7.12.11 Scholastic Digital Marketing Summit

A Local SEO Case Study

Follow me on twitter @willfleiss

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Why should Scholastic care about local SEO?… We don’t have brick-and-mortar stores!

The “Local 7-Pack” often pushes the

regular organic results down the page

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A year ago Knewton was making the same assumptions

1. If people are searching for an in-person class they probably won’t purchase an online course

2. It’s impossible to rank well for local searches because the “Local 7-Pack” of brick-and-mortar stores always comes up first

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That’s when Super SEO Man arrived on the scene… We can still get a lot of that

local traffic and convince people to consider our online

course!

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Enter the SEO landing page Keyword rich title tag

Keywords in the URL

Keywords in the H1

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Local SEO landing page (cont.)Don’t let anyone tell you that keywords and text on the page are not important

We launched thousands of these pages targeting cities in the U.S., UK, Canada, and India

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How you link to these pages internally is just as important as the content

The homepage usually has the most link juice to pass to other pages

U.S. States index page

Massachusetts pageWe also link keyword anchor text to

specific local pages in copy throughout the website and blog

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Results

Ranking 2nd and 3rd for “gmat prep course in

gainesville fl”

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Results (cont.) Before July of 2010 we received zero organic search traffic from locally

modified GMAT keywords Now, we receive on average 2,000 unique visits per month from GMAT

keywords with a local modifier These 2,000 visitors come to the site using an average of 1,500 DIFFERENT

keywords, demonstrating just how big the long-tail of search queries really is.

That’s interesting Will, but do they

buy your product?!?

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Well…

When we looked at last-click analytics, the answer was a resounding NO!

But when we were able to implement multi-attribution tracking with the help of a third-party vendor (Performable) we learned that,

20% of all GMAT customers visit a local page at some point between the time they first

land on our website and the time they buy!

So now the answer is a resounding YES, people who search for an in-person course WILL buy Knewton’s online alternative!

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5 Major Takeaways – F.I.B.L.R.

1. Find out what local searches your customers are doing

2. Invest in researching long-tail keyword modifiers

3. Build pages to target specific long-tail keywords

4. Leverage your website’s existing link equity to send link juice to new pages

5. Remember that multi-attribution tracking can tell an entirely different story than just last-click analytics

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Thank You!

@willfleiss

Knewton’s Adaptive Learning Platform™ transforms educational content into a uniquely personalize learning experience. www.knewton.com