Big Cat Rescue

The Solution

Baskin began to experiment with all of the internet tips and techniques she could find, such as optimizing keywords, using meta tags, exchanging links, posting to chat rooms and blogs, and providing useful content for free. Sure enough, the internet marketing techniques helped: Rankings at search engines began increasing, as did i traffic to the site. For instance, BigCatRescue.org ranked:

Meanwhile, rather than having to face 600 or so big cats becoming homeless in 2004, as Baskin was expecting, the number fell to 110. Baskin was encouraged.

In late 2004, Baskin signed up with Capitol Advantage's Capwiz-XC tool to help pursue the sanctuary's legislative agenda. Using e-mail alerts about key legislative issues, the Capwiz tool helps Baskin keep supporters informed and enlists their advocacy assistance through letter-writing and other means to pass relevant legislation. The Capwiz site costs Big Cat Rescue $16,000 per year, but in 2005 the number of cats that were discarded fell again to 94 — a reduction of about 15 percent over the previous year—and Baskin realized that her Web efforts were paying off: "I knew this was how we were going to fix the problem." Further powering her determination, four states banned the practice of keeping big cats as pets that year. Things had started looking up.

Baskin's search engine optimization techniques took Big Cat Rescue's site a long way, bringing the site into the top 10 for many of the keywords relevant to its mission, such as "big cat," "save big cats," and "tiger photos." However, some keywords proved tougher to crack, so the sanctuary turned to search engine advertising for those terms, which over time have included individual species names such as "tiger" and "cougar". The sanctuary began spending about $600 per month for search engine advertising on each of Google and Yahoo.

In late 2005 the sanctuary received a huge boost in this area when it was awarded a Google Grant of unlimited advertising for three months. In an unconventional move, Baskin expanded her keyword list to include terms that were less obviously related to her mission, resulting in dramatically higher website traffic but also a higher proportion of site visitors who viewed only one page before exiting.

Prior to the Google Grant, the sanctuary was getting 9,000 unique visitors per day, and "we thought life was good," says Baskin. But the combination of Baskin's ongoing search engine optimization efforts and the newly donated advertising dollars caused daily traffic to rise to 90,000 unique visitors.

Google continued to give Big Cat Rescue unlimited advertising for an additional three months until May 2006, and then set a limit of $10,000 per month that continues today. As of September 2006, Google had donated more than $1.2 million in advertising to Big Cat Rescue.

Since the peak times of unlimited advertising dollars on Google, traffic has dropped back to a still considerable 22,500 unique visitors per day, Baskin says.