Search Engine Marketing Campaign Boosts Exposure for Ballot Initiative

Challenge

Healthier Colorado, a nonprofit dedicated to improving opportunities for our state’s residents to live healthier lives, partnered with GFM|CenterTable to support its public awareness campaign to educate and pass Boulder’s “soda tax” ballot initiative in 2016.

Given the strong opposition on the initiative by the beverage industry and the significant competition for ballot-related content on the web, it was critical to increase visibility in order to build awareness and educate community members about the benefits of voting in favor of the initiative on this issue.

Solution

GFM|CenterTable executed an integrated search engine marketing campaign that included hyper-local pay-per-click (PPC) search advertising and on-page local search engine optimization (SEO) tactics, to ensure that the healthyboulderkids.org website would be easy to find as the larger public awareness campaign gained momentum.

First, on-page and local SEO best practices were implemented to ensure that the website was positioned well for any campaign-related Google searches occurring in the Boulder area. Then, GFM|CenterTable supplemented these organic search efforts with a hyper-local paid search campaign that targeted named ballot initiative terms as well as unnamed soda tax-related terms on both sides of the issue in Boulder County to maximize search engine visibility across a variety of audiences.