Uniting Vic.Tas SEO Case Study

How we helped one of Victoria and Tasmania's largest community service organisations consolidate, migrate and grow their online presence across hundreds of services and locations.

Uniting Vic.Tas is the community services arm of the Uniting Church in Australia across Victoria and Tasmania. Formed through the consolidation of 21 UnitingCare agencies, the organisation encompasses more than 7,000 employees and volunteers delivering over 770 programs and services to 200,000 people across aged care, disability support, employment services, early learning, foster care, homelessness support, and advocacy.

Each of those service areas has its own audience, its own competitive landscape, and its own search behaviour. That breadth is what makes this engagement unique, and what makes it genuinely complex.

This wasn't a straightforward SEO campaign. When Optimising first partnered with Uniting, the organisation was consolidating 21 separate agencies under one brand. That meant 25+ legacy websites, each with their own domain authority, content, link profiles and technical setups, all needing to be brought together without losing the organic equity those individual brands had built over years.

The ongoing SEO challenge was equally demanding. Dozens of distinct service verticals, each with different audiences and competitors. Physical locations across two states. A separate Early Learning Centre subdomain with 38+ individual centres. Multiple fundraising and advocacy priorities competing for attention. And a small internal team managing it all.

Website Migration and Consolidation

The foundation was getting the migration right. We planned and executed a staged migration of legacy sites including Wesley Mission Victoria, Prahran Mission, Kildonan and others, covering pre-migration audits, redirect mapping across thousands of pages, content migration, post-launch monitoring, and link reclamation from decommissioned domains.

The result was a consolidated presence under unitingvictas.org.au that preserved the collective authority of the legacy brands while creating a unified platform for growth.

Multi-Vertical SEO

Each service area required its own keyword research, competitive analysis, and content strategy. We developed targeted approaches across foster care and kinship, enterprise partnerships and employment services, disability employment, early learning, homelessness and housing, aged care, and advocacy. For key verticals like Employment Services, we conducted full SEO audits with competitor analysis and strategic roadmaps.

Local SEO for Early Learning Centres

With 38+ centres across Victoria and Tasmania, each needed to compete in its own local market while maintaining brand consistency. We built a systematic approach covering locally optimised content for each centre, suburb-specific keyword targeting, Google Business Profile management, and supplementary content plans.

Content Strategy

We developed thought-leadership content targeting employment and workplace training topics, conducted fundraising keyword research across homelessness, family violence and cost of living, and built out advocacy and informational content across the site.

The main site saw 50% organic traffic growth, from approximately 11,300 to nearly 17,000 monthly organic visits. Over 12,600 organic keywords ranking, with 411 in the top 3 positions.

The Early Learning subdomain achieved 39% organic traffic growth which is very strong performance for a niche subdomain competing in highly localised markets.

Starting from a brand-new domain, we built Uniting Vic.Tas to a Domain Rating of 66 through strategic link reclamation, content that earned natural links, and consistent technical health maintenance.

Over more than six years, Optimising has worked as a true extension of the Uniting Vic.Tas digital team. The complexity of this engagement, dozens of service areas, multiple sites, competing priorities, physical locations across two states, is exactly the kind of challenge that requires a collaborative, long-term approach. There's no shortcut to understanding an organisation this large and this diverse. It takes time, trust, and a willingness to get across the details.

For Uniting, that means a team who understands the difference between a foster care enquiry and an early learning enrolment, and who treats every page as an opportunity to connect someone with the support they need.