How Ascend Education Attained 14 First Page Rankings
Ascend Education, an IT training provider based in Provo, Utah, had never pursued SEO and had minimal organic traffic with zero first-page visibility for key terms like "Cybersecurity Certifications" and "Virtualization Training Courses." Firestarter SEO implemented a strategy of targeted keyword optimization, local and national link-building, and in-depth content improvements, achieving 14 first-page rankings, a 166% increase in organic traffic, and 250+ organic leads.
ABOUT Ascend Education
Ascend Education is an established IT training provider based in Provo, Utah.
As an established brand in the industry, their mission is to make the lives of instructors and students easier by delivering comprehensive IT training courseware on an easy to use platform. Their clients are educators and students across the US. With such a competitive industry, online visibility is paramount to their success. With our help, they drastically increased their online presence and generated an incredible boost to their traffic by attaining 14 first page keywords.
THE CHALLENGE
When Ascend first approached us, they had not pursued SEO previously. Their online visibility was crucial to their business growth, and they needed to find a provider to help them reach their goals.
Our research revealed the size of the challenge, including:
- Minimal organic visits per month.
- Zero first page visibility for some marquee keywords such as “Virtualization Training Courses” & “Cybersecurity Certifications.”
In other words, they were not reaching a significant portion of their potential client base. A new strategy was absolutely necessary.
THE STRATEGY
Firestarter developed a strategy geared towards targeting better high intention keywords, increasing traffic to the website, & generating high quality leads
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KEYWORD TARGETING
Ascend Education’s site was targeting many keywords that had very low search volume or were too generic to produce results. After identifying their core keywords for each service, we implemented specific keyword targeting throughout the site.
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Link Building
Firestarter pursued a local and national link-building strategy for Ascend in order to boost rankings. Over time, Firestarter helped increase Referring Domains from 25 to 140.
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Content Optimization
An additional layer of our strategy was to pursue an in-depth optimization on core pages throughout the site. This included analyzing items like word count, headings, and keyword use frequency. This played a massive role in boosting up conversions by creating SEO rich content that Google was able to use to get a better understanding of what they wanted to rank for.
THE RESULTS
Our strategy generated massive increases in every key metric.
INCREASE IN RANKINGS
Ascend Education attained major visibility, with 14 keywords ranking on the 1st page. This includes “Virtualization Training” “Comptia Online Courses,” & “Linux + Course.”
166% INCREASE IN MONTHLY ORGANIC TRAFFIC
Monthly traffic increased to 1,200 organic visits per month from 450.
250+ ORGANIC CONVERSIONS
Ascend Education has received more than 250 organic leads as a result of their robust SEO campaign.
