Missing People
How we doubled visits to donate and increased organic traffic by 17%
Challenge
Missing People is a lifeline to an estimated one million people affected by disappearance every year. Their ambition is to double the number of people they reach over the next 3 years to ensure they provide maximum help to those in need and to inspire people to support the cause. We looked at how their website could be improved to support this ambition.
Solution
Missing People’s existing website had served the charity well but had become inconsistent and outdated and was no longer meeting the needs of the users or the organisation. We started with a deep dive into understanding the experience and needs of people affected by missing, and how Missing People’s experts support that experience.
Close collaboration through workshops, surveys and group interviews helped us understand users and experts so we could put their needs at the heart of every decision related to improving the website experience. We co-created our solution with families of missing people and user tested key features to ensure our recommendations met the needs of the audiences.
While we focused on usability and users, we also looked at how we can apply the latest and best practice technical and SEO conventions to the website to ensure it is optimised for search engines. SEO also helps people find the content they need easily and the organic performance of charity websites is essential to driving long term sustainable traffic and engagement. This is how the website redesign project could help Missing People to double the number of people it reaches within three years.
Website analytics also suggested there were opportunities to increase engagement within donation journeys to improve conversion. We used compelling storytelling and intuitive sign-posting to inspire website visitors to support the cause.
Results
The new website quickly improved key areas of performance that connect directly to Missing People’s ambition to reach more people.
The website was more findable: average position of Missing People in Google search results improved by 38%. At the same time, average click through rates improved by 36%. These combine to deliver an overall 17% increase in users of the website in like for like comparisons for organic search.
A key contribution to these numbers is an improvement in Page Speed of 15.5% across the site.
The website’s content was more engaging: So while the new site increased the number of visitors to the website, it was also clear that it improved engagement too, which led to more support and donations for the charity, with the number of Donate section pageviews doubling.
“We decided to completely overhaul our site, which had become unmanageable and was never designed with our users in mind. It was a challenging but overall enjoyable experience thanks to Pixeled Eggs’ patience, logical thinking and expertise. We were very impressed with how quickly they got to grips with the complexities of our work, the huge volume of content we needed to structure, and the way in which they sensitively engaged with our beneficiaries.”
Georgia Romeril – Senior Marketing Manager
