Online Course SEO: Achieving Major Traffic Gains from Backlinks
Selling online courses can be a lucrative endeavor.
In fact, according to industry averages, you can make anywhere from $1,000 to $10,000 per month by selling educational courses online.
The catch is you need stellar visibility on search engines if you ever want to earn a dime.
After all, your potential students need a way to discover your course, and over 90% of experiences online begin with a search engine like Google.
Thus, SEO is an extremely important marketing channel for selling online courses.
By ranking in one of the top 3 results for keywords (search terms) related to your course, you’ll generate a steady pipeline of traffic to your website. From there, if your course is truly valuable and your website is optimized for conversions, you can convert those organic visitors into paying students.
Without any form of online visibility, you’ll struggle to get anyone to view your website, let alone sign up for one of your courses.
In this online course SEO case study, we’re going to tell the story of how we radically improved the search rankings for a provider of professional development courses for K-12 teachers.
As a preview of the results we achieved, this is what the client’s traffic looks like now (represented by the orange line):
While they were stagnant back in late 2023, their organic traffic has been rising steadily for many months now, and this trend will only continue.
All in all, we were able to score a 988% increase in organic traffic and get the site ranking for over 2,000 industry keywords.
Stay tuned to learn how we leveraged our link-building expertise to achieve all these results (and more).
The Client: A Provider of Graduate-Level Courses for K-12 Teachers
This particular client sells professional online development courses for teachers and has provided resources to educators for the past 27 years.
The courses help teachers learn new skills like analyzing student achievement data to identify learning problems. Professional development courses are a great way for teachers to expand their toolkit and learn new ways to approach teaching.
These are truly valuable courses that help teachers obtain new credentials and qualify for salary advancements.
In other words, the courses tend to sell themselves.
That is, whenever teachers can find them.
This leads us to the client’s main problem: a lack of visibility on Google.
Their site wasn’t ranking for crucial keywords related to professional development for teachers, and their competitors were outranking them and taking all their business.
While the client knew a little bit about SEO, they lacked the in-house knowledge and expertise to do it themselves. Because of this, they knew their best bet was to outsource their SEO to an experienced agency like ours.
They did some digging online and came across some of our case studies. After reading about the results we generated for other clients, they reached out for a free SEO consultation.
During the chat, we discussed the client’s goals.
Namely, they wanted to:
- Outrank their competitors
- Consistently generate more traffic to their course pages
- Rank for more relevant keywords
With these three goals in mind, we knew that a HOTH X campaign would make them a reality. It’s our fully managed service where we combine multiple HOTH products to form an extensive SEO strategy.
We even assign a dedicated campaign manager to each HOTH X client to A) devise an in-depth strategy and B) keep the client informed of our progress.
The Audit: Targeting Easy Wins to Speed Things Up
First things first, we have to audit the client’s site before we take things any further.
An SEO audit involves taking a close look at the website’s current performance on search engines.
The auditing process has two goals:
- Identify and resolve any potential errors that affect search engine rankings
- Find easy-win opportunities, which are keywords the website is already ranking for, just not in the top 3
On the technical side, we needed to ensure the client’s website was up to snuff to achieve high rankings on Google.
For a website to rank in the top 3, it must have:
- Stellar content with proper keyword usage throughout
- Backlinks from other relevant websites (which vouch for the quality and accuracy of the content)
- Fast speeds for loading, interactivity, and responsiveness (Google runs its Core Vitals Test on all websites in its search index)
There are countless other ranking factors, but these tend to be the most important. Whenever we audit a website, we look out for critical errors like:
- Duplicate content
- Indexing errors (which cause web pages not to appear in Google’s search index)
- Broken links
- Orphan pages (web pages that have no internal links directed at them)
- Thin content (Google views content with less than 1,000 words as thin)
Should we come across any of these issues, we will resolve them before moving forward with the campaign.
In this client’s case, their site was well-optimized, so we didn’t have to spend much time resolving technical issues.
Also, we found lots of easy-win opportunities via keywords the site already ranked for on Google. We knew that with a little tweaking, we could boost these keyword rankings into the top 3.
The Strategy: Building Backlinks for Course Pages and Easy-Win Pages
Once we had a look at the client’s backlink profile, we knew that we needed to focus entirely on link-building.
They already had solid content, they just needed backlinks coming from reputable websites to give it more credibility.
Our primary areas of focus were the client’s course pages and easy-win pages, so we built the most links for them. Technique-wise, we found a bunch of success targeting link insertions.
This is where we request that a site owner ‘insert’ one of our client’s backlinks into an existing piece of content on their website. To encourage the site owner to go along with our request, we found instances where it made perfect sense to link to one of our client’s online courses (like a blog post about professional development for teachers).
We also conducted targeted link outreach to land guest posts and link placements on relevant education websites.
The Results: 988% Boost in Traffic, Ranking for 2.6k Industry Keywords
This case study is a perfect demonstration of the power of link-building.
Through backlinks alone, we were able to achieve a drastic boost to the client’s organic traffic (a 988% rise in 6 months) and get them ranking for 2.6K keywords, 67 of which are in the top 3.
The links we built helped the client consistently generate $3.9k worth of traffic for their business, and the results continue to come in.
Do you want to sell more online courses through your website?
With HOTH X, you can sit back and watch the traffic roll in without lifting a finger, so don’t wait to get in touch for a consultation!
