+1,423% INCREASE IN ORGANIC LEADS & +447% IN ORGANIC TRAFFIC

Client Overview

University of the Potomac is a higher education institution with campuses in Washington DC, Virginia & Chicago. We were brought on board to help them recover the lost traffic after a site redesign went wrong & set up UOTP for future SEO growth.

Services

The Challenge

They launched their new website in August 2018 and saw their organic traffic drop by 70% during a crucial period of time in their industry (fall semester).
Redirects weren’t implemented properly, the URL structure was changed twice in the previous six months and all internal links were pointing to the homepage (impacting the performance of different sections on the site as a result).
The site was taking 9.9s to open for first-time visitors and 7.7s for returning visitors. This impacted the number of pages Google crawled and rankings in search results.
In the first half of 2018, we saw an unnatural increase in backlinks from low-quality sites. These backlinks targeted a specific section of the site which had seen its rankings drop dramatically after these sites started linking it.

What did we do?

Technical SEO: 301 Redirect Mapping from OLD URLs to NEW ones (identified during the audit, weren’t handled properly), Internal Linking (all internal links were pointing to the homepage, probably a Find & Replace command used wrongly), Page Speed (removed unused plugins, server performance issues, no caches & no CDN - fixed all these) and more.
Content Marketing: Content Audit (identified well-performing content pieces, ones that had the potential to rank after optimization, content to rewrite/refresh or delete/merge, etc. Content Strategy (identify gaps in the industry, implemented Topic Clusters model, came up with three content series), Keyword Research & Content Calendar and Content Production.
Link Outreach: Used existing partnerships to secure links from. Dozens of successful Link Outreach campaigns targeting links from brand mentions and resource pages. Were able to get an average of 10 new links per month.