SEO for Public Policy Publishers

Pageviews from search increased by 32.6%

The obstacle in bringing in SEO experts on retainer is always stakeholder buy-in. Leadership tends to be less in touch with technology and the problems we’re facing in digital promotion are hard—especially when things are “invisible.” Initially there’s nothing for them to see. The product isn’t a video, a white paper, or even a new design.

Patience and empathy with management helps—they don’t have a frame of reference. In this case, we tied SEO to deplatforming—there are fewer cases of groups being delisted from Google than being suppressed on Facebook or Twitter.

Part of the language that stakeholders speak is fundraising—so we had to attach a product like the Case Index to this project.

When it comes to results, the numbers speak for themselves. If we compare the year since we launched the Case Index to the previous 365 days, organic sessions increased 44.1%, a gain of over 300,000 users. Pageviews from search increased by 32.6%, bringing the total to 1.9 million.

Furthermore, our website now appears in the top-10 search results for 119 Supreme Court cases, with an additional 168 ranking in positions 11 through 50. This has raised the average court case keyword ranking for our site to 14.52, outperforming sites like supremecourt.gov, harvardlawreview.org, americanbar.org, and yalelawjournal.org.

We’re achieving a level of visibility on our Supreme Court content that has been a dream goal of Federalist Society supporters. We want to be a source of outstanding Supreme Court commentary, so seeing court cases at the top of Google results is remarkable. 

This whole process began with Tallest Tree’s audit. It was supremely impressive from an analysis standpoint—the technical teardown and strategy immediately established credibility. And unlike audits or reports some consultants produce, this wasn’t a pre-written set of improvements. Tallest Tree’s recommendations were bespoke to us.

Taking the time to be a good communicator and translator of the SEO ideas to different parties—our internal team, external developers, and internal content writers—is extremely rare and has been incredibly valuable.

There were other benefits of having Tallest Tree on retainer, as well: 

1. Finding ways to achieve measurable results. Nonprofits struggle with quantifying results, so being able to track things like ranking and traffic is a huge departure for us.
2. Having SEO expertise in the mix when we’re talking about marketing and content has been a huge help and value for the Federalist Society. We’d otherwise be leaving a lot of value on the table. At its best, SEO is technical knowledge combined with understanding of how people actually use content.
3. Trusting someone to focus on these issues so developers are focusing on development and marketing is focusing on messaging.

I have on many occasions recommended Tallest Tree to others and told them that SEO extends beyond the sort of on-page things like h1 tags. Tallest Tree understands that SEO has an end goal in mind and is about serving users.

We feel like there’s much more direction to our website work—we’re no longer just fixing broken things. We now have the goal of lifting up all of our content, rather than simply maintenance. 

On top of the expertise and language you speak, Cord is a personable guy. We appreciate his use of humor and listening to diffuse tensions between developers and their recommendations. Consultants can be condescending or prone to drowning you in jargon, but Tallest Tree never did that.

Daniel T. Richards, Vice President & Director of Digital