The customer
The Chartered Institute of Payroll Professionals was established in 1985 to increase recognition of the importance of payroll in business. The CIPP offers its 5,000+ members many benefits, as well as a comprehensive range of professional training courses for career development. Formerly the Institute of Payroll Professionals, the organisation was granted Chartered Status in November 2010.
The challenge
We had been working with the then Institute of Payroll Professionals since early 2007 to maintain high search engine visibility through SEO and had delivered great results, more than doubling traffic to the website over the course of three years.
When the Institute was awarded Chartered Status, the organisation underwent a complete rebrand to reflect a new identity and showcase membership benefits. An essential element of the project was the successful launch of a new website, which would act as an online information hub for existing and prospective members. The new website needed to build awareness, drive increased membership enquiries and enhance industry reputation, whilst retaining the high visibility of the previous website.
Our strategy
Included in the rebranding was a change in domain name; we needed to ensure that all of the work that we’d done on the outgoing website was carried over onto the new one.
The three years that we’d had been working on the site had seen a significant increase in the authority of the site, resulting with excellent results and visibility. Our strategy was two-fold – to make sure that the new site contained all the elements of the old one that had made it so successful, and to put into place a structure of redirects that would guide both visitors and search engines to the new home of the CIPP.
Vickie Moss, Associate Director of Marketing and Business Development, CIPP commented;
‘We’d been working with Vertical Leap since 2007, and had always been thoroughly impressed with their methodology, communication and results. It was natural that they would support the CIPP with a transition to the new website’
The results
The transition went very smoothly, with only a very short term drop in site visibility as search engines adjusted to the new URL. Within a month keyword rankings were back to their previous level, and nine months later the website has excellent visibility across a wide range of competitive key terms, including five separate first place rankings in Google UK.
On top of this, traffic levels have risen significantly; as other sites have succumbed to Google updating its algorithms, the strong basis on which the CIPP website is founded has seen organic search traffic leap by 40%.*
Vickie said:
‘Vertical Leap’s SEO enabled us to retain our previous rankings, so we maintained good traffic levels right through the changeover to the new website. ’
*August 2011, when compared to August 2010