SKILLS TRAINING GROUP CASE STUDY
Skills Training Group are a UK based training service offering educational programmes and training for industries including gas, electric and first aid.
Skills TG – The Clients Situation
Skills Training Group approached SEO Audits IO looking for an audit to look for further opportunities for traffic growth. The client’s organic had briefly increased within a 16 month period – however, a huge volume of the traffic being generated was via the blog and less through the actual course pages – so whilst there was traffic gain – this didn’t bring much benefit in respect of new course entrants. The audit was to identify why and what could be done.
How We Helped
We conducted a full audit of the domain – focusing primarily on pages of higher transactional intent – looking at the traffic and query composition to better understand weighting of pages.
We looked at the types of content being served up, pre-existing rankings, horizon rankings and where the opportunities existed.
Addressing Click Stagnation
Segmenting out blog traffic – we saw minimal click change over time – we had to address why clicks had stagnated and why core navigation pages were not pulling their weight.
Click stagnation was masked by overall traffic growth – seperating out the blog showed that actual course category pages weren’t gaining any traction and required a review at content level and at query level – what opportunities were there based on search diversity – we came up with a plan as part of the audit.
SERP Opportunities for Courses
During the audit for Skills Training Group – we looked at the highest impression queries of transactional intent (people who would sign up and buy a course) – we looked at impression vs average position to look where low hanging fruit existed – we also looked at SERP features to see what other opportunities existed from a localisation, SCHEMA, people also asked and video perspective.
Content Auditing
A chunk of the audit looked at the content performance across the domain – we segmented out the blog from courses / course categories, auditing to look at intent alignment, quality of content, coverage of courses, course content depth, cannibalisation issues and link flow. A content audit helped us to better understand how well the content was put together and suitability for end users – this generated a report that was actionable in respect of content culls, content updates and blocking where required.
Ensuring Content of Value
Lots of the course pages were thin – whilst some categories did OK, they were not propped up by pages of value – therefore a key part of the strategy would be to improve content at course level and to look at course coverage, types of courses and to look at topical coverage / topical performance – driving up relevance for end user search intent and ensuring anything of no value was blocked from being indexed.
Step by Step Guidance
We provided guidance to the client for implementation their side – this involved a step by step process to understanding topical relevance / intent / coverage and how to rectify pages that didn’t meet the estimated requirements to rank. These step by step items were detailed enough for writers their side to work with and address content issues – fundamentally underpinning their strategy moving forwards.
On Site & Core Web Vital Issues
During the audit we performed a full technical tear down of the website looking at the websites architecture, URL structure, clustering, structural integrity, rendering, pagination, non JS rendering, tag utilisation, canonicalisation, path consistency and lots of other checks – to ensure that the website was clean, well put together, easy for Googlebot to crawl and cache.
Addressing Cannibalisation
Like many commerce/transactional websites – there are often cannibalisation issues that impact average position / position stability – segmenting out these items from things such as site links – we could ascertain where cannibalisation was most prevalent and provide guidance on resolution – cannibalisation often being more difficult to deal with between root domain and internal category pages.
Good Links vs Bad Links
Looking at the domain – we saw that there were a number of high quality strong links supporting the website/brand – we also saw however a lot of lower quality links from things such as forum profile links through to tiered links – many were nothing to do with the client but could have been from previous SEO exercises – Google will often ignore weak / poor quality / spammy links – however the partial benefit they can bring can be supportive until a link based spam update – we get to the bottom of all links – where they come from, root domain vs sub page links, anchor balancing, link networks, PBNS and more.
End Guidance for the Client
We provided end guidance as to why their SEO strategy was going nowhere and the best thing that could be done. We gave clear and concise information for the client to decide on.
Skills Training Group – The Outcome
Skills Training Group have been working on the resolutions highlighted by our audit process. They have since taken resource inhouse to build links, generate content and strengthen their overall organic profile.
Our Clients Have Included
