How we navigated the “mission impossible” SEO campaign.

The Context

A11 Initiative is a well-established NGO focusing on social and economic disparities.

At the time of this writing(Apr. 2024.) they are in the 5th month of “(Anti) Social Card” campaign, which critically analyzes the work of public government institutions on the hot and sensitive subject of AI-driven decision making process which left 27.000 people from vulnerable groups without financial social assistance.

Requirements

Before the start of the campaign they approached us for help:

• They needed a one-page website to showcase their research.

• Additionally, they sought to rank high on Google for the term "socijalne karte" (social cards in English) to raise public awareness about these disparities.

New domain antisocijalnekarte.org was ready for the campaign.

The Challenge

The given requirement was objectively a remarkable challenge - to achieve high rankings for the highly competitive keyword "socijalne karte," using only a one-pager website while the competition included government sites, portals, and renowned journalistic giants.

It all seemed like a mission impossible, akin to the battle of David and Goliath, competing with a one-pager against websites with strong reputations and abundant content. But let's explore how it unfolded.

Strategy

We communicated extensively with the A11 team to exchange materials and analyze and refine the strategy.

The challenge lay in the fact that we couldn't employ the fundamental principles of SEO. It's a bit like SEO and linguistics aren't the best of friends; we had to keep the text's linguistic essence intact. We couldn't go overboard and resort to a typical commercial, repetitive style.

As for the strategy, we defined 2 parts:

1. To initially lean towards a more commercial approach to rack up some early SEO points.

2. To smoothly transition to a more nuanced, linguistically focused fine-tuning.

Execution and Results

The 1st part of the strategy

The initial phase involved designing the one-pager website, where the key task was to distill the essence of their extensive research. 

This demanded solid work on information architecture to transform a plethora of raw data into a coherently structured presentation.

Once the website was launched, we began the process of iterative search engine optimization…

In three months, the team was surprised by a significant milestone. We had managed to achieve an exceptional breakthrough, securing the 5th position in search rankings.

The 2nd part of the strategy

Following our initial success, we faced a monumental challenge of the 2nd part of our strategy: to carry out linguistic fine-tuning. This required restructuring the page, its content, and the headlines.

The whole team was in fear, as we risked losing the achieved results and all the effort invested so far overnight.

Nevertheless, we were determined.

Two months later, at the time of this writing… 

The outcome is remarkable.

We moved even higher, ascending to an impressive third place on Google, surpassing many of the strong competitors we had anticipated.

Reflections

Besides the SEO benefits, the organization uses the website as a valuable asset in many of their current  promotional events. 

The project reaffirms an old engineering axiom we all know from our childhood - for every technical challenge, there is a solution.

Update

Since May 29th 2024. we raised to position #2.