In the world of online marketing, the higher the traffic the better. When people visit your webpage, more impressions are made, which leads to higher chances of signups, purchases, shares, and eventually brand loyalty.
However, with more new businesses discovering the power of online marketing, online users are bombarded with similar information on services and products, making it harder for businesses to stand out.
How would you ensure your target market is accessed without expending unnecessary effort? With SEO marketing, of course!
According to HubSpot Inc., a US-based inbound marketing company, SEO marketing:
- brings in quality traffic
- is more cost-effective than paid advertising
- procures more clicks than pay-per-click
- increases leads and sales
- builds trust and credibility
- drives offline sales
In this article, XCalibur Digital shares how it managed to raise the bar for Afterschool.my – Malaysia’s number 1 higher education website.
Seeking new horizons
Afterschool.my was relying purely on paid advertising but after a few years, the company realised that the growth wasn’t where it wanted it to be.
In 2016, Afterschool.my collaborated with Xcalibur Digital to implement SEO marketing. The website was a tough nut to crack, because as opposed to general websites that run with a modest number of pages, Afterschool.my as a portal had somewhere around 20,000 pages. Therefore, we had to find a way to optimise these pages to reach the targeted audiences right away.
This is how we raised traffic and user numbers for Afterschool.my by almost 200% in just one year:
1. Keyword Analysis and Keyword Grouping
First, we analysed statistics for performing keywords on the Afterschool website. After identifying these keywords, we worked to increase the usage of these words into the pages with caution to prevent redundancy.
With increased density of relevant keywords on these pages, Google picks them up as relevant articles and ranks them higher on the search results.
While we cannot beat the strength of being the actual university, Afterschool’s profile page on Curtin university now comes right after the official university’s website due to its adequate use of relevant keywords.
2. Website Technical Audit Report and Suggestions
Then, we scoured the website for any technical issues that could be secretly causing lower search ranking, incur penalties or even cause Afterschool.my to be invisible on Google’s search results. Changes are made to ensure better speed, website structure, user interface and user experience as well.
3. On-page Audit Report and Suggestions
After optimising the main structure of the website, it was time to optimise the uniform resource locators (URL). Having certain keywords in the URL can actually improve the search rankings of the page, so we worked to edit these links to reflect the content offered by the pages.
By using the right words in their URLs such as “https://afterschool.my/spm” and “https://afterschool.my/students-life/download-your-spm-revision-guide-here-”, students looking for study materials will find Afterschool’s content in a click of a button.
4. Usability Audit (Template-wise)
Being number 1 on every organic search page does not guarantee returning customers if user experience on the website is sub-par. Therefore, we assisted Afterschool.my in revamping their website design and template for easy and comfortable usage, thus prompting users to stay longer on the site.
5. Off-page Audit Reports
Similar to the traditional method of trust building through word of mouth recommendations, Google ranks websites based on existing backlinks. When other websites mention or refer to Afterschool.my (either through paid or collaborative mentions), Google will perceive Afterschool.my as more relevant, and therefore rank it higher in search results. Social media does the same for the website as well through referral links.
6. Conversion Optimisation Suggestions
Finally, after the main foundations of the website has been optimised, inbound marketing skills are then utilised to prompt conversion from site visitors. After determining performing URLs, which are pages that tend to get more traffic, we placed call-to-actions (CTAs) on these pages to initiate consumer responses. When people like the content on a page, they are bound to reciprocate when prompted to apply what they have just read.
After informing and entertaining a reader with good content, Afterschool.my then applies CTAs to its target audience, mainly senior secondary school students.
Sit back and wait
With these methods, we got Afterschool back in line for the best education portal in Malaysia! However, that’s not all. While we can sit back and relax a little bit after the initial setting up of SEO marketing, there is still constant monthly maintenance to be done.
The initial stage took 3 months to set up, and in the next 9 months, Xcalibur Digital conducted On-page Optimisation/Implementations and Off-page/Link-building on a monthly basis to maintain Afterschool’s performance and iron out whatever kinks and quirks left on the website.
Because of Afterschool’s nature as an education portal, the large surge in traffic was in March to May, when the national exam results are out and students are looking for tertiary education information. Nevertheless, traffic and user numbers remained steady even after the seasonal rush.
Steady flow with room to grow
Our hard work paid off, as in the one year of 2016-2017, we managed to rake in a 195% and 181% increase in traffic and new users respectively for the portal. Norma Razak, content curator of Afterschool.my, says it was definitely fascinating to see the numbers leap in such a short amount of time. “It felt wonderful to see our content curating and writing efforts be utilised to its maximum potential with the help of SEO marketing,” she says.
If your business needs boosting, Xcalibur Digital will come to your bidding. No business should miss out on the wonders of SEO marketing. Contact us at www.xcaliburdigital.com
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