Pacific College +900% increase in organic leads & +930% in organic traffic

Client Overview

Pacific College is a nursing school in California, with Costa Mesa, Los Angeles & Ontario campuses. Their organic traffic had been declining for years, and they brought us on board to help them increase their traffic and leads.

Services

The Challenge

Pacific College changed its CMS from WordPress to Squarespace in 2018. When this migration happened, many SEO best practices weren’t implemented, and the organic traffic dropped significantly.
Missing pages that had traffic. They had a lot of deleted pages that used to drive tons of highly qualified organic traffic. These pages were deleted during the migration as the team managing this process wasn't aware of their traffic contributions to the site.
Broken internal links. When the CMS changed, the URL structure changed as well. Program pages were the ones most affected by this.
Broken pages with backlinks. Important pages that had a lot of backlinks weren't migrated to the new Squarespace site, which resulted in 'link equity' going to 404 pages instead.
Lack of content. A news section existed and it was updated from time to time, but apart from that, there was no content strategy in place.
Conversion tracking wasn't set up. Google Analytics was implemented, but it wasn't tracking any type of conversions. Also when the new Squarespace website was built, a new GA view with no historical data was created & implemented, resulting in fragmented data sources.

What did we do?

Missing pages:
We recreated and updated all the missing pages deleted during the migration. We did the same thing with broken pages that had backlinks. In just a few weeks, they started to drive a significant amount of qualified search traffic back to the site.
Broken internal links
We fixed all broken internal links. We used this opportunity to audit all internal links, optimize anchor text on most of them, add new internal links on pages where we had this opportunity, and other optimizations.
Website speed
We identified the areas slowing down the site and optimized those for better performance.
Conversion tracking
We implemented best practices and the data we were able to gather from tracking conversions helped us adjust and improve our overall SEO strategy.
Content strategy + implementation
After we were done with the SEO audit, we dived deeper into understanding / analyzing the search landscape & our competitors. We found out that there is a lot of search demand around the degrees Pacific College offers, and very few institutions talking about them.

We realized that there is a lot of potential in creating content around informational topics like “lvn vs rn” or “what does a nurse practitioner do”. These were potential students looking to educate themselves, and the pages that were ranking weren’t doing a great job of offering the best answer.

We had the expertise & it was in our niche, so we proceeded with doing an extensive keyword search, building out a content calendar, and started publishing content regularly.