SEO for Higher Education (EdTech): A Full Case Study
Table of Contents
It used to be easy to generate high quality leads with one simple funnel. A single piece of content, hyped up on social media.. and BOOM! Pipeline full.
But the market is getting noisier every day — and prospect’s attention harder to win.
Most of our clients have previously relied heavily on Facebook Ad campaigns to generate leads. Facebook Ads can be effective for lead generation, but without a proper content funnel they can be a massive budgetary dump.
Instead, we push our higher education clients to first invest in a “student journey” content framework. Organic growth takes more time, but when executed properly it always provides a higher ROI in the long run (usually in the multiple digits).
In this post we’ll walk you through the exact strategies we used to grow organic traffic by 300%, resulting in a 29X ROI for the business, inside of six months.
Want to see how your Ed Tech website compares to competitors of similar size and ranking power?
Make sure to have a look at our Ed Tech SEO & Content Marketing Benchmarks report..
Want to see how your Ed Tech Website stack up to the competition?
Check out our free Ed Tech SEO Benchmarks Report:
THE CHALLENGE
The client in this case was an app-based MBA program. The product is sold directly to students as well as to enterprises as a corporate training / learning solution.
To say this Ed Tech startup was entering a challenging market would be a massive understatement. They’d be competing with well established, top tier Ivy League programs. A market deeply entrenched with centuries old brand names like Harvard business school.
The business retained JourneyEngine Inc to generate organic interest in their programs and fill their funnel with qualified leads from two core markets;
MBA Student Prospects (End Users)
Enterprise Learning Executives (B2B Decision Makers)
Like every client engagement, we began by running our proprietary deep-dive DISCOVERY process — a digital strategy roadmap including a comprehensive Website Quality Audit and ROI Forecast report.
It didn’t take us long to diagnose why past marketing efforts were not generating enough leads
Misaligned CONTENT
Lack of the proper PROMOTION
Content strategy is one of the most common issues among our clients.
In order to generate leads from organic traffic, it’s first necessary to develop content that will attract the right type of users.
Content needs to nurture website visitors into qualified sales leads. It needs to be present at every stage in the buyer journey, not just “bottom funnel” sales pages.
This client was already creating content. But it wasn’t properly targeted to provide value to their target audience.
The content they’d created was highly technical; the intricacies of their platform’s technology, pedagogy.. etc.
It makes sense that their team was excited about the innovations.. but their prospect’s pain point weren’t related to pedagogy and technical features. And without tying those features to their customer’s pain points, it was impossible for them to drive leads.
Instead, we set to focus on developing content to address their prospects problems and story-sell the business as the ideal solution for their desired result.
Results like;
career progression
salary improvement
job satisfaction
team development and
business growth
Our plan was to build and promote this content across all stages of the customer journey:
THE SOLUTION
We follow a five part framework for organic business growth, each with their own tasks and actions.
In the interest of time, we’re going to focus on three core processes for this study;
Measurement Plan
ALL marketing campaigns should begin and end with a detailed measurement plan — a system to track the campaigns performance against pre defined target objectives.
We’ve built a proprietary, organic marketing data pipeline for tech businesses that shows the performance of an SEO + Content campaign, from start to finish, in real-time.
The reports give transparency into which assets are driving organic engagement/leads, and how those assets are progressing over time.
2. Content Strategy + Execution
After researching the businesses ideal prospects, we planned content around four “pillars”, each representing a different audience with unique problems to solve.
For each pillar, we created a series of content “Clusters”, in the form of different content tactics
Expert guides
Tools
Templates
Roundups
Infographics
Expert Interviews
Video Trainings..
Each content cluster achieves three things;
Solves a specific problem for the intended audience
Introduces the business as the ideal long-term solution to the prospects overarching goal
Gently nurtures the prospect and prepares them for the next stage of their journey with the business
For this client, our content strategy outlined:
6 months of content clusters (new, existing, updates)
Full content calendar with assigned deadlines for writers
In-depth content briefs for each topic
There’s no “magic” to it — the process is really dead simple to understand.
The reason most marketers fail at organic growth isn’t due to a lack of understanding of the theory.. It’s an inability to execute on a consistent basis.
Structure, organization and accountability in their processes are the key to winning at content marketing.
3. Link Outreach + Promotion
Once content production and publishing started to gain momentum, the next step was to establish the business as an authority within the space.
We follow a tiered, white hat structure for link building and outreach, in order to gain powerful partner promotions and build organic traffic to our Pillar and Cluster content.
Our promotion takes a number of forms;
Manually placed “HERD” promotions within community forums related to business education
Broken links on top industry publications
Open contributor roles on top business education publications
Link reclamation campaigns
Since the content was positioned properly for their audience, publishers were happy to oblige.
We landed links from some of the top publishers in the business education space, averaging 12 links per month
In fact, even competing programs like NYU and Cornell University agreed to promote our content assets to their audiences.
THE OUTCOMES
✅ Page 1 Ranking on Target Keywords for all Content Pillars.
📈 3X the Organic Site Traffic (Hockey-Stick Growth)
(Including a 30X lift in traffic to blog pages).
💲 PPC Value Upwards of $100K per Month (Ahrefs).
💰 20X Increase in Conversion Value (per Google Analytics).
🔄 29X ROI for JourneyEngine’s Content + SEO Service.
WANT RESULTS LIKE THIS?
If your business needs more quality leads from organic traffic, you deserve to have a conversation with us.
Journey Engine has been recognized among the Top Los Angeles SEO agencies by ranking authorities including DesignRush, Clutch, Digital.com and SEOBlog
We’re currently running a limited special promotion on our ROI projection report.
Click below to learn more or Get In Touch for a free introductory consult.
