Case Study | Uplift Michigan

+600%

increase in organic traffic

+545%

Increase in visibility

traffic from search engines

positions higher than original targeted keywords

01 | Situation

Situation Overview

Online School with exceptional, tuition-free program
Traffic to website was stagnating
Turned to MINDSCAPE for SEO and increased visibility

A respected online school in Michigan was looking to drive more leads to their site.

Uplift Michigan Online School is a leader among online schools in Michigan – a tuition-free institution that proudly serves all grades K-12. Uplift provides a rich, technology-focused curriculum and a staff with years of experience teaching in an online environment. With so many great offerings, Uplift knew they could convince people that their program was the best in Michigan as long as people saw everything they had to offer.

The traffic on their website was less than they would have liked for how exceptional their program was. So to get more people in front of Uplift’s website, they turned to MINDSCAPE for SEO assistance.

02 | Goals

Goals

Target effective keywords
Rank higher in search engines
Drive more traffic to website

Rank for effective keywords and convert traffic from said keywords.

At the core of any great SEO strategy, are your target keywords. A number of factors go into what makes an effective keyword, such as how often the keyword is searched, your current ranking for the keyword, and how difficult it is to rank highly for the keyword.

Uplift’s goal was to drive more traffic to their website to drive more conversions, so helped them identify the right keywords to target for the greatest chance of success.

03 | Challenges

Challenges

Uplift uncertain which keywords to target
Current website targeted ineffective keywords
Targeted crowded markets, underutilized local SEO

SEO Keyword uncertainty previously led to targeting ineffective keywords.

At the time MINDSCAPE started working with Uplift, the core of their keyword strategy targeted ‘tuition-free k-12 online school’. Although Uplift was proud to be all of those things, that was a very crowded space for SEO. They weren’t ranking on the first page of relevant keywords here despite targeting them.

Uplift needed to find a less crowded keyword space, so we recommended localizing their keyword strategy.

04 | Solutions

Solutions

Examine top keywords relevant to online school in Michigan
Target keywords that were easier to rank highly for
Benefit from local SEO practice

Target local keywords with low competitive difficulty.

To find a less crowded keyword space, we looked at a lot of options and found the local approach was the way to go. We advised Uplift to move their main target keyword messaging away from ‘tuition-free k-12 online school’ to ‘online school in Michigan’.

We found a high stream of people searching for the “online school in Michigan” keywords – and they were much easier to target than “tuition-free k-12 online school” keywords. Following our recommendation, Uplift begin implementing this strategy on their website.

04 | Results

Results

600% increase in traffic to website from search engines
545% increase in visibility on targeted keywords
8 positions higher on average search engine pages than original targeted keyword

Results better than we could have ever expected.

The shift to ‘online school in Michigan’ keywords went even better than expected. Uplift had originally been ranking at #12 in SERP, for “tuition-free k-12 online school” keywords, putting them on the second page of results. For their newly targeted ‘online school in Michigan’ keywords, they were ranking as highly as #4 and towards the top of the first results page. This lead to 545% increase in visibility for targeted keywords, and a 600% increase in organic traffic!