Our redesign lifted CEED's site from roughly 420 to a peak of 1,934 monthly organic visits, a rise of about 360%, and unified a fragmented network into one flagship.
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.
A single network that looked online like thirty unrelated ones.
A content-heavy flagship site, a sprawl of separately built country sites, and no shared strategy holding them together, so the network competed against itself for search, attention, and donors.
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. A funder evaluating credibility and an entrepreneur looking for a programme arrived through the same undifferentiated experience.
Around 40% of traffic was mobile, yet the experience was not designed mobile first. CEED's two goals, validating impact to funders and growing newsletter subscriptions, had no structured path to either.
Discovery opened with the Los Angeles workshop, CEED's leadership in the room rather than on a call, working through value proposition, personas, risk mapping, 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.
Roughly 40% of visits already arrived on mobile, against a site built for desktop reading. The fastest-growing surface had the least support.
The two core audiences arrived with opposite jobs and were handed identical navigation and identical calls to action, so neither was served well.
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, the primary audience. Weighing whether CEED is a credible, high-impact partner. The question: can I trust this organization with capital?
Founders in emerging and transition markets. Looking for programmes, mentorship, and community, and a clear route in.
Other organizations in the entrepreneurship development space, benchmarking CEED's model, reach, and results.
Build a geography-specific SEO strategy so headquarters and country content target distinct terms and regions. The network's pages reinforce each other's authority rather than cannibalizing it, anchored by achievable near-term keywords and evergreen, link-worthy content.
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, training, and documentation, so a small team can publish and run campaigns without an agency retainer. The editorial surface was wired to Salesforce to convert readers into newsletter subscribers, and the whole build shipped mobile first on a new, faster, secure hosting foundation.
CEED did not need a prettier website. It needed to stop being thirty front doors and start being one network. Once the country sites stopped competing with the flagship for search and attention, and the homepage led with the collective impact, the whole became more credible than the sum of its parts. A better looking page helps once. A network that reinforces itself compounds.
Following the relaunch, ceed-global.org recorded the strongest organic search performance in its history, sustained across 2020 and 2021.
Traffic and keyword figures are Semrush estimates for ceed-global.org, worldwide organic. Baseline is the 2018 monthly average; peaks fall in 2020 to 2021. The upward trend begins shortly before launch, so the relaunch coincided with and sustained the site's best-ever performance.
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.
