Our redesign took CEED's site to its strongest organic performance yet: monthly organic traffic climbed from roughly 420 to a peak of 1,934 visits, a rise of about 360%.
CEED, the Center for Entrepreneurship and Executive Development, was created by the impact investment firm SEAF to help founders in emerging and transition markets grow their companies through mentorship, training, and connection
It operates as a federation: a Washington DC headquarters alongside a constellation of country and regional organizations, each with its own audience and, at the time of the engagement, its own website. The reach was real. The website was not carrying it.
The network was competing
with itself.
A content-heavy flagship site, a sprawl of country sites, and no shared strategy holding them together.
Headquarters and country pages chased the same keywords with overlapping content and no shared search strategy. CEED pages ranked against CEED pages, splitting the network's authority instead of compounding it.
The site was dense and text-heavy, with little visual branding to make CEED memorable. Donors evaluating credibility and entrepreneurs looking for a programme arrived through the same undifferentiated experience and had to wade through the same walls of copy.
Around 40% of traffic was mobile, yet the experience was not designed mobile first. CEED's two conversion goals, validating impact to funders and growing newsletter subscriptions, had no structured path to either.
Drag the handle to see how the experience changed, from a generic gaming site into an institution-grade platform built to earn trust with skeptical U.S. players.
Discovery opened with a full-day design thinking workshop at WANDR's Los Angeles studio, with CEED's leadership in the room rather than on a call. The day ran through value proposition mapping, persona and journey work, risk mapping, a branding “this, not that” exercise, and a structured reframing of problems into opportunities. Running alongside it, an SEO audit and competitive keyword analysis established, in data, where the network was competing against itself.
The keyword audit showed CEED's own properties ranking against one another. Fixing that required a geography-specific search strategy, not more content.
Funders and entrepreneurs arrived with materially different intents and were served identical navigation and identical calls to action.
CEED's impact numbers, the single strongest asset for a donor's credibility test, sat well below the fold behind introductory copy.
Development finance institutions and foundations. Primary audience. Weighing whether CEED is a credible, high-impact partner. Wants impact proof, governance, and scale, fast. The question: can I trust this organization with capital?
Founders in emerging and transition markets. Secondary audience. Looking for programmes, mentorship, and community. Wants a clear route in. The question: is there something here for me, and how do I join?
Other organizations in the entrepreneurship development space. Tertiary audience. Benchmarking CEED's model, its reach, and its results.
"I play with colleagues. Social proof and community matter as much as the games."
"I play with colleagues. Social proof and community matter as much as the games."
"I play with colleagues. Social proof and community matter as much as the games."
Build a geography-specific SEO strategy so headquarters and country content target distinct terms and distinct regions. The network's pages reinforce each other's authority rather than cannibalizing it, anchored by achievable near-term keywords and evergreen content designed to earn links over time.
Open the homepage with CEED's numbers, so a funder clears the credibility test in seconds. Organize the work into one repeatable framework, Know-How, Networks, and Ecosystem Building, and rebuild navigation around two plain questions, Who We Are and What We Do, so each audience self-selects in a single click.
Deliver on WordPress with a self-service CMS, written documentation, and training, so a small team can publish, restructure, and run campaigns without an agency retainer. Wire the editorial surface to Salesforce so readers convert into newsletter subscribers, CEED's core engagement channel.
By 2019, CEED's headquarters site and its country sites had each been built separately, at different times, to different standards. They competed with one another for the same search terms, the same donors, and the same entrepreneurs. The flagship site was dense with content, thin on hierarchy, and gave a prospective funder no fast route to the proof they came looking for.
WANDR was engaged in December 2019. The project kicked off in January 2020 with CEED's leadership travelling to Los Angeles for a full-day, in-person design thinking workshop. The engagement covered SEO strategy, information architecture, wireframes, art direction, UI/UX design, WordPress development with Yoast and Salesforce integration, and a CMS handoff, followed by a server migration that carried the new site live in spring 2020.
The engagement closed with a complete handoff package: page designs across 20+ unique templates, research documentation, a trust architecture framework, a design system, and an implementation plan ordered by impact.
Source: Semrush, ceed-global.org, worldwide organic. Baseline is the 2018 monthly average. Peak traffic September 2021, peak keywords July 2021.
We came to WANDR for a website and left with a strategy. They showed us our own sites were competing with each other, then rebuilt the flagship so that funders and entrepreneurs each found what they came for.
