+550% INCREASE IN ORGANIC LEADS & +2,500% IN ORGANIC TRAFFIC

Client Overview

This is a Washington DC-based private, non-profit university that offers the very best in higher education programs to US and international students at its centrally located campus. Their organic traffic was branded only and they brought us to help them diversify their lead acquisition channels (with a strong focus on SEO growth).

Services

The Challenge

Technical / On-page SEO We identified various indexation issues, where landing pages used in Paid Search/Social campaigns were indexed and got some clicks. There were two pages (versions) for each program page (duplicates) that were indexed in search results, and this was confusing for Google as they didn't know which one they should rank. Page speed wasn't ideal either. Pages weren't targeting any specific keyword, and a dozen of them were duplicates (published drafts) as well.
Content There was a 'News' section on the site where the staff published content about recent events at the campus. There wasn't any non-news content that would provide helpful information for students who are interested in a specific degree/program but still have questions or aren't convinced that they found the right option yet.
Link Building Their website was relatively new, and they didn't do any SEO or link building before. In order for us to compete, we needed to double the link profile and we'd need to be creative on how we approach link building.

What did we do?

Technical / On-page SEO
We fixed the issue with duplicate program pages, which immediately improved the rankings/performance for those pages. We also deindexed the landing pages (and any other irrelevant page) from the search results. We did technical optimizations to improve page speed and, in the 2nd year, also migrated the site to a new server for better performance. We did on-page optimizations (titles, descriptions, internal linking, headings) for program pages and blog content.
Content
We developed a content strategy that targeted four different personas defined in the SEO strategy. We started creating and publishing content regularly and once the strategy proved that it can generate traffic and leads that convert to students, we scaled that even more. In the 2nd year, we designed and developed a new blog that was better suited for the needs of our campaign. Migration to the new blog was executed flawlessly and this resulted in another bump in traffic & leads.
Link Building
The best way to build links is by creating great content that people want to share. This is what we did. We identified highly linkable topics, made the best content for those topics, and optimized it very well to rank in top positions. This then brought us great & relevant links week after week with zero promotion.