Targeted SEO campaigns to increase uptake for the RCA’s short courses

A bespoke design for a discerning and lucrative young audience.

The Royal College of Art offers access to world-leading researchers, practitioners and facilities through innovative masterclasses and workshops, and needed help increasing visibility of their short courses.

Utilising search engine optimisation and some targeted paid advertising, MintTwist managed to increase signups for the Executive Education short courses by making the website more visible to a relevant audience, and by creating more entry points to the site. Our objective was to attract, engage and build relationships with new audiences across the art, design and humanities industries.

The RCA were expanding the number of short and summer courses on offer.

Their primary focus was to increase signups for the executive education short courses and overall recruitment for postgraduate courses as a secondary goal.

As part of the project, the RCA used the ongoing support and knowledge transfer from us to attract, engage and build relationships with new audiences across the art, design and humanities industries. Our main objective was to achieve the university’s recruitment goals for the short courses through organic search engine optimisation and secondly, with the assistance of some paid activity.

Growing the organic visibility of the RCA’s short courses was the main challenge.

Our main goal at MintTwist was to grow the organic visibility of the RCA’s short courses and increase the number of signups.

Throughout our process, we:

Workshops

Knowledge transfer was key to the success of this project

We created five workshops for the RCA including On-Page SEO, an introduction to keyword research, PPC, content for SEO and a reporting and analytics workshop.

The purpose of these workshops was to transfer knowledge to the marketing and recruitment team and make sure they have all the information needed to continue to work towards their targets.

We couldn't be happier with the result of our team’s wonderful work.

With almost immediate effect, the Executive Education pages have seen a huge SEO visibility boost, which has resulted in more than a 200% increase in pageviews.

The relevant pages have not only become easy to find and access but as a result of the new URL structure and new landing pages, the website is now easier to navigate which means users are now spending 4.2% more time on the site than they used to. Finally, and most importantly, as a direct result of MintTwist’s work with the RCA, the Executive Education courses have seen a 300% increase in signups and every course was filled in 2018/19.

Just the visibility boost the RCA needed.

Ultimately, MintTwist provided the Royal College of Art a huge visibility boost on search engine results pages, leading to significantly increased traffic to the site.

Training the RCA marketing and recruitment teams also allowed them to keep up the PPC and SEO efforts for more increases in future academic years.