Content Marketing / SEO
Supporting NZ Paralympics Organisation
Overview
Paralympics New Zealand were looking for a supplier that could provide them with digital marketing expertise, specifically around SEO and we were delighted with the opportunity to work with them to build their online presence.
SEO
Content Marketing
Website Design and Development
Background
Paralympics New Zealand is the National Paralympic Committee for New Zealand. As a charity, they rely on donations and funding to help transform the lives of para athletes here in New Zealand. When an opportunity came up for us to work with Paralympics New Zealand, we jumped at the chance to help to raise their online profile through SEO and content marketing, helping to drive more visitors to the website and raise the profile of the organisation.
The Paralympics New Zealand website is a legacy website inherited from a Zeald build and transferred to WordPress before we started working with them. The site had very little optimisation and there had been no content marketing strategy in place.
We first set about optimising the existing content on the website, improving all areas from page speed and accessibility to keyword targeting and optimsation.
Once this groundwork had been done, we set about researching the key topics that people were searching for here in New Zealand relating to Para sport, going on to create a content strategy that would allow the website to not only appear, but to be the authoritative body on key questions relating to Para sport.
Outcome
Visitors from Organic Search
Performance metrics are particularly difficult to compare for Paralympics New Zealand. We first started to work with them in late 2019/early 2020 as the build up to the Tokyo Paralympic Games was just starting. Sadly, the COVID-19 pandemic led to the postponement of the Games in 2020.
Despite the postponement, we were already starting to see traffic spiking to the website in the build up to the Games prior to the postponement announcement and from that point, we were able to focus on a content plan for the next 12 months that would help Paralympics New Zealand to grow their traffic and brand awareness.
With the 2020 Tokyo Games pushed back to 2021, we saw some huge spikes in traffic in that year, especially in the Games period with people coming to the site for news, results, and more information about the Para athletes they were seeing on TV.
The following year saw the Beijing Winter Paralympic Games take place, followed by the Commonwealth Games later that year. This all means that it is difficult to compare both month on month and year on year traffic to the site with lots of spikes when major events take place.
What we can see is that content marketing pieces are contributing to the overall growth of the website, with seven out of the top ten landing pages in the past 12 months being content marketing pieces written by the Digital Hothouse team in close collaboration with the team at Paralympics New Zealand.
Moving forward, we continue to work closely with the team to improve the overall user experience of the website whilst also focusing on the keywords that people are searching in relation to Para sport in New Zealand.
“Digital Hothouse did a fabulous job developing our education programme website on time and on budget – including some quite demanding functional and design requirements. They’ve also joined us on the human-centred design journey to improve our main Paralympics New Zealand site. We like the friendly and communicative way we work with Paul and Gavin – we always know we can ask them a question and get a straight answer. They are longstanding and close partners of Paralympics New Zealand.”
