Selling online courses can be a profitable venture. According to industry averages, you can earn anywhere from £1,000 to £10,000 per month by offering educational courses online. However, the key to success lies in having excellent visibility on search engines. After all, potential students need a way to discover your course, and over 90% of online experiences begin with a search engine like Google.
This highlights how crucial Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is for selling online courses. By ranking among the top three results for keywords related to your course, you can create a steady stream of traffic to your website. If your course is genuinely valuable and your site is optimised for conversions, you can turn those organic visitors into paying students. Without visibility online, it will be challenging to attract anyone to your site, let alone convince them to sign up for your courses.
In this case study, we will explore how we dramatically improved the search rankings for a provider of professional development courses aimed at K-12 teachers.
The Client: A Provider of Graduate-Level Courses for K-12 Teachers
The client in question has been offering professional online development courses for teachers for 27 years. These courses help educators acquire new skills, such as analysing student achievement data to identify learning difficulties. Professional development courses are an excellent way for teachers to enhance their skill set and learn innovative teaching methods.
These courses are genuinely valuable, assisting teachers in obtaining new credentials and qualifying for salary advancements. In essence, the courses have the potential to sell themselves—provided teachers can find them.
This brings us to the client’s primary challenge: a lack of visibility on Google. Their website was not ranking for essential keywords related to professional development for teachers, resulting in competitors outranking them and capturing their potential business. Although the client had some knowledge of SEO, they lacked the in-house expertise to implement an effective strategy. Consequently, they decided to outsource their SEO efforts to an experienced agency, which led them to us.
After reviewing our case studies and the results we achieved for other clients, they reached out for a complimentary SEO consultation. During our discussion, we identified the client’s goals:
- Outrank their competitors
- Consistently generate more traffic to their course pages
- Rank for more relevant keywords
With these objectives in mind, we knew that a Clout X campaign would be the perfect solution. This is our fully managed service, where we combine various Clout products to create a comprehensive SEO strategy. Each Clout X client is assigned a dedicated campaign manager to develop an in-depth strategy and keep the client updated on our progress.
The Audit: Targeting Easy Wins to Speed Things Up
Before we could proceed, we needed to conduct an SEO audit of the client’s website. An SEO audit involves closely examining the website’s current performance on search engines. The auditing process aims to achieve two goals:
- Identify and resolve any potential errors affecting search engine rankings.
- Find easy-win opportunities—keywords the website is already ranking for but not in the top three positions.
On the technical side, we ensured the client’s website was optimised for high rankings on Google. To rank among the top three, a website must have:
- High-quality content with proper keyword usage throughout
- Backlinks from relevant websites that vouch for the quality and accuracy of the content
- Fast loading speeds, interactivity, and responsiveness (Google runs its Core Vitals Test on all websites in its search index)
While there are many other ranking factors, these tend to be the most crucial. During our audit, we looked out for common issues, such as:
- Duplicate content
- Indexing errors (which prevent web pages from appearing in Google’s search index)
- Broken links
- Orphan pages (web pages with no internal links directing to them)
- Thin content (Google considers content with less than 1,000 words as thin)
Fortunately, the client’s site was well-optimised, so we didn’t need to spend much time fixing technical issues. We also identified numerous easy-win opportunities through keywords the site was already ranking for. With a few tweaks, we could boost these keyword rankings into the top three.
The Strategy: Building Backlinks for Course Pages and Easy-Win Pages
Once we reviewed the client’s backlink profile, we realised that our focus needed to be on link-building. They already had solid content; they just required backlinks from reputable websites to enhance credibility.
Our primary focus areas were the client’s course pages and easy-win pages, so we concentrated our link-building efforts there. We found significant success using a technique called link insertions. This involves requesting that a site owner ‘insert’ one of our client’s backlinks into existing content on their website. To encourage site owners to comply with our request, we identified instances where linking to one of our client’s online courses made perfect sense, such as in blog posts about professional development for teachers.
Additionally, we conducted targeted link outreach to secure guest posts and link placements on relevant educational websites.
The Results: 988% Boost in Traffic, Ranking for 2,600 Industry Keywords
This case study exemplifies the power of link-building. Through backlinks alone, we achieved a remarkable increase in the client’s organic traffic—a 988% rise over six months—and secured rankings for 2,600 keywords, with 67 of those in the top three positions.
The links we built helped the client consistently generate £3,900 worth of traffic for their business, and the results continue to improve.
Do you want to sell more online courses through your website? With Clout X, you can relax and watch the traffic roll in without lifting a finger. By implementing a well-structured SEO strategy, you can transform your online course offerings and reach a broader audience, ultimately leading to increased sales and success in the competitive world of online education.
