Objectives
Distance Learning College (DLC) offers accredited courses and flexible learning options for students across the globe. They offer industry body recognised courses for everything from HR and accountancy, logistics and supply chain management to leadership and management courses.
The online environment is competitive with several other distance learning organisations and all the recognised industry bodies competing for organic search visibility for relevant searches. DLC wanted us to assess their site for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) opportunities and build organic visibility for high intent searches to grow traffic to site and conversions.
- Build organic visibility for high intent, relevant searches
- Increase traffic to site and conversions
Our Approach
Working in collaboration with our agency partners at NORTH, who owned the content development strategy, we assessed DLC’s site ‘fitness’ in terms of technical SEO attributes, ability to rank for core high intent terms and worked to identify content issues.
The initial audit revealed the site wasn’t ranking well for core terms such as:
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CIPS (chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply courses)
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ILM (accredited management courses)
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CILT (chartered institute of Logistics and Transport courses)
In addition there were many instances where pages for different types of qualification for the same levels of course from the same institution were confusing Google and looked like duplicate content, although they weren’t. Ensuring the content wasn’t flagged as duplicate content from a technical perspective was a key issue to be resolved for the whole site.
We performed keyword research and assessed Google analytics and Search Engine Results Page (SERPS) data to understand:
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Which pages were currently Google’s favourite
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Which queries out of Award, Diploma and Certificate were most popular
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Which pages were driving the most traffic and conversions
From this information we created a plan of work for the client to work on differentiating the pages that looked so similar. The key technical optimisation was to use canonicalization cues to tell Google which pages to rank in preference.
Results
The results have been great!
Rankings for key search terms have all improved significantly ensuring DLC ranks on pages 1 or 2 of SERPs for all key qualification terms.
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CILT searches ranking improved by 16 places moving DLC to page 1
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CIPS searches ranking improved by 6 places moving DLC to top half of page 1
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CIPS level 3 courses ranking improved by 4 places to top half of page 1
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CIPS level 5 courses ranking improved by 8 places to position 1 on page 1
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Procurement qualification rankings improved by 8 places moving DLC to top half of page 1
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Accountancy Courses improved 50 places, from 60 to top of page 2.
Impressions and clicks to site improved significantly within a month:
- Clicks to site improved month on month by 192%
- Total organic impressions month on month improved by 271%
- Average position increased by 12% across all keywords
The client was delighted with the progress made.
William Baxter, Web and Platform Manager said:
“We just want to take the time to thank you personally for the improvements we made in such a short space of time."
Clicks to site improved by 192%
Total organic impressions month on month improved by 271%
Average position increased by 12% across all keywords
Interested in seeing what we can do for you? Get in touch and let us know about your requirements today.
