Case Study 3 Executive Study Abroad Case Study Overview ESA, a study abroad consultancy, based in the heart of Dhaka, Bangladesh. They provide expert counseling, assist in university admissions, and facilitate visa processing for studying in countries like Australia, Canada, Malaysia, the UK, and the USA. They are in the industry for over 2 decades, and are official university representatives in Bangladesh for numerous well-reputed universities overseas. Yet, they didn’t have much online tracktion going on, and not much brand recognition or traffic from any search engine either. Remember, how in the last case study I gave insights on how SEO is not a one person’s job. But give them even 1 person to work with and they can do wonders (in time of course). Well, this case is a noteworthy example of that. This project was primarily completed by 1 SEO expert and 1 writer. And in 10 months, organic traffic reached from almost 10 per day to almost 2K per day. Over 20,000% increase. Granted it’s not that much, but here’s the reality for every digital marketing project you want to start; the more talents you put in a project, the better and faster results you receive. Objective: Branding. Having an organic stream of traffic from search engines, increased brand awareness. Keyword Ranking in most relevant searches in the industry. Prime target: local audience of Bangladesh, who are researching about studying abroad. Challenge: One of the biggest challenges in branding was IDP education. Well, everyones has heard of IDP, and in terms of organic keyword rankings and brand awareness from that, we were competing against them. Also, some of our immediate competitors were PFEC global in terms of branding game, and AECC global in terms of keyword rankings, as they were a high authority site in the industry & ranked over almost every important keyword that we targeted. Another challenge was the site’s Technical SEO section, which had loads of issues to solve. Solution: As with all SEO games, our first move was to get rid of all the potential technical threats. Not all were resolved firsthand, but the most important ones were done. Gradually, we neutralized other technical threats too. As we had limited resources, just a writer and an SEO expert, our best resources were targeting small difficult keywords, creating most valuable contents for those, and ranking on those.See, most of the time, we don’t pay attention to low volume keywords, and even if we do, we don’t give our 100% effort on creating content for it. As there usually is no direct return on that time & effort. But these are the ones that pave the way for you. Ranking on them first, gives you tracktion, build your E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust) slowly but steadily. Then we started our backlink efforts. As we just started and were not that much of a brand yet, it was hard for us to get backlinks from very high authority sites yet.So, we started with getting external links from any & every education community possible across the web. This helped us get our PR game tracktion. Regular scheduled posting, targeting all possible keywords that were used by students while researching about studying abroad.We covered all sorts of topics like S.O.P, University details, Country details, All possible scholarships, Costs, Living Standards everything that a student might need. Also, our core focus was on giving huge value for every keyword.See, when a user searches for say, “Study cost in australia”, that user doesn’t just want cost information. Rather all possible things related to it. So, what we did is created a content-query map. Like after a user searches for “study cost in australia”, they might search for “scholarships in australia”, “career & lifestyle in australia” etc. Then after clearing everything related to a query in depth, we shortly answered for queries that the user might have next. Sometimes in the FAQ section, or sometimes through small paras. And each time, if they wanted to know more in depth, we linked our other content pieces that would satisfy those queries in depth. Through this internal linking, if one of our pages gets traffic, a huge other related ones mostly do. This mixture of RELEVANT keywords and links changed the game alone. Results + Timeline: There were so many other things that we did throughout the project’s timeline. But what were the results? In 6 months, traffic increased over 12,000%. It went from at max 10 per day, to over 1200 per day. In the 6th month, one of our content ranked and alone doubled the traffic. The day it ranked, the overall organic traffic was over 2800+. 80% of which were from Bangladesh, our target audience.Funny thing was, due to keywords it obviously attracted traffic from Australia, United States and other countries too, and the contents were value-oriented enough that even people from those countries interacted and shared our content(s). Through steady posting and with minimal backlinking, more internal links; it kept increasing by the 10th month, organic daily traffic reached almost 2K+. Ranked on over 1500+ keywords, 50+ important ones of which were on the first page. In certain important keywords like SOP, Study Cost and others we even outranked AECC and IDP. If we were to calculate the value of that branding, daily we brought $200 worth of traffic organically. Multiply it by 30 = $6000 worth of traffic everyday. That means if we were to bring this much traffic through advertisements, we needed to spend $200 daily or $6000 per month approximately. (Note: This calculation is done by calculating organic traffic/clicks earned by each organic keyword ranking, then multiplying it by CPC based on the country from which traffic is generated. To calculate your organic traffic’s value, feel free to reach out.)
