CASE STUDY

University Increases Backlink Budget 5x After Showing Clear ROI

Client Overview

The client was an online higher education institution that helps working individuals return to school for degrees ranging from associate to doctoral degrees in business, education, nursing, and technology from all over the nation.

With a large alumni network and corporate partnerships, the institution focuses on career-relevant education for people who have reached the limits of their current careers and want to obtain the education and certifications needed to find continued career growth.

Results:

57% increase in average rank
80% increase in visibility percentage/share of voice
400% increase in the number of ranking keywords

Challenge

The client was experiencing a long-term steady drop in traffic and visibility on core sales pages that negatively impacted student enrollments.

Our champion was the Director of SEO and a new hire who had to prove capabilities while building relationships with key stakeholders who did not readily trust SEO’s ability to drive results and were concerned that any new initiative would interfere with their goals.

They wanted to show SEO performance but had limited levers they could pull as a well-established, large organization in a highly regulated space and a lot of internal red tape.

As a seasoned SEO with years of experience working at large organizations, our champion knew how to increase impact. However, they also understood the challenges of implementing changes in such a difficult environment with many stakeholder considerations to navigate.

For example, if the champion wanted to launch a new content strategy, make technical SEO changes, or update any website content, they would have to attend numerous meetings with unfamiliar stakeholders and compliance teams during months-long approval processes.

This put the client in a difficult position—asked to deliver on KPIs with few levers to pull and a countdown to show performance.

SOLUTION

Our champion realized unbranded link-building campaigns would side-step the internal and external approval obstacles, increasing visibility on key sales pages and conversions in a competitive search environment.
This would showcase SEO’s ability to positively impact performance, increasing positive perception and perceived value of the SEO team as a major sales lever within the organization.

Having worked with Citation Labs before, our champion knew we could get high-quality, relevant links to core pages that would impact visibility, support business goals, and help underscore the value of their role.

OUR PROCESS

We started with our main link-building offering for organizations in industries with hyper-competitive search environments (including design, deployment, management, and reporting). Then, we evolved our approach to fit the changing needs of the client.

Conduct Analysis: Run several site audits using our Link Gap tool from the Link Launch Tool Suite to evaluate core sales landing pages at the page level.
Run Discovery: Determine the business priorities (engagement and conversions) and how the new project would differ from the previous engagement.
Strategy Development: Create the initial strategy suggesting pages for links, how many links, how to acquire those links, and the order (priority) for getting those links.
Determine KPIs: Figure out how to track and report on business KPIs in a complex, multi-touch journey, then work with the team to find and establish those metrics as KPIs.
Provide Guidance: Provide our champion with the information needed to collect critical business metrics for the campaign.
Outreach Design: Build a detailed campaign for unbranded link-building to increase visibility on sales pages that serve as key touchpoints in the buyer journey.
Outreach Management: Successfully manage, negotiate, and deliver 100s of new links to key sales pages each month per the agreement.
Present Reporting and Forecasting: Using the link impact report, share clear data with controls that show the impact link building has on key sales pages and revenue.
Test New Approaches: Move beyond the initial strategy to test unique, high-value link-building campaigns to further distance the client from competitors.
Ongoing Coaching: In-depth support and guidance for selling the value of SEO internally, communicating results (in language CMOs care about), and expanding the budget for new campaigns over several months.

ROADBLOCKS

The organization was unsure about the value of SEO for increasing student enrollment as previous hires and vendors failed to connect SEO efforts to business impact. This lack of understanding meant the initial budget for link building was low.

Working with our champion, we built campaigns to get links to critical sales pages. The increased visibility drove new sign-ups and created an internal buzz for SEO.

When the leadership team discovered additional budget, our champion leaned on us to build a proposal to expand the link-building effort. We worked with our champion, the sales, analytics, and PPC teams to unlock key sales data (CLTV, Value Per Lead, and AOV—true conversion data from the website).

This included joining the PPC team at MozCon to answer questions while building trust through educating their team on the potential business impact of backlinking campaigns targeting more sales pages.

Once the team trusted us, they found the relevant sales data we needed to build a custom ROI calculator for the CMO and show the potential impact the additional budget could have on the business goals if used to increase back-linking compared to other channels.

This convinced the CMO to increase the budget, increasing from 64 to 142 links per month.

The increase in backlinks led to a verifiable sales impact. It also increased the organization’s appreciation for link building’s ability to drive business metrics, solidifying our champion’s value to the organization.

Building on each previous success and strong alignment with our champion, the CMO again increased the budget for backlinks (from 142 to 300 per month).

Custom ROI Forecasting Tool Built for the Client

RESULTS

During our initial engagement, we added 54 links per month to key sales landing pages across the site, resulting in a 45% increase in visibility to keywords ranking in positions 1-3.

The average rank for the top 10 KWs per page increased by 58%.

Visibility for keywords ranking 20 or better also improved by 80%.

This was driven by a 4-fold increase in the number of ranking KWs:

Additional Results:

Early results led to a 50% increase in the budget for link-building campaigns.
Consistent reporting provided by our team made it easier to have internal discussions about the value of SEO.
The CMO invited our champion and our team to a budget meeting due to the positive impact of link building, leading to a significant budget increase for SEO.
The budget has increased 5x since the initial engagement due to the continued success of our main and experimental link-building campaigns.
Our champion received a promotion because they could clearly show how their choices led to a positive impact on the business.

Our champion’s ability to navigate internal challenges, build relationships with key stakeholders internally, avoid potential pitfalls, and regularly educate the client’s team on the value of our efforts significantly amplified the speed of our success and results.

WHAT’S NEXT:

Since our initial engagement four years ago, we’ve launched several successful link-building campaigns and tested new experimental campaigns to explore unique ways to stay ahead of competitors while providing more value to students.

Specifically, we’ve developed our strategy for mapping out Frequently Unasked Questions (FUQs or unknown-unknowns) to help prospective students and their stakeholders make an informed decision leading to content that’s more citation-worthy.

We’re also exploring their internal linking, lost backlinks, and other often overlooked areas of link-building for a continued edge against competitors.