From an initial website recovery project to ongoing optimisation improvements and sustained results.
By combining page-level optimisation that focuses on core business growth opportunities, with technical SEO best practice, the following YoY improvements have been seen:
- Halted declining organic traffic - fully recovered in the first 4 months
- 49% of target terms saw improved rankings
- 36% increase in organic traffic during peak months
- 124% increase prospectus requests
- 10% increase to Open Day bookings
- 21,000+ goal completions included organic as a channel within the top 50 conversion paths
- 34% of overall goal completions included organic traffic as an assisted conversion (not last-click)
their challenge
The initial challenge facing ARU was a 30% decline in organic traffic year-on-year which had no signs of slowing down and had begun to gather momentum.
Initial audits of the site revealed several technical issues, including a large number of redirects implemented as 302's (temporary) and not 301's (permanent).
The next challenge was ensuring the website continued to grow and reach a larger audience within the ever-competitive education sector.
our solution
All technical issues were sent to ARU’s development team, with clear guidance into how these can be resolved. Our Experience experts continually ran technical housekeeping checks to follow-up on the impacts the resolutions had on the sites performance and users behaviour.
We identified high-value courses as a core area for growth and keyword research. We also included courses that had seen reductions in organic traffic year-on-year that were a contributing factor to declining stats. These provided a new suite of target keyword sets.
A review of search intent was also conducted and analysed to understand the value of existing landing page content versus user expectations.
A solid strategy was devised to update landing page content based on this research and a review of search intent.
All outputs from course selection, search intent, and strategy to update landing pages allowed us to present an extensive list of pages that was woven into a content optimisation roadmap.
results
Including both high value and year-on-year declining courses acted as a double-edged sword. We were able to halt the decline in organic traffic and use the content optimisation roadmap to gain momentum to begin the land and expand challenge. This saw us overcome our second challenge in having the website continue to grow and reach a larger audience within the ever-competitive education sector.
