Case Study
Increasing online visibility & organic traffic for private school in Berkshire
+ 15% 10% 44 674.6%
Increase in keyword impressions referring domains keywords in the 1st page keyword share of voice
Project briefing
About the client
LVS (The Licensed Victuallers’ School) is an independent, co-educational, day and boarding school for pupils aged 4 to 18, located near Ascot in the English county of Berkshire. This educational institute has an Infant & Junior School, Senior School and Sixth Form that all come under the same School Principal.
The school has a mission of developing each and every one of their students to reflect on the past in order to embrace the challenges of the future. The pupils are encouraged to be resilient, inquisitive and creative in everything they set out to do. They are developed to be courageous, bold and robust as well as to live with integrity and humility.
The challenge
LVS.ASCOT.sch.uk presented us with a bumpy road and a turbulent journey. The site was built exclusively for the eyes with no regard for search marketing. Furthermore, it had not encountered any optimisation work in its past to make things even more complicated. This raw domain required an overarching approach and us to put our best foot forward to revive and elevate LVS Ascot’s digital profile.
Project goal
LVS Ascot aspires to raise and nurture independent individuals who will be as life-ready as possible once they graduate from the school. LVS provides excellent education to prepare pupils for key examinations like GSCEs and EPQs.
The school complements its in-class practices with pastoral care, outdoor learning and co-curricular activities such as sports, coding, origami and street dance. Last but not least, their boarding houses equip students with invaluable real life experiences and skills.
Similar to any given school, LVS Ascot aims to retain the solid reputation they have built for themselves over decades while always improving their methods and maximising their admissions to stay ahead of their competition. They are fully aware this can only be made possible through a combination of traditional and digital marketing practices. The school had to employ the latest digital strategies not to fall behind the fierce competitors in their field.
Jackie Pollard was the first person to realise their online presence was not up to scratch compared to the considerable prestige the school earned in the educational circles. In today’s digital world, this constituted a major conundrum. Enter an expert SEO company, also known as Bubblegum Search.
No SEO work done previously
Keyword targeting is non-existent
No history of organic metrics tracking
Major indexation issues
Duplication errors for key pages
Heaps of old/outdated pages in many formats
Local strategy not considered in the past
UX/UI not user-friendly at all
Fierce competition in domestic and national arena
Site speed nowhere near satisfactory
Metadata wholly unoptimised or simply missing
No internal linking structure in place
Big chunks of texts without complementary practices
Poor backlink profile despite solid reputation
The Solution
Complex on & off-site Search Engine Optimisation
Roadmap created as the initial phase of SEO processes
All-embracing keyword research and targeting done
Brand new keyword strategy devised for core pages
Technical errors uncovered and fixed
Indexation problems
404 pages redirected
Site speed improvement
Duplication errors
Thin content addressed
FAQ section revamped with brand new questions and optimised positioning
UX audit both for mobile and desktop
Local audit conducted & strategised
Google My Business profile
Local outreach campaigns
Local landing pages created
Fresh metadata created for all key pages
Competitor analysis carried out
Blog strategy put together to be deployed in future
On-page keyword analysis to bulk up and improve existing content
Sitewide internal linking audit implemented
Local/school schema markup analysis
FAQ research to answer popular questions within key pages
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The optimisation results
674.6% in Share of Voice
Summary
Keyword rankings, backlink profile, organic traffic – all significantly improved!
Our education SEO agency actively manages a number of schools and their search marketing profiles. Nevertheless, prior experience does not immediately translate into a one size fits all approuch.
Clients often require a personalised and bespoke approach to deal with particular issues and requests. This was once again the case for LVS Ascot and we had to unlearn a portion of what we know about schools to construct a bespoke SEO strategy.
After partnering up with LVS Ascot in January 2021, a comprehensive technical audit was conducted to detect critical errors that demanded urgent attention. From duplication issues to missing metadata to extremely poor site speed and indexation trouble, there were a total of 9 areas of focus we identified. These fixes were defined as the first stage of essential implementations. We knew rectifying these problems would give the domain a huge boost.
A must-have quality for an agency professing SEO expertise is the ability to adjust to new developments. While we worked on purging the domain of technical issues, brand new concerns kept popping up such as redirection problems and historic pages of various formats. This forced us into rearranging our priorities and investing time in hitherto nonexistent technical difficulties. These had to be cleared up before moving onto on-page optimisations.
Another challenge for Bubblegum Search to surmount was the lack of a local digital marketing strategy. LVS Ascot had tremendous unfulfilled potential, yet no history of strategic planning to act upon. Simple practices like local keyword research and competitor analysis showed us including local keywords in our list and targeting them in new landing pages was a must.
Bubblegum’s signature local SEO audit was set up, keyword list was revamped, existing core pages were optimised and key changes for Google My Business profile were submitted, along with technical fixes and other typical SEO practices we choose to employ and voila!
After only 3 months of work, we observed the first steep climb in keyword rankings and a consequent growth in overall share of voice (SEO Visibility) amongst the competition.
We are happy to report this positive trend has been sustained over the next 6 months for a remarkable 674.6% increase in SOV!