Case Study
A New Online Graduate Degree School Builds an SEO Strategy from the Ground Up
Scope
Overview
When the University of San Diego (USD) launched its online graduate degree school in 2015, they were starting from scratch. No website, no digital marketing presence, and certainly no search engine-optimized content that would help attract prospective students and drive leads, applications, and enrollments.
As a full-service digital marketing agency focused on higher education, Vital brought website design and development expertise to the table, combined with an understanding of the complex needs of a school operating within a larger university environment. We also knew that higher institutions often struggle with SEO, so we would need to bake in search-engine-friendly best practices from the very beginning.
Ten years later, we continue to enjoy a strong relationship with USD Online Degrees, which has grown from two to 14 graduate degree-granting programs, and enjoys a healthy average of 152K organic sessions every month.
152K
Organic sessions every month
Goals:
When they came to us, USD Online Degrees had a few broad, but pressing, goals:
- Build a website that would showcase their new brand
- Promote their flagship degree programs
- Drive organic traffic to the website to support lead, application, and enrollment goals.
Challenges
Like many schools within a university, the new website would be on a subdomain, onlinedegrees.sandiego.com. With no domain authority, we knew we would need to both create content that was optimized to rank in organic search and to build links back to that content in order to start building authority.
Additionally, the two programs USD Online Degrees were launching with posed challenges of their own.
- The school’s online Master of Education program was entering a crowded, competitive space with many high-authority universities already ranking for keywords we wanted to target — especially bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) keywords that indicated a high level of intent to enroll in an MEd program.
- The online Master in Law Enforcement and Public Safety Leadership (LEPSL) was a unique entry into the market with few competitors — but also low or nonexistent search volume for relevant keywords. We were challenged to find creative ways to structure our content marketing strategy in order to drive demand for the new law enforcement degree program.
Our Solutions
We took a three-pronged approach to tackling these challenges.
1. Build the site to be SEO-friendly from day one
In addition to the basics of technical SEO best practices, such as optimizing page load speeds, building mobile-friendly pages, and making sure the sitemap structure was easily crawlable by search engines, we knew that USD Online Degree’s blog would be a major engine for search-optimized content. As such, we took care to include a link in the utility navigation and make sure the URL structure didn’t bury it within multiple subdomains (as is surprisingly common with higher education institution blogs).
2. For the MEd program, a focus on links and authentically valuable content
The upside of the competitive nature of the Master of Education program was that we knew exactly who the audience was for this degree — teachers. And while BOFU keywords that indicated that searchers were actively looking for master’s degree programs would be hard to rank for out of the gate, our higher education content strategy experts had a creative workaround that we’d already proven effective for our roster of higher education clients.
Instead of targeting those difficult BOFU keywords, we would create content that would naturally be valuable to teachers who might not be actively searching for a master’s degree program but who were looking for ways to improve their skills and advance their careers. We also created enriched, downloadable content such as:
- Resume and cover letter guides
- Classroom management resources
- Guides to state licensure requirements
We created CTAs to download these resources within our blog posts — in exchange for filling out a lead-generation form, of course.
These strategies served several purposes at once:
- Because the content was valuable and informative, other blogs and websites would naturally link to it, helping build USD Online Degrees’ domain authority.
- It introduced the brand and the program to an audience that would see the value of a master’s degree in order to meet their career goals.
- By offering premium downloadable content that was highly relevant to our blog visitors, we generated top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) and middle-of-the-funnel (MOFU) leads that we could then nurture through automated email campaigns.
- Those leads increased the value of our search-optimized TOFU content and enabled USD Online to see a higher return on investment (ROI) than they would by targeting highly competitive BOFU keywords.
3. For the LEPSL graduate degree program, drive demand for a unique offering through content marketing
Today, USD Online Degrees enjoys a solid reputation for offering the graduate degree program of choice for law enforcement professionals looking to advance their careers, especially in the school’s home state of California. But at launch, of course, they had no reputation at all. And because the program was so innovative, no one really knew to look for a master’s degree in law enforcement.
Luckily, our higher education digital marketing specialists understood how to capitalize on audience insights much like we did with the MEd program.
Instead of focusing on degree-related keywords, we built a content marketing strategy around keywords relevant to law enforcement professionals investigating ways to increase their skills and advance in the field — things like career guides and articles about trends in law enforcement.
Once law enforcement professionals ended up in the program’s blog via search, we were able to introduce the program to them and ideally get them to convert on a premium content offer, giving us a chance to nurture them via email.
Results
Starting from zero has the advantage of making tangible improvements a breeze! But of course we weren’t satisfied with just any improvement from baseline — USD Online Degrees needed significant, high-converting traffic to make their new programs viable in the long term.
Here are some of the measurable SEO gains that resulted from our collaboration:
21 blog posts from 9 graduate degree programs, driving 15K+ sessions per year per post
USD Online Degrees Website
From 0 to 50K+ organic sessions/month
Master of Education Program
From 0 to 8K+ organic sessions/month
Law Enforcement and Public Safety Leadership Program
Blog Post: Is Homework Necessary? Education Inequity and Its Impact on Students
This post was one of the first pieces of content Vital wrote for USD Online Degree’s MEd program, and it’s been a top performer from the start. Here’s where it stands today:
- 12% of all USD Online Degrees’ organic traffic comes from this post
- 19K organic sessions per month
- 16.1K backlinks
- 665 keywords in traffic driving positions*
- 41 AI overviews featuring this post
*Traffic driving positions include the top three spots on Google’s search engine results page (SERP), plus featured snippets and AI overviews.
Blog Post: 17 Innovative Police Technologies
This is one of the top-performing blog posts for USD Online Degrees’ LEPSL program. The lower traffic numbers reflect the narrower audience for this program compared to the MEd program.
- 1.9K organic sessions per month
Conclusion
In the midst of constantly changing SEO “rules,” following a few simple principles has allowed our partnership with USD Online to remain highly effective in driving organic traffic to their now 14 graduate degree program offerings. As AI becomes more sophisticated in its ability to both generate content and curate search results, our focus on the human art of connecting with our audience’s true needs and interests enables our clients to stay ahead of the competition.
That’s one of the things we love about higher education marketing. Our clients offer something that’s truly valuable to people — an education — so search engine optimization becomes an exercise in empathy, backed by strategic and technical expertise. In the case of USD Online Degrees, the Vital team’s ability to empathize with prospective students enables an effective and creative approach to SEO that continues to play an important role in USD Online Degrees’ growth and success.
Vital did an incredible job designing and building a website that empowers my team to meet our most important goals. From increasing prospective student leads to making it simple to launch and promote new academic programs, the site strikes the perfect balance between powerful functionality and ease of use. It looks
great, too.”
— Jaclyn Kezirian
Marketing Director, University of San Diego Online
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