The Learning Experience

Scenario

The Learning Experience came to Empire in the Fall of 2022, with one SEO focus. Start ranking for “daycare near me.” Historically, TLE with over 450 locations, had built a very strong brand presence online. 90% of their terms were brand related. This type of visibility was not producing the lead volume that they needed to keep all locations running smoothly.

Challenge

There were several challenges at the start of this campaign. The most difficult part was the technical SEO scores were all failing. We had to make the very difficult call of rebuilding the website. It had been 5 years since a rebuild and with 6 custom APIs, this environment was collapsing. After 6 months of a very aggressive timeline to launch prior to their busy season, August, the new website launched on August 9, 2023.

Simultaneously, while rebuilding the website, we devoted all of our efforts to cleaning up the off page SEO – backlinks, profiles, social bookmarkings, toxic backlinks, and building new high quality backlinks with and without content.

Solution

• Rebuilt the website
• Built 1000’s of quality backlinks
• Cleaned up backlink profile
• Created more than 500 backlinks with content
• On Page and technical SEO
• Built and launched an FAQ content strategy
• Built and launched a cornerstone content strategy
• Built and launched a blogging strategy

Results

Immediately after the “soft” migration, we lost 30% in organic traffic. After 30 days, the domain recovered completely from the migration and organic traffic increased by 3% when compared to the previous year, so we knew we had made it through the transition.

All of this was in preparation for January of 2024. TLE experienced the highest volume of leads and traffic from organic search on record. 78% of all leads in January came from an organic search. This is an increase of 42.3% over the previous year. 38% of all leads came from a non-brand search term in 2024 vs. 12% in 2023.