The Challenge
Our client is in the Edtech business selling innovative online courses for teens in India.
The client came with a requirement to capture organic traffic of students and parents seeking career counseling in India.
They were doing good offline, paid ads but wanted to scale their online organic presence through SEO and lead generation.
Just to remind you there are many Edtech players in India focused on SEO like Byjus, Vedantu, Aakash, and many more.
Result-
Google Search Console snapshot for SEO enthusiasts. 😛
Statistics –
- From 414 to 5,256 clicks in a week
- 11.6X jump in traffic
- Time period – 23rd to 29th Dec ‘22 vs 23rd to 29th Dec ‘21
- 132K Clicks in the last 1 year
- Branded Clicks – 13K
- Non-Branded Clicks – 119KÂ
- From 1,578 to 19,283 Clicks monthly clicks [28 days]
- 11.2X Jump in traffic in Year on Year basis
- Time period – 2nd to 29th Dec ‘22 vs 2nd to 29th Dec ‘21
Establishing E-A-T (Expertise-Authority-Trust)
The branding elements were fantastic in terms of the look and feel of the website. However, establishing oneself as an expert in the field was a top priority.
Signaling on various fronts to Google to generate trust and authority over a topic was the goal; here is how we did it.
Step 1 – Content Strategy
Keyword Research
Using SEMrush, we performed keyword research thoroughly.
Different variations were taken into account, and the topic map was created. Competitor analysis was done to understand how we can crack the space and create value for the client’s prospects.
Content for the full marketing funnel was planned in this stage.
Step 2 – Technical Auditing
Using SEMrush and Screaming Frog, various issues were identified like
- 404 Errors
- Broekn Internal Links
- Broken External Links
- Duplicate pages
- The developers were making pages live for a demo with a dummy URL and then duplicating the page and changing the URL path. This way, both URLs were getting indexed, and duplicate issues were getting created.
- No Meta Descriptions
- Duplicate Meta Descriptions
- All product pages had the same meta descriptions.
- Multiple H1s
- Developers overused H1 while developing the product pages.
- Missing H1s
- In some cases, there were no H1s on product and category pages.
- Page crawl depth of more than 3
- Nearly 30% of pages needed to be internally linked.
- Missing Sitemap
More issues were detected, and all these were taken up with the clients and resolved within the first 45 days. It created a solid base to publish articles and handle higher traffic.
Step 3 – Content Strategy
Setting up an in-house writers’ team.
A few training sessions were held to teach the client’s in-house writers about the requirement of content is there to rank content.
Standard operating procedures were set, and an editor was also trained to proofread and edit the content.
This whole setup is crucial when you, as a company, generate a huge number of articles, maintaining content velocity, which is a part of the SEO strategy.
We used Frase to optimize the content and provide a brief for each article using the same tool.
We used Frase to provide article structures created by giving keywords and country to the tool. It makes an article outline containing the number of words expected, articles ranking on Google’s SERP, and more.
It helps content writers a lot when they research the topic.
Along with the text, the content must be grammatically correct, plagiarism-free, and have visual elements for higher engagement, like images, videos, and gifs.
I recommend investing in Grammarly, Hemmingway, or Copyscape to check for plagiarism. It will be helpful whether you have an in-house or content agency.
This requires skilled personnel to pull off on a scale, and you will also need to sensitize the client to make that investment.
Luckily, this client was ready to make that investment.
Step 4 – On-Page Optimization
Once the content is produced and published, we further optimize the right set of keywords in the heading, title, and meta description.
We used Frase to optimize the content, also. Once the content was ready, we ran the article through the tool, which helped us understand whether we have covered the topic extensively enough to rank the article.
After this, one more crucial step is internally linking all the articles as when they are getting published and updated.
Google Instant Indexing API
We used the Instant Indexing feature available in RankMath, which submits the URL to Google’s indexing API, and it gets picked up by Google in minutes.
Table of Content –
For easy navigation within the article, TOC was kept. This helps in enhancing the user experience and dwell time. If you are using WordPress, you can use this plugin.