Healthcare

Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation SEO + Social Strategy

The Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation (HBFF) is a nonprofit organization that operates alcohol and drug addiction treatment facilities nationwide for both youth and adults. The HBFF of today is the result of a merger between two of the largest players in the treatment provider space – Hazelden and the Betty Ford Center.

Search Engine Optimization , Social Media

The Challenge

Maintaining brand equity & authority during merger.

Pre-merger, both brands relied heavily on their digital content (website + social) as a primary resource to support and connect with individuals, families, and communities affected by addiction. This also meant that both organizations possessed strong legacy brand awareness that needed to not only be preserved, but strengthened when combined.

Hazelden turned to Collective Measures for guidance on how to navigate the merger and rebrand in a way that would preserve existing search equity, maintain and re-establish social authority, provide a positive user experience, and position the new brand for long-term growth.

The Solution

We developed an SEO & social migration plan.

SEO
Social Media

Collective Measures developed a seamless SEO website migration plan – mindful of existing search equity while identifying areas to improve search rank for the newly combined brand. Specifically, we:

Audited, appraised, and prioritized more than 50,000 pages of content across 2 websites to identify and preserve top-performing content
Instituted a content merger and redirect protocol for two major content migrations, retaining and combining all core content
Developed a technical migration plan to properly redirect more than 50,000 pages

In the social media transition, Collective Measures sought to minimize the disruption of fans and followers and maintain as much social authority as possible. To begin, we:

Developed a social strategy + migration roadmap for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, and Instagram
Assisted the HBFF team on all execution to facilitate this transition, including name updates, page mergers, asset technical specifics, and more
Completed full audits of both brands’ paid media accounts and social channels, looking for areas of existing strength to maintain through the merger

The results

Maintained 93% of first-page keywords.

The Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation website launched successfully and experienced a seamless transition. One month post-launch the new website, HBFF:

Maintained 93% of the first-page keywords that ranked on the pre-merger websites
Saw 98% of cross-channel traffic migrate to the new website