How an academy site saw a 300% rise in quality search traffic
An education website case study which shows how foundational fixes can generate high ROI
Client's background
The client ran a vocational training academy, in business for over 20 years. They are a very traditional business, located at a second level of a food centre.
Their goals
They wanted to get more students to sign up for their beauty and sports massage courses. Since there was very little walk-in customers, they relied on their website to drive awareness of new classes and for students to apply online.
Our objectives
- Build brand awareness and drive targeted search traffic
- Increase the number of leads that the website converts i.e. get more potentially interested students to contact the academy
The problem
What happens when a business owner is too busy focusing on providing the best education for his students, and had neglected digital marketing?
The client had noticed that sign ups for their courses via their website had gradually decreased over time. For years, they had relied on their brand recognition to attract new students. When that traffic started drying up, they realized they needed to start investing in digital marketing.
The first problem we had to fix was poor technical SEO. The website had a number of technical issues that prevented search engines from correctly crawling and indexing pages. Duplicate content and broken links were present.
Site structure and layout also provided poor user experience.
Training course pages had poor On-Page SEO – content and copywriting on key pages did not properly convey the topic of the page.
The challenge
We recommended a full website revamp, but the budget did not allow this. Due to the website being built on a custom CMS, recommended technical fixes also had to go through the client’s developers (added another layer of complexity in execution and communication).
On top of that, the budget was tight, so we had to prioritize critical fixes, and had to give up on some of our recommended marketing activities.
The solution
Before any other digital marketing activities should be done, we felt that building the foundation of the website was key.
Fixing technical SEO issues was our main priority. We started with a full website audit and came up with a list of recommendations for their developers to implement. We focused on fixing navigation issues, broken links, and duplicate content.
Through indepth keyword research and on-page SEO, we optimized all their main course pages for the right keywords.
A full website revamp was not an option, but we managed to make minor changes to page layouts and internal site structure to improve user experience.
The results
Within a month, course pages started to rank for their relevant search keywords. Search traffic to course pages rose by 23% when compared to the previous year.
When comparing year-on-year improvements in organic search traffic, we noticed a 300% increase in people who visited their website. This increase is from people landing on their landing pages, not the blog!
The quality of leads improved too – as people who landed on course pages were specifically searching for the exact courses.
What did we achieve?
TL;DR
