Here’s a quick case study about how we helped Washington Policy Center (WPC) increase their organic search traffic by 190%.
Our work with WPC focused on technical SEO, so we started out with our 90-point SEO audit. This involves running two or three crawls of the website, analyzing the results, consulting SEO tools like Ahrefs, and scrutinizing individual page templates to find even the smallest issues that could be affecting Google’s ability to crawl and index the site.
We found one such issue on every page. The robots meta tag nofollow was telling search engines not use the page as a means for discovering new pages. That means that the links on every page were being ignored, severing the connections between content and shredding any hopes of placing articles into a broader, interconnected context.
When we corrected this problem, last November, washingtonpolicy.org went from zero clicks and nearly zero impressions in news and image results to at least some clicks and impressions. Below you can see this using simple history graphs from Google Search Console:
Since Google could now serve WPC pages in its news results, their site also started to be featured in “Top stories” boxes that appear on main results pages, such as the one below:
Has to feel good to outrank The Seattle Times.
So this small change—simply getting the robots meta directive right—was key to enabling SEO success.
TopicalBoost Grew Traffic Across the Board
As a second step, Tallest Tree launched TopicalBoost for WPC on March 18, 2025. As of 75 days after launch, the site saw a 195% increase in organic search traffic from all sources as measured by Google Analytics 4.
This has resulted in the single best month of organic search traffic recorded along with the only months outside of October 2024 (and the lead-up to the election) to break 40,000 visits from search.
Google Search Console shows a 93% increase in web referrals, a 113% increase in news results referrals, a 3,390% increase in Google Discover referrals, and a 158% increase in Google News referrals:
In total, this is a 170% increase in traffic from all Google properties in just over 2½ months since launching TopicalBoost.
Here’s a visual of how TopicalBoost affected these traffic channels:
Zooming in on Google Discover, we can see that two days after TopicalBoost was launched, Google was already showing their content to more users:
11 days later, Google Discover delivered nearly 10,000 visitors to the Washington Policy Center site. Their previous single-day Google Discover record was just 640 visitors.
When you combine these success with an incredibly successful social media campaign in April, you get Washington Policy’s largest month of traffic recorded in Google Analytics 4:
Quadrupling overall traffic on top of doubling organic search traffic is a pretty impressive feat in such a short amount of time, and reflects a willingness to experiment and take calculated risks.
Our next steps with Washington Policy Center will be further technical improvements, combined with content refinement, which should see these traffic numbers continue to climb. This work will make it clear to Google, Bing (this is the home state of Microsoft), and other search engines that Washington Policy Center has both great news coverage and in-depth answers to the policy questions that Washingtonians are asking.