The Problem
The North American Trade Schools marketing team excelled at offline advertising and TV commercials, mailers, and other offline channels historically yielded strong results. As an increasing number of prospective students turned to the web; however, they needed to strengthen their digital presence.
Their team created a website that combined materials from their course catalog and visitor’s brochure. While better than nothing, the website failed to truly amplify their recruiting abilities. It was unoptimized, underutilized, and failing to attract new prospects.
The Solution
Our number one recommendation was to identify low competition keywords used by prospective students and optimize each page’s on-page and off-page elements for that specific keyword. Our team conducted some keyword research and developed a Keyword Universe that revealed commonalities amongst prospective students’ search queries. We nominated target keywords for each existing page and optimized them accordingly.
To optimize the pages, we first updated each page’s metadata to include the target keyword. We also included a well-written hook in the metadata that would entice the searcher to click on that result. We then optimized the on-page content by adding contextually important keywords and building internal links to and from related pages.
The Results
The SEO Backbone had an immediate impact on the website’s relevance for important search queries. Visits more than quadrupled—up 469.79%—from the 30 day period preceding the SEO Backbone!
After stabilizing, we were then able to start the second phase of our SEO activities—content publishing. The SEO Backbone was pulling a huge influx of new student prospects to the updated pages.
