Said Business School

Said Business School is a leading provider of management education and is consistently ranked one of the world’s top business schools. For over 20 years, the school has delivered a range of graduate and undergraduate business management courses to students from the UK and around the globe.

The challenge

The school were struggling to find the right candidates for their MBA and Executive MBA courses. Over the course of 12 months, we were tasked with building and executing an SEO strategy that would raise the organic visibility of these two programmes, and the school in general.

The strategy

Our strategy to achieve these objectives was split into three main areas: technical SEO, content SEO and gaining a wider understanding of the school.

1. Technical strategy

During our technical audit, we identified various crawling and indexing issues, and that more needed to be done in terms of internal linking across the site.

To monitor changes and progress in our technical SEO, we used Google Search Console to create reports core technical issues, such as page speed, indexed pages, crawl errors, and mobile responsiveness.

These reports were then used to prioritise improvements that could help optimise the website for search engines.

2. Content strategy

Content creation, quality and targeting were all issues for the school, not just for the MBA and Executive MBA programmes, but for most of their offerings.

To help prioritise the content work, we pulled keyword data for the primary keywords for the MBA and Executive MBA programmes. These were then divided into three tiers, allowing us to tackle the key pieces of content first.

This data driven approach meant that we could ensure high-quality content was written for their target audience, and on the most crucial pages.

3. Wider business understanding

We worked closely with the school’s internal marketing team and senior management to thoroughly understand their business and student audiences. We dedicated time to discovering what applicants were looking for in an MBA programme, using SEO as criteria for which keyword variants and questions to prioritise.

We improved the website structurally for both search engines and users, and helped to educate the internal marketing team on SEO best practices. We also ran several SEO workshops for the main departmental editors at the school, helping them to create better content in the future for search engines that would raise brand awareness and increase traffic.

We also reported on technical improvements through a reporting dashboard by showcasing technical metrics, and how they were moving in a positive direction.

The result

We’re proud of what we achieved within 12 months, and the work we carried out achieved a 10% increase in enquiries for the MBA programme and a 12% increase for the Executive MBA.

This meant the school achieved its intake targets for the academic year ahead, and could look forward to a greater number of enquiries in subsequent application cycles.