Creating a high-ranking website involves a combination of effective SEO strategies, quality content, and a user-friendly design.
This case study explores how to build a website like Extinction Rebellion (XR)—a decentralized, international, and politically non-partisan movement—and make it rank higher using SEO strategies, link building, and modern SEO tools.
What is Extinction Rebellion?
Extinction Rebellion is a decentralized, international, and politically non-partisan movement that uses non-violent civil disobedience to compel government action on climate change and biodiversity loss. Founded in the UK in May 2018, it has since spread to over 80 countries.
Our team at MagicSpace SEO worked to redesign, rebuild, and optimize the Extinction Rebellion website for the global movement. Our goal was to consolidate all the smaller Extinction Rebellion websites—different per country, city, and region—into one global website for a more cohesive and consistent message.
With a powerful backlink strategy leveraging country-level websites, we were able to push link juice to the global website. This helped Extinction Rebellion achieve the highest website authority among decentralized climate change movements.
Extinction Rebellion's website is a model of effective communication and engagement. It is clear, concise, and filled with actionable information about their cause. The site is decentralized, allowing anyone who agrees with their ten core principles to act as part of XR. This approach fosters a sense of community and shared responsibility, which can be a powerful tool for engagement and conversion.
SEO Strategy
Building an SEO strategy around sustainability helps ensure your website cues Expertise, Authority, and Trust (EAT). This involves creating content that is honest, transparent, and focused on your organization's sustainability efforts.
Our SEO strategy focused on:
- Programmatic SEO (course): Listing each country-level website on the global website.
- Green Hosting: Choosing hosting providers powered by renewable energy sources. The Extinction Rebellion website is hosted in Switzerland and is 100% powered by renewable energy.
- Backlinks: We used a robust link building strategy. For AI-powered backlink outreach, LinkDR is a great tool to automate and scale your link building efforts.
- Content marketing: Weekly newsletters, a press team, and regular blog posts were all part of our content marketing strategy. For creating compelling visuals and presentations, AI presentation makers can be incredibly useful.
Some of our SEO tips we learned from this and our NSFW AI Chat project include:
- Use SEO tools: SEO research tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush can help you find the best keywords to target for your website.
- Optimize for Core Web Vitals: Ensure your site loads quickly, is visually stable, and responds promptly to user input. Use tools like PageSpeed Insights to identify and fix performance issues.
- Leverage Structured Data: Add schema.org structured data to your pages to help search engines better understand your content and improve your appearance in search results.
- Prioritize Accessibility: Make your website accessible to all users by following WCAG guidelines. This not only broadens your audience but can also positively impact SEO.
- Internal Linking: Use clear, descriptive internal links to connect related content. This helps users navigate your site and assists search engines in crawling and indexing your pages.
- Regularly Update Content: Keep your content fresh and relevant. Update key pages with new information, statistics, and resources to maintain authority and ranking.
- Monitor Analytics: Track your SEO performance using Google Search Console and Google Analytics. Use insights to refine your strategy and identify new opportunities.
Conclusion
We take climate change seriously and work with clients who are committed to sustainability and reducing their carbon footprint, such as Extinction Rebellion.
If you're interested in learning more about how to reduce your carbon footprint and improve your website's SEO, please reach out.
WRITTEN BY:
Ilias is a former CTO turned SEO strategist who specializes in building scalable content systems that rank, convert, and compound. He's founded multiple ventures including LinkDR (AI-powered backlinks), MagicSpace SEO (CRO-focused agency), AISEOTracker (SEO monitoring), and GenPPT (AI presentations).
He's led SEO and content projects for 50+ brands, producing growth systems that drive 300%+ organic traffic increases through systematic conversion psychology and technical optimization.
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