Content optimisation strategy for Summer Boarding Courses to combat cannibalisation and encourage organic rankings and conversions.

Summer School SEO

The methods students use in researching the next steps of their education have changed, and an education digital marketing strategy is now essential. SEO for Universities and Colleges is becoming increasingly necessary to stand out from other institutions in the race to attract prospective students in the top ranking positions of search results. Local SEO, deep content, paid search strategies and a responsive website are a priority with the requirement to showcase the best parts of your campus early in a student's investigatory phase.

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+345 Top 10 keywords

+169 Top 3 keywords

+163% Site traffic

Challenge

Summer Boarding Courses has offices in both London and Leeds and offers students aged 6-17 summer school programmes across the South East of England.

They organise exciting placements in top UK private schools such as Eton and world-renowned universities, including Cambridge and Oxford.

In a growing market, Summer Boarding Courses looked to us to help regain their visibility against their increasing competition after suffering a loss of rankings and authority.

Following this, they wanted to optimise their site to encourage conversions.

To recapture their authority with the search engines, the team approached the site in two ways...

Solution

Firstly, the team entered the back-end of the site to diagnose why it was suffering from authority loss and a decrease in rankings. Secondly, they re-optimised the course and campus pages to increase conversions amongst site users.

The team completed a content, competitor and technical audit, and it was during this time that they noticed the site was suffering from cannibalisation issues. This explained the site’s authority and ranking issues.

They got to work on the cannibalisation issues by restructuring the metadata across the landing pages and summer school pages.

Time was spent consolidating several pages to help increase content relevance and decrease the chances of page cannibalisation. This was reinforced by improving the internal linking to the canonical versions of pages.

As part of increasing authority and decreasing cannibalisation, reoptimising course and campus pages was key. After a new wireframe was approved by the client, the team began to implement new copy for the site too, improving the user journey and optimising for conversions (whilst keeping cannibalisation in mind).

Result

The new wireframe and extensive optimisations allowed both the cannibalisation issues to be fixed and site users to be converted with excellent effect.

Not only was the client incredibly happy to see both on-page and off-page changes, but they were ecstatic to witness their desired results come to fruition.

The number of position 3 rankings increased by 169, and the top 10 positions increased from 1073 to 1418!

Summer Boarding Courses also saw site users increase by a massive 163%. Overall, a very successful campaign.