About The Customer:

SpacesEDU (https://spacesedu.com/en/) is a forward-thinking educational platform dedicated to empowering students with digital portfolios and competency-based learning software built to showcase student growth. Despite its strong educational offerings and established position in the Market, SpacesEDU’s organic visibility and online presence were being undermined by several technical and SEO challenges.

During 2024, they engaged Jason Pittock to help support their SEO goals and increase their site traffic. Driving more revenue opportunities and reinforcing their go-to-market strategy with increased non-brand-aware traffic.

Problems:

  • Unoptimized Pillar Pages: The site lacked optimized content hubs, limiting its thematic authority and semantic content.
  • No Localized Pages: Without region-specific pages, the website struggled to capture local search interest that closely aligned with its go-to-market strategy.
  • Missing Title Tags & Structured Data: Essential on-page SEO elements were absent or unoptimized, diminishing search engine performance.
  • Long URLs: Overly lengthy URLs were negatively affecting usability and search engine indexing.
  • Failed Core Web Vitals & Slow Site Speed: Critical performance metrics were below par, leading to poor user engagement.
  • High AI Score: The content required optimization to read more accurately and better serve the target audience.
  • No adoption of Search Console and Organic visibility insights: the key members of the marketing team lacked insights on their core organic search metrics.

Key outcomes:

  • Increased Organic Visibility: The creation and optimization of pillar and localized pages, along with on-page SEO improvements, resulted in higher search rankings and increased organic traffic.
  • Improved User Experience: Improved site speed and performance metrics reduced bounce rates and kept users engaged for longer periods.
  • Stronger Technical Foundation: Optimizing URLs, resolving technical errors in the sitemaps, and addressing Core Web Vitals issues laid the groundwork for ongoing site performance improvements.
  • Authentic Content Quality: By optimizing content and reducing the high AI score, the website now features a more natural, credible voice that builds trust with both users and search engines.
  • Increased Domain Authority: Domain authority increased by 6 points in less than four months. This improvement is due to passing the core web vital assessment and content optimization.

SpacesEDU Engaged With Jason Pittock in 2024 With a Goal: We Need Our Brand To Become Visible in Search to Non-Brand Aware Audiences. 

We understood from the get-go that the website is a channel for visibility and must contribute to opportunity. The website, as an asset, should support business growth and other activities in the sales and marketing function. The SEO program for SpacesEDU had to be sensitive to contributing to the business go-to-market and not looked at in a silo. This allowed us to make informed decisions that were strategically aligned with the business roadmap.

Key implementations of the SEO Program:

Content Structure Overhaul:

  • Supported the development of optimized pillar pages to act as central hubs for key topics, thereby strengthening semantic relevance.
  • Enabled SEO-structured localized pages tailored to specific regions, enhancing local SEO and connecting with regional audiences.

On-Page SEO Enhancements:

  • Added missing title tags and meta descriptions to improve click-through rates and visibility in search results.
  • Implemented structured data markup to help search engines better understand the site content.

URL Optimization:

  • Shortened and refined long URLs to improve both user experience and indexing efficiency.

Technical Performance Improvements:

  • Addressed Core Web Vitals issues and improved overall site speed through code optimization and server enhancements, ensuring faster load times and smoother interactions.

Content Optimizations:

  • Revised and refined existing content to reduce the high AI score, ensuring a more natural, engaging tone that resonates with users and search engines alike.

GTMetrix Report: Before & After Site Speed and Core Web Vitals Optimization

Website performance is a crucial factor in SEO and user retention. Our GTMetrix analysis highlighted critical speed issues affecting Spaces Edu, including slow load times and failed Core Web Vitals. After optimizing caching, code efficiency, and server performance, we achieved significant improvements. Below are the results of our optimizations.

The Team To Achieve SEO Success for SpacesEDU

This SEO program wasn’t achieved in a silo. There was an integrated high-performance SEO team behind the project to deliver at each stage. 

Ranging from key strategic SEO oversight to website development and updates, SEO training for the team, and On-Page optimizations. 

The key roles we filled in this project were:

  • SEO Oversight and Strategist
  • On-page SEO and Content Specialist 
  • SEO Coach

Integrated Collaboration for SEO Success

Working with the team to win is what we care about the most. This customer had limited resources and aggressive ambitions to make headway in a new market! The key to success in these projects is communication, integrated working relationships with the team, and managing expectations. Creating organic visibility isn’t just flipping a switch. Its journey and supporting the customer’s goals to start that journey is the best part of these SEO projects!

The Time Frame

  • Phase #1 Kickoff Discovery 
  • Phase #2 Audit and Alignment to Business Strategy
  • Phase #3 Implementation of optimizations
  • Phase #4 Team Training and Adoption
  • Phase #5 Attribution, Measurement, and SEO Coaching