Higher Education SEO, PPC, & CRO National
Background Information
Sixth City Marketing was hired by Kent State University in 2014 to help market a variety of graduate programs for the College of Business Administration (now named the Ambassador Crawford College of Business and Entrepreneurship) to potential students searching online.
Initial Situation
Marketing graduate programs in Ohio are incredibly competitive and have become even more challenging over the last few years. This is due to increased competition and degree offerings, especially online options, from neighboring universities and those nationwide.
What We Did to Help
- Implementing a custom higher education-focused marketing strategy tailored toward their audience
- Increasing search engine presence by targeting keywords relevant to the audience
- Refining keywords and targeting across key pages and PPC landing pages
- Utilizing an aggressive content marketing strategy on prominent pages
- Designing custom page templates on their Drupal website to help with conversions
Results of Our Work Over the Years
2016 vs. 2015
- Search engine traffic increase of 74%
- Paid traffic increase of 36%
- Leads from Google Ads increased by 366%
2017 vs. 2016
- Overall leads increased by 135%
- Organic leads increased by 38%
- Paid leads increased by 148%
- 6.4x ROI in 2017
2019
- 10+ enrollments across the programs we focused on in our SEO strategies
- Nearly 3x ROI in 2019
Following our higher education SEO, PPC, and site design expertise, we interviewed Kent State’s Dean, Deborah Spake: