Running a full SEO strategy, large PPC and Social Advertising campaigns to grow student numbers

Project summary

Goldsmiths University of London is a close-knit community with a rich academic heritage, it’s a creative powerhouse and a thought-provoking place.

The university describes itself as a “fluid and energetic community where staff and students work in partnership to bring learning to life”.

To develop a full SEO strategy with the help of the university’s in-house digital marketing team.

Our first step was to analyse the full website to find key issues and to highlight them to Goldsmiths.

We then created a number of campaigns to draw the right people to the website.

Objectives

Goldsmiths University of London had a couple of main objectives; to increase keyword rankings of priority pages and to drive more traffic to their website.

Additionally, we needed to gain sign-ups for the university’s Postgraduate Event and create campaigns to drive brand awareness.

Strategy

We analysed potential target audiences and created an SEO strategy that would suit each case in the best way. This allowed us to create priorities and structure for the campaign based on:

Key courses

Search volume

Key audiences

Key objectives

Budgets

Key conversion actions or touchpoints

With the research and analytics data available to us, we were then able to prioritise which SEO work should be rolled out first.

We then implemented all campaign activity and analysed the results for Goldsmiths.

The SEO strategy

We recommended updates to page titles for all the duplicated page titles which represented a total of 7,702 pages.

We identified that many page titles were too long, which can distract from the real subject of the page. The young generation’s attention span is very short and we know that they respond far better to visual content, emojis, etc.

We helped the university with their Postgraduate Open Day which was a great success and also worked on their International Branding Strategy campaign.

The result

One of the largest campaigns we ran for Goldsmiths was the International Awareness Campaign.

The campaign’s success is reflected in the results:

130,048 taking actions

779,844 people reaching