THE GOAL
Drive more prospect inquiries with organic site improvements
THE CLIENT
A leader in career training institutions with 16 campuses nationwide.
THE CHALLENGE
The career college had a great wealth of website content speaking to a variety of different audiences. But when Google released new algorithm updates, the search engine giant quickly lowered its perceived value of the school’s organic presence. Organic traffic volume reached a historic low because the website wasn’t up to new SEO standards. Statwax partnered with the college to prioritize and fix organic losses, with the need to work as quickly as possible to avoid missing organic leads.
THE STRATEGY
First, Statwax wanted to get a deep understanding of the college’s site structure and content strategy. Unsatisfied with data alone, the team flew to the school’s HQ. The face to face meeting allowed us to map out the college’s entire institutional content strategy and how it ties into SEO. It also allowed us to explain the why and how of the SEO update, making it easy for upper leadership to understand and support changes moving forward.
Next, we conducted a complete audit of the college’s website and analytics, noting every weakness as well as opportunity. This detailed understanding of the school’s needs and its prospects’ needs, allowed us to prioritize the SEO fixes that would make an impact where the two intersected and were most likely to turn connections into conversions.
The top priorities were:
- Addressing site architecture
- Optimizing low quality content
- Bolstering the backlink portfolio
- Aligning content strategy with SEO needs
As we made our way through these steps, a surprising discovery emerged. The college’s previous organic presence was focused on creating content in five topic areas. But it turned out the category receiving the most creation effort (accounting for roughly 35% of articles) was only driving a small portion (11%) of organic leads from prospective students.
Adjusting for this discovery, along with implementing best practices that mirrored the institution’s goals, resulted in monumental leaps in site visibility, new users, and leads. On top of that, it allowed the college to restructure their internal strategy so that content efforts were spent in areas most likely to drive leads, with less time investment.
THE TAKEAWAY
Successful SEO in higher education isn’t simply about the technical best practices. A forward-thinking strategy that takes your school’s goals and your prospect’s actual, data-based behavior into account is the best way to grow organic visibility and leads. And following that path can also help your internal web and content teams drive more leads, with less effort.
Want to see how many more inquiries you can get by optimizing your SEO? Let’s start a conversation.
