Achieving over 70% growth in organic traffic year-on-year for Melbourne Polytechnic
Technical and
Content Audits
Social Garden & Melbourne Polytechnic have been in partnership since 2021 across a number of projects, ranging from SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) services to Organic Social Media content and User-Generated video content. Melbourne Polytechnic enlisted Social Garden's SEO expertise in March 2022, and the partnership has gone from strength to strength ever since.
Over 72%
Increase in organic traffic to the website year-on-year from 01 November 2021 to 30 November 2022.
Timeframe
March 2022 - February 2023
Services
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
Support retainer
Identifying the job to
be done
The Social Garden team, led by Account Manager Orla Moffatt, worked alongside the team of SEO and web experts at Social Garden to deliver a technical and content audit. We provided actionable insights, recommendations, and next steps for Melbourne Polytechnic's digital team to implement.
The strategic approach
Identify the client's goals
Melbourne Polytechnic's desired outcome was clear: they wanted to see a 15% increase in organic traffic to their website.
Conduct an SEO Audit
Our team conducted:
1. Technical audit
2. Website quality audit
3. Competitor analysis
4. Keyword research for existing pages
5. Content quality audit
Deliver the insights and support
Our flexible approach to working meant we could tailor each month's insights and next steps to suit Melbourne Polytechnic's resources, such as copywriting and web development at any given time.
SPOTLIGHT ON:
The Website Quality Audit
The website quality audit is a key starting point for the team to understand both the content and back-end structure of your website. This creates a roadmap to work on to improve your site’s organic ranking, as Search Engines send traffic to websites they deem to be “high quality”.
So, what does this mean for your website?
• Sites must be coded and structured according to their webmaster guidelines
• Ideally, your site should be mentioned across the web, showcasing that it is ‘popular’ and of value to the traffic that gets sent to the page
• Sites must satisfy “searcher intent” through relevant and quality content
Having low-quality content and pages, coupled with a poor structure and little to no mentions, cause Google to lose trust in your website — which means it will crawl, index, and rank it less and less over time.
The website quality audit assesses the quality of your website by looking at a number of different data inputs, including inbound links, titles, content depth, sales from organic traffic, keyword rankings, and more.
We then use a number of tools and collected data to assess quality metrics at the page level. From here, we decide what to do with all of the pages on your site.
After the data is pulled and aggregated, the manual process begins. We begin by grouping each page into a ‘section’. This allows the team to segment the site and prioritise pages and/or keywords to focus on.
In the case of Melbourne Polytechnic, the Website Quality Audit ensured we had plenty of both technical and content updates to make, so we could roll up our sleeves and start working on them!
The Process
Updating content: on page
• Following our SEO audit, it was apparent that on-page content updates were required across a large number of pages
• We front-loaded our monthly retainer hours, to provide on-page optimisation guidelines and content for Melbourne Polytechnic to publish
• Additionally, we were on hand to review and guide Melbourne Polytechnic regarding content updates, offering both copywriting and editorial services to them as required
Technical tasks: Liaising with the web developers
Like many of our clients, Melbourne Polytechnic did not have a dedicated in-house resource for making technical SEO updates to their site architecture, so we were happy to work alongside their web agency Technical tasks which have been conducted throughout the job include:
• Improving website speed and performance
• Adding images with missing alt text
• Updating Meta description lengths that were too short or too long
• Redirecting internal URLs
Monthly retainer: Consistent Support
• Each month, we met with the team at Melbourne Polytechnic to discuss the monthly report, which outlined results to date, including insights and recommendations for the following month
• To assist with the flow of tasks, we provided a workbook that was colour-coded with assignees. This ensured a clear log of ongoing tasks alongside defined roles and responsibilities
“Social Garden provide us with clear guidance,
great content, regular check-ins, and technical
and functional recommendations. They drove us
to reach and exceed our SEO goals.”
Gino Crawford,
Senior Digital Marketing Coordinator
Result and insights snapshot
72% increase
Traffic to site from 01 November 2021 to 30 November 2022
23% increase
In Page Views from 01 November 2021 to 31 November 2022
40% increase
In Sessions from 01 November 2021 to 30 November 2022
60% Organic Traffic
Showcasing the efficacy of on-page content and site structure updates, as at October 2022
“Not only have we surpassed the client's original targets, but we have done so 6 months ahead of schedule! The results speak for themselves.”
— Orla Moffatt,
Melbourne Polytechnic's dedicated Account Manager
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