How Greater Chicago Food Depository Increased Organic Traffic by 49% with Orbit Media’s Optimization Services

A mission to end hunger

The Greater Chicago Food Depository’s mission is to end hunger, because they believe a healthy community starts with food. To achieve this, the Food Depository partners with a network of community-based organizations and individuals to provide neighbors with the resources they need.

“In [our] case, a ‘healthy website’ is directly leading to a healthier community. That’s really exciting to think about.” -Amy Schriefer, Director of Brand and Digital Marketing, Greater Chicago Food Depository

Through over 800 partner pantries, soup kitchens, shelters and mobile distribution centers, the Food Depository strives to make a difference in the lives of children, families and older adults throughout Chicago and Cook County.

The challenge

Connecting more of our neighbors with the food that they need

The Food Depository team turned to Orbit Media to raise awareness with more neighbors in need. This came with a secondary goal of increasing their pool of donors and volunteers.

“Our mission is to end hunger in Chicago and Cook County. We know that our neighbors are in need and they are searching for resources. Making it easier for our neighbors to find those resources through our website is essential to our mission.” Amy Schriefer

After working with the Orbit web design team in 2022, the Greater Chicago Food Depository had a beautiful website with great bones–it was accessible, user-friendly and representative of their mission and messaging goals. While this site covered all the essentials, no one-time project results in comprehensive search result coverage with competitive performance. The Food Depository needed a plan for search and conversion backed by relentless execution.

“It’s critical that we’re able to stand out and be easily accessible to people who are hungry and are searching for food so we can immediately serve them” -Rodolfo Godinez, Marketing Manager, the Greater Chicago Food Depository

This brought them to Orbit’s website optimization team with five key goals:

1. Getting more page-one rankings around finding food in Chicago
2. Cast a wider net that ranks for a more thorough set of high-quality phrases
3. Perform better in local search results, ie. Google Maps and “map packs”
4. Improving site performance and technical health
5. Improving UX/conversion rates (finding resources, donations and volunteer sign-ups)

The solution

Diversified tactics to achieve ambitious goals

Orbit’s optimization team began by analyzing the big-picture opportunity. A 360° initial assessment was used to design the first 12-month Program Plan. This established a medium-term vision outlining specific audits, exercises, content editing and early actions.

“The content is very relevant to our brand, our mission and our voice. It comes with a sensitivity to who we are as a non-profit and what we are trying to solve in our community.” -Amy Schriefer

Content upgrades

The team decided the best route forward was to optimize existing high-value, high-converting pages. This avoided additional approval steps for new content and allowed the team to move faster with some early wins. Additionally, it was clear that while these existing pages were well-written, they were not written with consideration for this ambitious new vision that balanced search and conversion.

Page upgrade highlights:

• Improve free search engine listings to draw more clicks
• Leverage above-the-fold area for greater impact
• Strategic use of key HTML tags
• Deepen semantic topical coverage
• Target primary, secondary and tertiary keywords
• Reduction of unthematic, unrelated content
• Reduction of “fluff”

“When you’re looking for food, algorithms don’t understand if someone is looking for a restaurant, or is food insecure and in need of our services. I was worried about how we would differentiate, but I think we did a good job selecting precise search terms.”  -Amy Schriefer

Technical enhancements

Orbit’s strategists hand-picked the right audits from our proprietary catalog of opportunities. Six thematic audits were executed in the first six months. In total, this left the team with 50+ precise opportunities ready to be discussed, prioritized and acted on. Key highlights included:

The results

15% increase in found food

In just six months, the Greater Chicago Food Depository saw an increase in results with a 15% increase in requests to “find food.”

“The ‘find food’ tool has helped our neighbors tremendously by allowing them to find all the food bank resources they need in one place.” -Rodolfo Godinez

The most dramatic shift appeared in a metric known as Organic Traffic Cost (OTC). SEO tools generate this number by comparing the equivalent cost of Google Ads if the website owner were to “rent” the same keywords in the google ads marketplace rather than getting free placement in organic search. These current market rates for ads tend to provide a better raw estimate of value vs. traffic alone.

For the Food Depository, OTC increased by over 1,000%, adding the equivalent value of $1.6 million per month in paid search ads. This was driven by a sitewide lift in search rankings due to technical SEO work and partially by upgrading content to pursue deliberate goals of search and conversion. Most of all, the Food Depository began pursuing terms surrounding pantries and food where they had previously been boxed out by for-profit organizations.

“As a non-profit, it is absolutely vital that we are efficient with our budget. These organic traffic wins helped us save on advertising, meaning more money can be redirected to helping our community.” -Amy Schriefer

Over 30 existing landing pages were upgraded in six months. Here are highlights for just the three most valuable calls to action:

• The /find-food/ a 42% increase in top 3 Google rankings: from 102 to 145 search terms
• The /volunteer/ a 109% increase in top 3 Google rankings: from 23 to 48 search terms
• The /donate-food/ a 67% increase in top 3 Google rankings: from 3 to 5 search terms

These improvements position these pages to be seen and visited by more users– making it easier for neighbors, donors and volunteers to find the information they’re looking for.

“The work that Orbit has done to make our website more authoritative, accessible and approachable has streamlined our ability to help our community and has made us more effective in our mission.” -Amy Schriefer

Because of Orbit Media’s work improving the Greater Chicago Food Depository website’s technical health and SEO, their site better supports their dedication to ending hunger. Whether you’re a neighbor in need, donor or volunteer, you can easily locate the Food Depository website and have a clear path to take action.