technical SEO

Whole Whale reconfigured the Cause IQ Google Analytics account to track key performance indicators such as email signups that were critical to understanding how visitors moved through the funnel of engagement. We also built a custom Data Studio Dashboard that included the funnel, so Cause IQ could easily track how each stage was improving over time.

Whole Whale knew that adding data-driven content to the Cause IQ site would help to drive the most relevant traffic, but we first needed to reduce any technical barriers that would keep that traffic from reaching the website. We conducted an initial technical SEO audit to identify missing metadata, incomplete site maps, opportunities to improve site speed, and other issues that impact how the site appears to search engines. Using Whole Whale’s technical SEO checklist, Cause IQ made immediate updates to their site that led to an increase in domain authority, site speed, and indexing on priority pages. This led to:

• 430% increase in the average number of monthly search impressions
• 250% increase in the number of unique domains linking to causeiq.com
  

Planting content seeds for quality organic traffic growth

Whole Whale conducted data-driven keyword research on high priority sections of the Cause IQ site in order to create a content marketing strategy that would increase both traffic and relevant leads to their website. We also worked with Cause IQ to set up schema markup — structured data that ensured Cause IQ’s content appears in rich snippets — to get even more views and clicks. This led to:

• 260% increase in organic goal completions period-over-period
• 17% goal conversion rate from organic traffic during our engagement
• 9 new articles suggested by Whole Whale ranking in the top 1-10 spots of search engine results

Acquiring and nurturing email leads with A/B testing and automation

Our ultimate goal was to help Cause IQ increase the number of highly qualified leads in their pipeline that could be nurtured over time. To attract new qualified leads, Whole Whale created an email acquisition strategy that included improving the user experience of their signup forms, adding signup forms to more key landing pages, and A/B testing both popups and forms on the Cause IQ site where we saw significant growth in sign-ups period over period.

Once acquired, we knew that ongoing email communication would be needed to nurture lead relationships. But how could we help Cause IQ prioritize where to spend limited team time on those most likely to become customers? We helped Cause IQ create an automated email series to nurture new subscribers coming in, informing them about Cause IQ and nudging them to take priority actions, such as requesting a product demo (which was a leading indicator of overall lead quality). We also analyzed Cause IQ’s newsletter to provide recommendations that resulted in a jump from 21% to a nearly 30% open rate.

People are saying…

“I’m already seeing results from Whole Whale’s work to increase the quality and quantity of our search traffic. Their insights and recommendations were spot on. They are also a pleasure to work with, with great communications and responsiveness.” – Josh Hurd, Founder & CEO