SEO for K-12 Curriculum Company

Industry: K-12

" Thank you so much for your help this year. Your guidance and effort has been significant and has really helped us to get up and running.
-Our target keywords on page 1 of Google grew by 120%
-We gained “Position 0” for many keywords, where the average CTR was a high 40%
-Year over year in Q4, the site’s traffic grew 67% for non-branded keywords. Impressions grew 216%, from 354,347 impressions to over 1.1 million impressions. We accomplished this not by creating substantially more content, but by optimizing the evergreen existing content. "

View The Results

SEO for K-12 Results in Boosts with Rankings, Position 0 Snippets, and Traffic

ORIGO Education is a global math curriculum company.  A vibrant and engaging brand with an eye on growth, they were looking to improve awareness of their products and services in the US market. They approached me to take their digital marketing program in the US to the next level. The goals and objectives were to improve rankings for core keywords and bring math educators to the website.

Like many K-12 companies, they had many factors going for them that put them in a great place to get the benefits from SEO:

  • Existing + ongoing content: 75+ published blog posts and a publishing schedule with more to come
  • Expert content: Content written by subject matter experts is naturally authoritative, unique, and primed for SEO
  • Multi-channel marketing plan: the organization was heavily involved in other channels that with focus, would contribute to boosting SEO after the one-time foundation was applied

The primary aim for digital marketing was to drive leads and support overall marketing initiatives in the US market. I began my work with ORIGO by putting together a Digital Marketing ROI analysis. From there, we both felt comfortable that there would be a mutually beneficial fit by engaging in a long-term engagement.

SEO and Digital Marketing Activities

Over 12 months, I created a comprehensive digital marketing strategy that involved organic SEO, PPC, paid social advertising (Facebook ads for K-12), display ads, and retargeting. Our goals were to generate immediate sales and leads through ecommerce and support the long US sales cycle by engaging prospects in all touchpoints of the funnel and staying top of mind.

We began with organic SEO. Here are the high-level highlights:

SEO

The ORIGO team was looking for an agency to assist in the strategy, implementation, and ongoing performance monitoring of an SEO plan. They realized they had minimal SEO within the site and were eager to begin optimizing their content to reach teachers, and target educators at each level of the school decision-making ladder.

I began by optimizing the existing evergreen content on the site: researching and selecting primary and secondary keywords for each post, applying on-page optimization, writing engaging title tags and meta descriptions, ensuring the link is pointing to the right resource, and linking posts in a series together in a more strategic and prominent way.

Organic SEO is a very measurable, high-impact area. I set up reports and metrics to measure data and progress on, including:

  • Impressions: is the site registering at all for core keywords
  • Ranking spot
  • CTR (click-through rate) from Google SERPS to the site
  • Micro conversion engagement metrics such as time on site, number of pages visited, etc.
  • Macro conversions such as downloads, subscribes, and even purchases

SEO Content Marketing

The site was initially comprised of mostly of core page types, blog posts, and product pages. Along with applying keywords to blog posts, I identified high-volume keywords that would be perfect for pillar pages, or hub pages, which had yet to exist. Pillar pages are designed to demonstrate topical authority in particular areas and are great for driving traffic. They are a great intermediate SEO tactic also that can help drive more momentum and relevancy for page-specific and site-wide SEO.

The Results

Within a few short weeks of implementing SEO, we started gaining traction quickly by gaining rankings, more non-branded traffic, and Position 0 snippets.

We gained “Position 0” for many keywords, where the average CTR was 40%.

k-12 position 0

k-12 featured snippets

Our target keywords on page 1 of Google grew 120%. The site’s SEO grew steadily in the first 3 months of implementation:

seo growth chart

And overall, in Q4, the site’s traffic grew 67% for non-branded keywords from 2018 to 2019 by not creating substantially more content, but optimizing the evergreen existing content.  Impressions grew 216%, from 354,347 impressions to over 1.1 million impressions:

YoY growth