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CQF SEO Results

It didnt take long for our efforts to take hold in Google, and we have seen some wonderful improvements in metrics across the board.

+36%

Increase in Website Sessions YoY

+64%

Increase in Goals YoY

+26%

Increase in Conversion rate YoY

The challenge

CQF wanted to compete in Google for core commercial and transactional keywords, as well as a selection of much more difficult informational keywords.

Ground zero

The CQF website had never had any SEO consideration, so we were starting from scratch.

Low word counts

Most of the pages on the website had very low word counts. An ongoing content programme would be crucial.

Technical issues

The website itself needed some serious TLC to get the page speed up and pass core web vitals before we could address items such as Schema and Meta Data.

The CQF website has to compete with the course landing pages from many prominent universities, making a top 3 search ranking position for these types of phrases extremely challenging as these education domains have incredibly strong domain authority and are well-known in the market.

The CQF’s reach is global and the SEO strategy had to reflect that by ensuring the content was written for a global audience. To this end, our keyword research was conducted on a global scale, with the keyword selection process giving the highest search volume keywords top priority.

The SEO plan of action

After careful analysis and consideration, we agreed that there were several important areas that needed addressing

  • Content – At this level, CQF’s content needed to be of a higher quality and length than the competitors.  We needed to update existing content and produce fresh content for both transactional/commercial keywords and informational keywords, so that we grow our digital footprint for anything Quant Finance related.
  • Improve the backlink profile – The backlink profile of each individual page needed to stronger than the competitors.  The backlinks themselves needed to have a global footprint, and to come from authoritative sources with high Domain Rating as we will be competing with a selection of well-established universities and course providers.
  • Technical SEO – We needed to ensure the CQF website was fit to load and serve users globally, on any device and with a very fast load time. Our technical audit highlighted a number of issues and areas for improvement, and we created a plan with the CQF technical team to tackle those.

Huge keyword ranking jump

In Summer 2023 our work took a significant step forwards with many more keywords now ranking in Google.

We secured the Rich Snippet

9 months into the project we managed to achieve the rich snippet for Quantitive Finance - a phrase with 40,000 searches per month

 

The results

We successfully overtook several major universities on search results pages.

We have had great success in getting the vast majority of  CQF’s core keywords onto Page 1 of the Search Engines, and CQF’s organic traffic continues to grow month on month.

This has resulted in:

  • 326% increase in net organic keyword portfolio
  • 164% increase in organic keywords in positions 1-3
  • Over 23% increase in Google Analytics goal completions

Moving into the next phase of work, we are shifting gears and plan to go after even more difficult search phrases with much higher monthly keyword search volumes.

Testimonial image for CQF SEO
The team at MintTwist have been a joy to work with. They produced a solid approach to help address our immediate SEO priorities and were there to guide us through both our understanding of some of the more complicated SEO principles, as well as implementing the recommended changes.

Marlen Klepin

Marketing Manager, CQF
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