About Project

Do training programs have to worry as much about SEO as do e-commerce or repair service companies? The answer is yes.

If you want your school, academy, course to get found online and have a successful recruiting process, you need to invest in SEO. School applicants are becoming more educated and sophisticated. You need to get out in front of them before others do!

This case study shows how we helped a beauty academy in Bedfordshire increase its organic traffic by nearly 5X and keyword totals by nearly 7.5X in 15 months!

The whole project was done by making sure the academy had an optimised website and that it could grow to an authority website in the beauty industry.

Read on to find out how we did it.

Background

A prestigious salon academy located in Bedfordshire contacted us to assist with growing their keywords and website traffic in February 2020. They have a large physical facility featuring multiple stations for hairstyling, manicures, pedicures, and more. We re-did their SEO strategy from scratch.

The institute is an accredited college that provides a solid education to help its graduates find jobs in the beauty industry.

The first thing we noticed about their website was that it lacked a blog. This was a missed opportunity for them to build authority and boost their SEO. They were also missing out on a lot of traffic from people looking for their services.

The SEO Audit

After having a conversation with our clients about their concerns and goals, we initiated our SEO audit. We do this with all new clients, and it helps us learn more about business, website, traffic, keywords, positions, traffic value, and more.

We learned that they launched their website in June 2017 and, as far as we could tell, hadn’t done much to improve their organic traffic since then. They have never been able to break through a ceiling of 250 organic monthly visits.

Their keyword numbers have remained below 500 for a few years. They need to improve their keyword targeting and their keyword strategy.

Finally, we learned that they were having some success with acquiring backlinks from other websites, but we knew that even more would be needed to give them the boost they were looking for.

Several “Easy Wins” That You Can Take Like Fish in a Barrel

We have an agreement with clients that they have to wait at least three months to see any kind of result from our services. Some clients are okay with this, but most are impatient and want to see results sooner.

This is why our second step is to identify “easy win” keywords. These are keywords that clients’ website is already ranking for in positions 4-30. All you have to do is make a few tweaks to web copy, and you can start capitalising on the gains.

We found that the institute had 154 easy wins. Of these, we looked for those with high search volume and low keyword difficulty. For example, “hair and beauty course” with a search volume of 880 but a difficulty of 9 out of 100.

Competitive Gap Analysis

You can learn a lot about marketing and advertising from what your competitors are doing.

We found that this institute’s top competitors included other beauty schools and cosmetology programs throughout the UK. One of their Top 10 competitors ranked for 3,200 keywords that our client hadn’t been ranking for.

We were able to find some new keywords to add to our client’s SEO strategy that would drive more traffic to their website. Some of them would work well, while others wouldn’t, but it was still a good place to start to generate new ideas.

The competition was stiff. There were more than 45 unique domains competing for the same students in the UK.

Results

The campaign we started in February 2020 lasted for a total of 15 months. There was a lag from when the client uploaded the new content we provided, but you can see the spike in organic traffic in the third month. The traffic to the client’s website has been gradually increasing ever since.

Most SEO campaigns don’t have immediate results. It takes time for them to have any effect, even if new content is added immediately.

The client’s site had gotten about 100 visits per month before they started the campaign. Today (April 2021), they are getting more than 500 monthly visits.

The same was true for their keyword rankings. When the campaign started, they were only ranked for about 200 keywords. Since the campaign began, the keyword rankings for their services have increased to over 1,500 in April 2021. The ranking increase was almost immediate, as you can see below.

By the end of the study, we saw an increase in both total traffic (about 5X) and the total number of keywords on the site (nearly 7.5X).

We used various SEO tactics to improve the website’s ranking: blog posts, guest posts, videos, syndication, and link building.

How can we be sure that our content is working? A simple keyword and traffic tracking indicate that the most popular web pages are blogs written by us. One of our blogs even ranks in the No. 1 position for its keyword.

Conclusion

What we were hoping you could take away from this case study is that well-written blog posts and web copy optimised for SEO can help you drive more organic traffic.

This salon institute learned that a blog is an excellent resource for connecting with prospective students. Everyone uses Google to search for schools or training programs these days, so it’s essential the client sticks out from the crowd and stands out from the sea of information.

Want to learn how you can get more traffic to your blog or your e-commerce website, or how to use keyword research to your advantage?

Connect with us today, and let’s discuss your business and your goals for the future.