+210% INCREASE IN ORGANIC LEADS & +351% IN ORGANIC TRAFFIC

Client Overview

Sustainability Management School (SUMAS) is the first-ever business school to launch high-level academic education in Sustainability and Management. They approached us in 2018 to help gain visibility in a brutally competitive online space. The goal was to rank them on top of the SERPs for relevant keywords to their sustainability programs and grow their overall organic traffic through content marketing.

Services

The Challenge

The site had a blog that was rarely updated and when it was, the majority were news about the school activities. We wanted to build out engaging pages to support the main keywords targeted by program pages.
Program pages (in comparison to competitors locally and internationally) were “thin” and didn't offer much value for users or search engines. This was an industry that had a lot of questions and additional searches (i.e. tuition fees, career opportunities) tacked on to degree program searches – these pages needed to be improved in order to rank.
The site had a ton of on-page & technical issues such as: the site not loading properly in mobile devices, HTTPs wasn’t implemented, the site took 14 seconds to load, duplicate content from the dev staging site, all its page titles being duplicates, ⅔ of the pages lacking any meta description and more.
SUMAS was already doing a lot of partnerships and events but didn't utilize them for SEO. There was a huge opportunity to reach out to these partners & also create content around different sustainability topics to use them as a source of links.

What did we do?

Technical SEO: An improved website architecture and cross-website strategy to support international targeting (hreflang implementation, etc). In addition, the site was built on a commercial theme that used a lot of third-party plugins causing a lot of issues with speed performance, duplicate content, internal linking, etc. Our team had to build custom pages and reduce the number of plugins that were causing the majority of technical issues.
Content Marketing: Consistent creation of supporting content related to the “top and middle of funnel” keywords targeted by program pages.
Link Building: We started by using the existing partnerships and were able to secure links on most of them. Next, we continued with two separate link outreach campaigns, targeting links from guest posts and resource pages. We were able to get on avg. 10 new links per month.