Initially, ARC Academy didn’t have a dedicated SEO strategy.

They create courses on game design, animation, VFX, and concept art. In terms of SEO, the main keywords for these products are very competitive.

Search results are dominated by the likes of Udemy, Coursera, Skillshare, and the like who have a way higher domain authority than their website.

Since they didn’t have the authority to rank for the big commercial keywords, my strategy for them focused on writing about adjacent keywords higher up in the funnel. The main goals were to:

Build out the site’s topical authority so that Google sees them as more relevant for the commercial keywords lower down on the funnel and eventually rank their sales pages

Capture users on the upper end of the funnel. Then, we can re-target them with ads on social media. Since they’ve already interacted with the brand by reading our articles, they’re much more likely to sign up for our courses

Outreach to industry-relevant websites to increase their domain authority so that they can rank for harder keywords

We started implementing the strategy in April 2023. From April 2023 to September 2023, their non-brand clicks increased by 88% YoY and their non-brand impressions increased by 30%.