Client
The educational center, which provides support for applicants to study in Poland, has more than 25 offices in different Ukrainian cities, with official representatives of the admission committee of Polish universities.
Having more than 15 partner universities, this center is an official representative of their admission committee.
Our goal
Improvement of positions and traffic in priority directions:
- “Study in Poland”
- “Universities in Poland”
Input data:
Region: Ukraine
Start of work: February, 22 2022
Language: Ukrainian
Search engine: Google
Seasonality: The peak season is from mid-July to October
Difficulties encountered during the project
The competition in the selected niche is particularly high: the top-10 is so well-established that even when Google’s algorithms change, the competing sites have not fallen out of the top. It is extremely hard to “move” someone out of the top.
Competitor and niche analysis
Our experts have studied the niche in detail, selecting competitors with the help of Ahrefs.com:
| Target | Domain Rating | Domains | Total Backlinks | Total Keywords | Total Traffic |
| Client’s website |
19 |
279 |
11885 |
6341 |
8488 |
| Competitor 1 |
17 |
258 |
1471 |
4355 |
7563 |
| Competitor 2 |
32 |
413 |
1299 |
3499 |
7774 |
| Competitor 3 |
22 |
155 |
762 |
5291 |
17208 |
| Competitor 4 |
30 |
427 |
17053 |
11081 |
33385 |
| Competitor 5 |
27 |
431 |
1654 |
3892 |
8058 |
Unfortunately, the link mass quality of our project is lower than that of most competitors. The number of links is optimal, yet it is important to continue building them up, since our competitors are doing link building on a regular basis, and in order to “move” them from the top, we have to do more and perform better than them.
Searching for site growth points
Based on the priorities of the client, we have studied the possible points of growth and identified the most frequent and appropriate ones:
- General page “Study in Poland”
- Page “Universities of Poland” as well as:
- Separate pages for each university
- City pages by “Universities in Warsaw” type
- Pages of specialties, e.g. “Cosmetology doctor, training in Poland”
Working process
Semantic core and working with the content
All of our proposed growth points were agreed upon with the client, and the team started collecting the semantic core and clustering. We collected a total of more than 40 semantic groups.
Having collected the Semantic Core, we studied the current positions of the site pages and made a decision on revising or writing new content. The optimizers drafted the terms of reference for writing and re-optimizing existing texts, and copywriters promptly proceeded to the task.
Technical audit of the website
We accepted the site for promotion with a fairly large number of errors.The technical audit consisted of 45 items, including 28 where we found errors and areas for improving the site.
For all errors, the team prepared a detailed ToR for implementation.
| Program implementation | Inspection result | Priority | Contractor | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | IP website analysis | correct | high | software engineer |
| 2. | Checking the website for viruses, malicious scripts, and blacklisting | correct | high | software engineer |
| 3. | Domain history analysis on WhoIs and web.archive | ОК | ||
| 4. | Checking for the elements that may negatively impact user’s interaction with the website | ОК | ||
| 5. | Recommendations for migrating the site to a new CMS | correct | high | software engineer |
| 6. | Checking for availability and correctness of forming SEO-Friendly URLs (human-readable URL) | correct | high | software engineer |
| 7. | Checking for the gluing of mirrors and complete duplications | correct | high | software engineer |
| 8. | Checking for a complete duplication of content | correct | high | software engineer |
| 9. | Setting up canonical URLs | correct | high | software engineer |
| 10. | Checking for technical pages, pages with duplicate content, or with no content in the index | correct | high | software engineer |
| 11. | Checking for correctness of the server’s responses to the page request | correct | high | software engineer |
| 12. | Checking the page code for HTML and CSS errors | correct | high | software engineer |
| 13. | Checking for availability and errors in SSL certificate | correct | high | software engineer |
| 14. | Checking for hidden or spam links to external resources | correct | high | software engineer |
| 15. | Checking for the correctness of robots.txt file set up | correct | high | software engineer/content manager |
| 16. | Connect GWT | ОК | ||
| 17. | Connect GA | ОК | ||
| 18. | Check Sitemap.xml | correct | high | software engineer |
| 19. | Checking for CSS and JS availability | ОК | ||
| 20. | Checking microformats | ОК | ||
| 21. | Checking social media buttons | ОК | ||
| 22. | Checking website loading speed | correct | high | software engineer |
| 23. | Checking for the availability and optimization of multilingualism | correct | high | software engineer |
| 24. | Checking for mobile version of the website | correct | high | software engineer |
| 25. | Checking for the website customization on other devices | correct | high | software engineer |
| 26. | Checking for the correct output of the text content | ОК | ||
| 27. | Checking the adaptability of the site on different types of devices | correct | high | software engineer |
| 28. | Tracking Stat.Aweb content in the SEO-monitor | correct | low | software engineer |
| 29. | Checking for the elements (commercial factors) on the pages required for ranking in this topic | correct | high | software engineer |
| 30. | Checking for the partial content duplication | ОК | ||
| 31. | Eliminate the removal of irrelevant and out-of-stock items | correct | high | software engineer |
| 32. | Checking for the content pages in the code, which is not displayed on the site pages, comparing the content with cache. | ОК | ||
| 33. | Is the content visible with the JavaScript turned off | ОК | ||
| 34. | Checking the site for compliance with the requirements of the Instructions for Assessors | correct | high | software engineer |
Content
| Program implementation | Inspection result | Priority | Contractor | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 35. | Checking for affiliates | correct | high | software engineer |
| 36. | Checking GCS geo-settings | ОК | ||
| 37. | Checking for the correctness of forming meta tags | correct | high | software engineer |
| 38. | Checking for availability of landing pages for semantic core | correct | high | software engineer |
| 39. | Checking for availability and uniqueness of the web content | correct | high | software engineer |
| 40. | Checking for the text content optimization | correct | high | software engineer |
| 41. | Checking for availability of content formatting | ОК |
Structure and re-linking
| Program implementation | Inspection result | Priority | Contractor | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 42. | Checking for availability of “bread crumbs” | correct | high | software engineer |
| 43. | Checking for re-linking on the website | correct | high | software engineer |
| 44. | Checking for indexed, optimized filter pages | ОК | ||
| 45. | Checking for the broken links | ОК |
Building up an external link mass
Since the site’s DR is not high, the first thing we did was to review all the links the site has, rejecting low-quality ones using Google Search Console.
Then we started selecting donors and gradually built up quality links
In addition to the standard linkbuilding methods we generally use, the team also used:
- Outreach
- Purchasing through link exchanges
- Registrations on trust directories and sites
- Registration on review sites
- Crowd-marketing
Results on the project
After about a year of working on the promotion, our team managed to achieve great results, and the last Google update showed that we were moving in the right direction and used exactly those ways of optimization, which are important for the search engine.
Group «Study in Poland»
The top priority group for the client, which he always emphasized. Reaching the top 10 was not difficult, yet it took around 10 months of work on the internal and external optimization of the page to reach the top 2.
Group «Universities in Poland»
Group «Cost of study in Poland»
Group «Study in Poland for Ukrainians upon the completion of 11th grade»
Group «Universities of Warsaw»
Group «Vistula University»
Group «Cosmetology doctor, training in Poland»
Conclusion
The team managed to achieve excellent results during a year of promotion. According to the ahrefs.com service, there has been a 6x increase in traffic since the start of the promotion.
The actual data in Google Analytics differs from Ahrefs, but in general, a serious positive dynamics is the same. Such results were achieved thanks to an integrated approach to the promotion of the project.
Project participants
Project Managers: Oleksandra Nesina
Optimizer: Yurii Oshchapovskyi
Linker: Yevhen Fedchenko