This case study is about the impact of an SEO and website management retainer for a a small cancer charity working in the US and the UK, focused on a specific type of cancer.
Key Points
- Supported a US–UK cancer charity operating in a highly competitive YMYL medical space, competing with major health authorities.
- Delivered early wins through technical fixes, content reorganisation, and removal of low-quality pages, followed by highly targeted, research-led new content.
- Traffic growth of 20x, compounded month-on-month, translating into real-world impact including increased donations, repeat visitors, and beneficiaries engaging with services.
- Pivoted the SEO retainer into a website management role, removing implementation bottlenecks and dramatically accelerating the speed and effectiveness of growth.
Their situation
Medical websites are a notoriously difficult field as search engines are cautious about who they rank for the types of search terms that could significantly impact somebodies health (known as YMYL – your money your life).
Despite being in a highly competitive medical niche (up against the likes of NHS, Mayo Clinic, Macmillan, Cancer Research), the team had strong expertise, were well established and were small enough to be versatile. These were our secret weapons.
Approach
My initial work with them covered the key bases, looking to understand the scope of issues and opportunities by conducting thorough keyword research, a competitor analysis, a technical SEO audit, content audit, Google Search Console audit, and developing a plan.
We had some initial quick wins by reorganising informational content based on logic and user experience. Having been given WordPress access and full admin permissions, I was also able to efficiently fix a large number of technical issues, to restructure key site sections, and to remove significant amounts of low quality content.
The big wins then came from using keyword research to identify highly relevant new topics that people were searching for, and to provide the organisation with detailed briefs on how to structure this content.
We published a small number of new topics that were highly comprehensive and user friendly, focusing primarily on ensuring that the information is easily accessible for the organisation’s audience. As we waited to see the impact over the coming months, I focused on making important tweaks and improvements to areas like schema, internal links, CRO, readability, and more.
Impact
The impact started modestly, and then grew significantly month by month:
But crucially, this wasn’t just vanity traffic. Over time, these users began converting into donors, fundraisers, and beneficiaries who use their services.
Donations increased significantly each month when comparing to the same time in the previous year.
Supporters had even got in touch when they made donations to express that the reason they felt compelled to give was due to how useful they found the content – simply due to how we had re-organised and optimised pages with a user-first approach.
Just recently, the client emailed me to compare some 2025 traffic to 2024, month by month, and the impact it’s also had on direct traffic – presumably from people revisiting and bookmarking links.
website maintenance – the secret sauce
There was one added secret sauce to why this retainer has been so successful.
With such a small organisation, there comes a point where an SEO retainer hits a certain ceiling about what else is possible. I didn’t feel that I could, in good conscience, continue to charge a charity for pure SEO services when the main 99% of opportunities for growing traffic had already been addressed.
Which led us to an idea…
Let’s pivot the retainer to become a website management retainer, focused on general day-to-day maintenance through an SEO lens. This allowed the organisation to save money on hiring somebody to manage the website, and to have a WordPress and SEO expert manage it for them.
SEO experts are absolutely ideal people to be managing websites because SEO = user experience. Of course, lots of pages won’t directly generate traffic, but any SEO consultant worth their salt understands the role that all page types play, and how to manage all different stakeholder interests.
The impact of this level of responsibility has been the number 1 reason for the growth we’ve experienced.
We’d still have experienced strong results if the client were implementing everything themselves, but this arrangement allowed us to supercharge the speed and the impact that SEO could have.
If you’d like to find out how I can help you with SEO support or website management, feel free to get in touch, I’d love to hear from you.
