Strengthening Organic Visibility for Leading Online Postgraduate Provider

Challenges

• Organic performance had flatlined. Traffic peaked in July 2024, then slid into a steady decline through late 2024, with the client flagging SEO as stagnant during onboarding.
• Content and metadata across priority course pages sat un-optimised, with missing meta descriptions, duplicate H1s, and title tags falling outside recommended character limits across dozens of URLs.
• A wide backlink and referring domain gap versus competitors. Monash Online held 192 referring domains against Open Universities’ 1,800, leaving significant authority headroom to close.

Strategy & Execution

• Executed a technical SEO overhaul across site speed, 301 redirects, schema markup, breadcrumb implementation, and a new HTML sitemap to restore crawlability and user experience.
• Optimised metadata sitewide. Title tags, meta descriptions, and H1s rewritten against the keyword map to tighten topical relevance and lift CTR.
• Devised a GEO strategy focused on AI Overview capture. Long-tail career pages built out for post-graduation roles in psychology and data science, paired with llms.txt implementation to improve generative search visibility.
• Produced new content and optimisations across priority course categories, targeting low-hanging fruit keywords ranking on pages 2-3 to push them into page 1 territory.
• Implemented a monthly link acquisition cadence, targeting DR60-70 publishers on the two highest-opportunity keywords: graduate diploma in psychology and data science course.

Key Results

KEYWORD REACH RESULTS

• 10% increased in overall keyword indexation (from 7,988 to 8,771) 
• 9.5% increased in top 10 keywords positions (from 2,200 to 2,409).

KEY RANKING WINS

• “courses online” increased 34 positions from 40 to Pos 6, (SV: 9,900).
• “online courses” increased 31 positions from Pos 41 to Pos 10, (SV: 12,100).
• “online university courses” increased 3 positions, from Pos 9 to Pos 6 (SV: 8,100).

CATEGORY TRAFFIC RESULTS (MOM)

• 83.16% increase in Psychology course page sessions (from 1,781 to 3,262).
• 36.34% increased, Data Science and Analytics page sessions (from 963 to 1,313).
• 15.1% increased, Psychology organic clicks by (from 806 to 928), with impressions lifting 2.8% MoM (from 179K to 184K).

AI OVERVIEW RESULTS (MOM)

• 7.8% increased in AI Overview feature appearances (from 180 to 194).
• Achieved, 16 Psychology-related AI Overview features and 5 Data Science-related features, reflecting stronger generative search visibility across priority faculties.