What do you do when you have a client with a site that’s barely a year old and trying to get noticed in one of the most competitive spaces on the internet? You develop a content production plan, of course. Specifically one that focuses on content with value for the user, and search engine optimization.
We improved College Ave’s keyword visibility by 263% through the strategic development of content (that’s about 4,500 keywords ranking in positions 1 through 100). The residual impact of that increase in visibility resulted in a 219% increase in conversions during a seasonally slow-period vs. the same slow-period last year. Not too bad!
The Challenge
College Ave was a fairly new business in one of the most competitive (and highly scrutinized) industries on the web: student loans.
We needed to provide results in a relatively short period of time. And with low domain authority and a primary keyword pulling down about 275,000 estimated monthly searches, we knew our work was cut out for us.
The Solution
The plan was to go after the almighty long-tail keywords to set the stage for long-term results. With this strategy we hoped to provide the increases in traffic and conversions College Ave was looking for, while simultaneously building brand and site authority.
In the tough student loan industry, unique and useful content would be crucial to bringing College Ave’s value (and brand) to the surface. We pitched the idea of a blog, regularly updated with quality content.
So we had to figure out what that useful and unique content would be. Extensive keyword research helped us find opportunities that the audience needed and their competition wasn’t already covering.
Once we had our keywords, we developed a running list of topics that were relevant to our target customer base and their search intent. Once the topics were agreed upon, Greenlane created the content for five articles and the client produced the rest.
Since November 2015 when the blog launched, over 25 blog articles and 5 evergreen resource articles have been created and added to their site.
The Results
The efforts of adding the blog and consistent content to their site are beginning to pay off. In the chart below, you can see the upward trend in ranking keywords for the site as a whole over the last 2 years:
As of December 2016, College Ave’s site is ranking for roughly 5,900 keywords (including brand terms). This is up from 1,900 in the same period last year.
Simultaneously, organic traffic to the site has continued to increase during the same time period:
In conjunction with additional marketing and general business growth, the addition of the blog and other resource-style content contributed to the increase in organic traffic. Here’s a look at blog traffic since the launch of the blog:
In summary, an increased focus on creating quality content and building up College Ave’s blog resulted in getting them more attention. And what’s more, it played a key part in bringing a 219% increase in conversions!
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