SEO Case Study: Cambridge Health

https://www.cambridgehealth.edu/
Atlanta, GA Campus
Palm Beach, FL Campus
Orlando, FL Campus

Marketing Services

Search Engine Optimization Conversion Rate Optimization Content Marketing

Cambridge College of Healthcare and Technology is a leading student-centered higher education college that provides education for professions in the healthcare field. Cambridge program offerings include bachelor’s degrees, associate degrees and certificates / diplomas which can be earned from their three campuses in Atlanta, Orlando, Miami and Palm Beach, Florida.

WebRanking was initially approached by Cambridge’s original web designer in March of 2011 to provide an SEO campaign for them. This campaign ran through April of 2014.

Cambridge, after changing web design firms, approached us again in November of 2015 to perform an SEO audit and start up a new SEO campaign, as they had seen a significant drop in organic exposure and rankings after abandoning the original campaign with WebRanking.

Objective

The objective of the Cambridge campaign was to first identify why there had been a loss in organic rankings and traffic, and to then restore it. Secondly, once the site had recovered, we wanted to work towards seeing year over year increases in online student applications and leads for the academic programs and degrees offered at the 4 campus locations.

These objectives were to be accomplished through first providing a comprehensive Technical and SEO site audit. Based upon these findings, we would then fashion an SEO campaign to address their current needs.

Challenges

The Cambridge College SEO campaign presented several unique challenges.  Due to accreditation laws, the website is limited in what keywords and phrases can be utilize for site copy and promotion directly on the website. Often, the keywords commonly used to search for the courses offered where phrases we could not directly use on the site.

This added to the already challenging issue of trying to attract visitors for the 4 geographic campus locations, with each location offering different courses and degrees.  On top of this, we discovered that a significant number of the courses offered were commonly searched for under different keywords than the actual course name.

We also discovered that a significant part of our previous SEO initiatives and content had been removed during the lapse in our SEO engagement with Cambridge. Because of this, we needed to establish what was missing, what impact it had on current results and what could be reinstated.

In addition, we were working in a very competitive industry that already had several established and better-known competitors.

Strategy

SEO & Technical Audit
The first step for our new campaign with Cambridge College was to conduct an in-depth SEO & Technical site audit. The results from this audit showed us that several important pieces of content had been removed from the site, that new programs had been added to their offerings and that there were some significant technical site issues that were hindering organic rankings.

SEO Fixes
Based upon the audit findings we provided updated onsite optimization for the new programs based upon fresh keyword phrase research. As noted previously, keyword research required additional attention to ensure that we didn’t promote phrases that were not approved due to accreditation issues. We also needed to identify popular keywords for each campus’ geographic location and course offerings.

Ongoing Strategy: Content Focused
For our ongoing efforts, we focused on content strategy, link building, optimization updates and technical SEO fixes.

We’ve recently made a heavy content push to include supporting content on the blog and other resource pages, to add authority, generate inbound links and add depth to the site.

We also discovered during our audits that a significant amount of content on the current site was duplicate content, either externally or internally. Due to this, we not only made a push for new content, but to also rewrite all the duplicate content.

Results

WebRanking has been providing continuous SEO for Cambridge since November of 2015. Since that time, we’ve seen continued growth in both organic traffic and organic leads. This past month, we set all-time records in both categories.

As their campaign can be seasonal, the best way to measure results is to look at year over year gains:

Year over Year Lead Gains