9/2/25
Adoption, Accelerated: The Digital Makeover That’s Changing Families Forever
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One of America’s largest adoption agencies removed digital friction to scale its mission. A rebuilt adoption journey, dominant search visibility, and automated systems increased conversions, engagement, and capacity so more families could move forward faster.
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For 135 years, one of America's leading adoption centers has delivered the most meaningful outcome imaginable: a child finding a family.
Its mission was clear. Its reputation was earned.
Its digital systems were not keeping up.
As adoption increasingly begins online, the agency faced a hard truth: growth was no longer limited by demand, but by digital capacity.
Upstart13 was brought in to change that.
The Before: When Mission Outpaces Systems
The agency’s challenges were systemic, not superficial.
Families were abandoning applications because the process was slow, confusing, and fragmented.
Staff were spending critical time on manual coordination instead of family support.
Despite national scale, the agency was nearly invisible in high-intent adoption searches.
This wasn’t a branding issue, the agency had the legacy and credibility earned by decades of work. It was a throughput problem. Every broken handoff reduced the number of families the agency could realistically serve.
The Intervention
We treated the organization like a scale up, with a clear and non-negotiable objective: remove friction wherever it existed and allow the mission to move at the speed families needed.
Digital experience overhaul
We rebuilt and relaunched the agency’s core digital platforms with a mobile-first, self-service approach. Families could move cleanly from discovery to application to engagement without stalled steps or broken workflows.
Search as a growth engine
The agency shifted from nearly invisible to indispensable. Average rankings jumped from position 97 to 14.5 across critical adoption terms, pushing competitors off page one and placing the agency where families actually search.
Data cleanup and protection
We removed toxic backlinks at scale, reducing harmful links from 46 percent of the profile to just 1.7 percent. This stabilized domain authority and ensured future growth rested on a defensible foundation.
Growth that actually matters
560 new keywords indexed.
More than 1.4 million Google impressions in six months.
34 top-three rankings and 170 top-ten rankings.
Not vanity traffic. These were families actively seeking adoption support and finding the agency at the moment it mattered most.
The After: Scale Without Compromise
The impact showed up quickly and across the organization.
Organic user revenue increased 27.6% year over year, proving that increased visibility translated into real outcomes, not just traffic.
Engagement rose 14%, meaning fewer families dropped off mid-process and more completed the journey.
Operationally, automation reduced internal load, allowing the same team to support more families without adding headcount or burnout.
On the search front, the agency secured category leadership. High-intent terms like “adoption” and “kids for adoption” generated more than 447 additional clicks and climbed into top positions, reaching average rankings of #3.9 and #5.1.
In Their Words
“It has been so nice to feel validated in a lot of my frustrations and know that we can improve and fix these things. You have been so quick to communicate and help.”
Customer Service Manager
Today, America’s largest adoption agency operates on a modern, mobile-first platform with digital reach that finally matches its national footprint.
More families reached.
More children placed.
More impact delivered, without compromising care.
When technology stops getting in the way, missions move faster.
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