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Web Strategy - Making an Industry Website Work Harder

Institute of Patent and Trademark Attorneys
(IPTA)

What does an organisation do when virtually any journalist in the country can write about its industry?   And what can an organisation do when virtually any individual can need its services.  The dilemmas faced by the Institute of Patent and Trademark Attorneys of Australia (IPTA) were that anyone is capable of inventing something (therefore requiring) the services of a Patent Attorney, and that any journalist can write articles on any type of invention from chromosomes to computers. (often from a purely emotional and not well researched viewpoint)

In late 2007, having undertaken PR for IPTA for some three years, the chance to solve these two dilemmas presented itself in an unlikely form… the release of the Beacon Benchmarking Report into Associations.  Although IPTA scored well against peer associations in most areas, it was apparent that it needed to improve the quality of information available to all audiences and the way in which it made this information available to them.

Network’s recommendation to solve these issues was to build an entirely new web site, with content highly optimised for natural language search by search engines such as Google.  The site rebuild was also an opportunity to redesign the navigation to allow for simpler access by the various audiences and to create a new dedicated area for media.
 
By using a combination of technology and content writing skills, the site was expected to rank well on Google by the end of its first three months after going live in July 2008.  And the results confirmed our expectations with site visitation jumping from 1,800 unique visitors a month on the old site to 6,000 a month on the new site.  And the number of search strings being successfully found by Google increased from 76 to 550.

Network also worked with IPTA to create and publicise new initiatives such as a Free initial Consulting Service for inventors.  For this service we created new web pages and distributed a release to a broad range of media, resulting in wide media coverage and strong site traffic.

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