Immunize.org: Increasing Access to Critical Immunization Information

Immunize.org increases immunization rates and prevents disease by providing up-to-date educational materials to vaccine providers, both for their practice and patients. Through partnerships with the CDC and other organizations, they actively promote the safety, effectiveness, and use of vaccines and advocate for policies that increase vaccination.

The project also included a partner website, Vaccineinformation.org, with a similar mission but with language and messaging crafted for a less clinical audience. The websites were developed consecutively, allowing the partner site to use a similar design system, including font choices and the color palette.

Through our comprehensive research and discovery process, we analyzed existing and recommended technologies and identified several critical pain points requiring innovative solutions.

As the site was not mobile-friendly, we employed our mobile-first approach to design a modern, responsive website that ensure users had easy access to critical information using any device in any scenario.

We also looked closely at website hosting, content management systems, and due to the vast amount of content, search indexing solutions.

Know Your User, Know Your Content

You must know your users to make something that works for them. Through stakeholder interviews and usability testing, we discovered users were being presented with an overwhelming amount of information without a clear path.

Organizing a website with this amount of content requires clean, organized navigation. A full-site inventory and audit revealed a clear picture — we needed to reduce content overwhelm and streamline the user experience.

We first restructured the content into clearly defined categories and created new navigation labels to remove redundancies and confusion. We also eliminated information overload through progressive disclosure design principles to guide users on their journey.

With these practices in place, the Immunize team saw a 13.4% jump in the site’s Net Promoter Score — a measure of customer satisfaction and loyalty — which increased from 67 before launch to 76 post-launch.

Powerful Site Search

The original search capability was by keyword only.

We chose an open-source search server with a 99.9% uptime guarantee. It offers full-text search, real-time or batch indexing, facets, integration with WordPress, and it can handle document search. This is especially important as one of the features of the immunize.org website is a large library of printable PDF documents.

Our UX plan implemented a flexible and scalable solution that involved detailed taxonomy on the back end to produce easy search experiences on the front end. Users can quickly locate what they want using intuitive filtering, including by disease, age, content type, vaccine, and topics.

For example, one highly popular feature is Ask the Experts, which was not previously searchable. We made each question and answer a standalone piece of content — a custom post type — with detailed filters. For these and all content, the taxonomy structure also means related content can be instantly gathered into a single section of a page or as an entire page.

The Immunize.org website uses more than 25 different custom post types to organize the content for the client on the back end and for users on the front end, all of which are now searchable.

Authority and Reputation

Topical authority is part of a search engine optimization strategy to make a website the go-to authority on one or more topics.

There are two main targets for elevating online reputation, users and search engines. Success in one leads to success in the other. Establishing a reputation with users increases visits, which tells search engines your information is valuable. A strong reputation with search engines moves more content in front of potential users.

The site’s expansive content backs up Immunize.org’s topical authority, so we focused on showcasing it through two main channels — the home page, including global content, and SEO.

The home page was designed to promote the organization’s trustworthiness by showcasing their mission, authenticity, and key relationships, including with the CDC. The messaging clearly communicates its purpose and how it serves its audience, with a focus on solutions for its primary audience. Global content, such as the navigation and footer, keeps key information and pathways easily accessible across the site.

Search engine optimization included a highly focused sitemap prioritizing content that answers their audience’s most common search queries. We also recommended complete and unique page-level details such as header hierarchy, internal and external linking, titles and meta descriptions, image alt text, and optimized file naming and URL slugs.

Next Stop, VaccineInformation.org

With Immunize.org in place, we looked at the sister site, Vaccineinformation.org. Immunize.org houses resources for professionals that include materials to be shared with patients, many of which are available on Vaccineinformation.org.

While we used a similar design system, our approach had to veer away from talking directly to health professionals to talking to regular people like you and me. To avoid user confusion, we worked with the client to ensure that terms and other language was used consistently, avoiding jargon. We also kept the site organized around age groups, which we found was the most helpful for parents, while keeping information well organized for all adults.

Both sites rely heavily on trusted external sources of information such as the Centers for Disease Control, World Health Organization, and the American Academy of Pediatrics. To streamline these resources for the client, we created custom post types for external resources so that when a new resource is found and approved, it can be added as a new post and tagged so it feeds into the appropriate location based on age. We used this same approach for each vaccine (disease), video, and personal testimony.

Site Health Score … Blast Off!

With SEO in place and a comprehensive old-to-new URL mapping complete, the Immunize.org Site Health score increased by 48% within the first two months after the launch of the new site.

Semrush’s Site Health score is based on the number of errors and warnings found on a site and their severity. The higher the score, the fewer problems a site has, the better it is optimized for search engines, and the more user-friendly it is.