How we increased a college’s website traffic by 1639%? 

Then this case study is for you!

Like many clients of ours, this website didn’t come to us with a clean history on Google. Their rankings were dropping, their indexed keywords were falling off, and their overall business was hurting.

See how we were able to recover them and turn their traffic around:

Let’s get into it!

Background

This is a college website with several locations based out of California. They focus on skilled trade training.

Most of the terms they want to target have good search volume and are extremely lucrative. However, they were ranking mostly for their Brand Keywords (Their name!) and no traffic from their money keywords (Program names)

Their goal was first to get their traffic back and improve their rankings for a few key pages.

Here’s how we did it:

First Things First – The SEO Audit

The first thing we always do when we get a new site is to audit their SEO history.

This client experienced a significant drop in rankings due to a Google Core Algorithm Update and a very old website.

This site’s rankings were affected due to having thin and duplicate pages with little-to-no content and a very high bounce rate.

This means there is a huge opportunity to win the traffic back!

Focusing On Improving Existing Pages Rankings & Traffic With Easy Keywords

One of the first things we do is looking at how to improve traffic to existing pages.

It’s common to find that many sites are close to ranking and getting traffic, but they just aren’t in the top positions yet.

For this, we ran our analysis and found keywords that the site was ranking for with the following metrics:

• Positions 10-30 with
• KD equal to or less than 30
• Minimum CPC .01

That way, we can find targetable, valuable keywords, and pages on the verge of ranking and quickly improved.

We found 460 potential targets on this site, mostly on the bottom of page 2 through page 3, with CPC between $0.30 and $2.50.

These terms / URLs were primarily training pages leading to specific programs that are available. The keywords have low/medium difficulty, and we could capitalize on these to quickly increase traffic.

Competitive Gap Analysis

The next thing we did was look at keywords that their competitors are targeting, which they were no ranking for, and then focus on building out content for these opportunities.

Most of the top competing college sites in this niche are thin on content, which allowed us to target the easy keywords and create long blog content around them.

Each month we did a combination of high-quality link building and strategic blog content.

SEO Results

After targeting this site’s easy keywords, we’ve bumped many of them to page. 

Here’s an example of their #1 exact match key term that experienced serious movement after the three month result period of using our strategy.

Takeaway

When this client switched over to our SEO service, their organic traffic and traffic value started to increase every month consistently.

We focused on building out quality content on the site and a combination of our link building techniques.

As you can see in the image below, the site’s backlinks, organic keywords, organic traffic, and traffic value are consistently improving as well. If they had to pay for this traffic, it would cost them more than $200K a month!

After a few consistent months of hard work, we’ve recovered this site’s organic traffic, bumped many of their keywords up to page 1, and increased by 1639% organic traffic value since we started 18 months ago!

If you’d like some help with your site (even if you’ve had a penalty or dropped in traffic), you might be interested in our SEO Services. Please contact us to get a full SEO audit of your website and an estimate.

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