Studential

Studential is an international education resource founded on the principles of helping school and college students with their learning journey. Specialising in university applications, they have spent over 20 years providing invaluable information and advice to pupils, parents and teachers across the UK and beyond.

The challenge

While already well-known in the education sector for their valuable information and advice on applying to university, Studential wanted to increase their organic keyword rankings for words not related to UCAS personal statement writing.

Studential wanted to implement a strategy that would work towards an end goal of growing 2016’s traffic by 20% by 2018.

We had a challenge in that competitor websites already ranked well for some of these target keywords, although we still started to see success early.

Specifically, our objectives were to:

1. Match or exceed 2016’s monthly traffic figures by 2017.
2. Improve overall organic visibility as recorded in SEMRush, which is a good barometer of site performance.
3. Optimise all agreed pages within a set deadline to ensure that changes could be uploaded to the site in time to measure impact in 2017.

The strategy

The first two months of working together were focussed on optimising copy for 50 key pages that were not related to personal statements. From these, we found:

• Headings, subtitles, meta data and the copy itself had not been optimised for search engines.
• We used a Google Sheet to track the content and measure our success in optimising it.
• Following our own optimisation, we carried out our own competitor gap analysis to see where competitors were outperforming Studential.
• From this analysis, we identified another 36 pages that could be optimised, a majority of which had not already been looked at in our previous optimisation work.
• Alongside these large scale content optimisation projects, we also supported Studential by optimising their blog content and suggesting titles for new content that would help them achieve further growth in 2018.
• We also carried out a full technical audit at the beginning of our time together, and supported the Studential team as they implemented recommendations that were feasible for them to action.

The results

• We started to meet and exceed 2016 traffic with a 7.35% increase over the month of October.
• 8.6% increase in organic visibility (Oct 2016 v Oct 2015).