
SEO: HOW TO INCREASE TRAFFIC BY 4 TIMES AND ENTER THE GLOBAL MARKET
How to turn a small business into a large international language school? Easy! In this case, we will talk about the promotion tools, the difficulties we encountered and the conclusions we came to. Enjoy reading.
PPC, SEO, Paid Social
Service
Education
Field of business
Kyiv
Location
Extralingua language school opened in 2015. Over time, the school moved from a small office to two spacious offices in the center of Kiev. Six more foreign languages were added to the teaching of Spanish, as well as Russian and Ukrainian for exam preparation. The staff has grown.
We started working with us in 2016.
See the review of Julia, the founder of the school of foreign languages Extralingua.
Goals:
✓ increase the number of applications;
✓ brand promotion.
Tasks:
✓ set up Paid Ads;
✓ increase traffic;
✓ get leads from Paid Social.
Results
4 times
Increase traffic
105 applications
Contacts from Facebook
Strategy
At first, the client planned to cooperate only in SEO. But then it was decided to test the setting of Search Ads, SMM and Paid Social.
Only the head of Marketing.link, worked with the marketing strategy at the launch stage, then an SEO specialist, Analyst, Linkbuilder, SMM manager and PPC specialist joined the project.
SEO
This website is powered by WordPress. It functioned on a default template with pages made in visual editors. Of the problems: slow page speed, old plugins, website has been hacked several times.
The website has been redesigned several times. Extralingua rebranded in mid-2019.
We have updated WordPress plugins to the latest version using a unique design template. There were no more hacking problems.
Having started to work on SEO, we decided to update the existing pages of the site. In parallel, we picked keywords related to the customer’s business, divided them into categories.
We analyze what web pages can not find them and developed. Introduced a variety of languages for teaching.
In the future, the structure of the site was updated, keeping the old url.
We experimented, tried to generate more web pages for specific keywords. Internal links were placed in the site footer, the anchors of which contained the necessary keywords. Over time, this strategy was abandoned.
Tip
Don’t over-optimize your website footer with links. It is no longer working in SEO and website can get search engines penalties.
We analyzed competitors extralingua.com.ua. There were callback widgets on competitors’ sites. We connected it to Extralingua. Widget was effective and gave enough conversions.
How do we make content?
At first, the content was created by the copywriters of our agency. Then, together with the client decided that the creation of the content will be engaged in the schools themselves teachers.
We started posting informational articles on the blog.
Additional traffic sources
We posted information about extralingua.com.ua on web portals that could provide additional traffic — Osvita.ua, Parta.ua, websites for finding tutors. This strategy allowed getting not only backlinks, but also potential customers.
Everywhere we posted the phone number extralingua.com.ua. After working with educational web portals, the number of applications for our client’s services increased.
Backlinks
At the beginning of work with extralingua.com.ua, we experimented with backlinks, got the maximum number from different sources. At the end of 2016, we changed our strategy and received only high-quality backlinks.
Ahrefs shows 104 referring domains. Although, according to our calculations, there are 115 of them.
Digital Advertising
We worked with Search Ads and remarketing. We tested Display campaigns, but it didn’t bring the expected results.
Targeted at people who live or work in the center of Kiev.
We have set up campaigns for specific keywords. We knew exactly how our keywords worked. For example, the keyword “spanish language school price” generated fewer conversions than “spanish language school”.
During our work, we received enough statistics in order not to spend extra money and receive applications.
Paid Social
An SMM manager worked on the project, who was also involved in posting on social networks. But analyzing marketing expenses, our client decided to redirect money from SMM to targeting in Social Ads.
We advised our client to publish one or two publications per week to increase the brand recognition.
It is worth saying that Paid Social works well for this area of business. Paid Social helped in cases when it was necessary to urgently involve people to form a training group. It is also effective for selling expensive services — language camps.
We used Facebook Lead and Ads in Messenger.
📌 You can read about what Facebook Lead is and what the benefits of this ad are in our article Facebook Lead Ads: how not to drain your budget and rolling in leads
Ads in Messenger should be configured when a chatbot is created and connected. There are special services, for example, Chatfuel, Manyсhat for these purposes. The services are intuitive, so you can customize the chatbot yourself. We test the chatbot for our clients when launching ads for free.
Do not overdo it with the texts of questions and answers for the bot, try not to write large texts. Use the chatbot only to get important information. We asked for a potential customer contacts and language skills. After that, the manager worked with the contact and personally communicated with those who left contacts.
The advantages of chatbots are 24/7 customer support. Even if someone asks a question at night, they will always give an answer at question.
The disadvantages of a chatbot are that not all people realize that they are texting with a robot. This can lead to misunderstandings from the potential client.
In addition, our client personally promoted some of the posts to the audiences that we set up.
Plans
Since 2020, extralingua.com.ua stops working in Ukraine and moves to Valencia (Spain). We are planning brand promotion in a new country.
We will conduct a keyword research to recommend in which part of the city it would be more profitable to open a school. Probably we will transfer the website to the new domain. We will adapt it for Russian and English speaking residents of Valencia who want to learn Spanish.
After the analysis, let’s start setting up ads on Google and Facebook. Under these circumstances, it is more rational to start with Paid Media, rather than SEO. When Paid Ads gives orders and earnings, we will connect SEO.
Review
Considering the experience of promoting the Extralingua language school, we recommend paying attention to Ad Social Media. You can get profitable and useful contacts.
Don’t lead potential customers from social media to your website. We experimented and directed traffic from Facebook to the website. But this strategy did not produce the expected results. In this case, Facebook leads work better.
Did you like our promotion experience? Share in the comments what other tools you would use to promote your educational business.