30% more organic traffic for Windesheim University of Applied Sciences

SEO strategy / SEO audit

A SEO audit has acquired a somewhat negative sentiment somewhere in recent years, as there is a perception that an audit is just a list of some isolated SEO areas for improvement. Zonder prio. Zonder estimates. But that, of course, is not the case. 

A SEO audit is equivalent to a SEO strategy at Onder. For example, we have two issues in this case, written down from team Windesheim: 

• We have technical SEO capability, but would like to seek advice on where best to set our arrows and in what order
  • The issue: deploy dev. capacity as efficiently as possible and brief the right technical SEO improvement points to have maximum impact
• We want advice on how to further improve positions of specifically engineering courses
  • The issue: analysing how technical courses rank better (in breadth) 

This was a pilot project for both us and team Windesheim, so that we could properly evaluate both result and cooperation afterwards. We are happy to prove ourselves!

Audit content/strategy

The analysis and strategy roughly consisted of four steps:

• Cluster analysis of technical courses (what does the search query look like, what is important for students, what are frequently asked questions, etc.)
• Zero measurement vs. competition
• Technical SEO analysis + briefing
• Content analysis + briefing

Technical SEO analysis

Windesheim.co.uk is a fairly compact website with a lot of traffic. In terms of technical SEO and crawling/indexing, our focus is therefore mainly on the technical setup. Think of improvements in:

• Robots.txt modifications so that certain filter pages do get crawled
• Canonicals and paging resolution
• Direct internal link structure improvements
• Fixing Canonical issues
• Add structured data in the template

The underlying goal we had with these technical SEO enhancements was not only to improve the efficiency of Windesheim's in-house developers, but more importantly to provide a particular set of pages on Windesheim.co.uk very important, so that Google sees that it means business. You can focus crawl budget pretty well on that in terms of signals, and it worked.

Content & training

Training pages are quite complicated in terms of content:

• You often target multiple audiences: students, parents, the professional field, teachers. These target groups differ not only in terms of intention or information needs, but also in terms of age
• There are many different types of information you can put on such a page at all. Think curriculum, student experiences, open day information, etc.
• Text is not the only content form for 'training in the broadest sense'. Video also generally does very well on these types of pages

In terms of comparing with competitors, these pages are well-organised: we know exactly which courses are comparable and in which cities/institutions the course also occurs. In addition, through (especially) ChatGPT, there are many such courses to compare. 

We compared and analysed all the elements you see above so that we could give team Windesheim a concrete improvement plan for the technical training pages. 

Key areas for improvement:

• Maximising internal linking to make training pages stronger
• Enriching training pages
• Enriching the interest area pages

Implementation and outcome

We presented the SEO strategy from the pilot to team Windesheim. We then:

• Technical areas for improvement checked and adjusted 
• Implementation of content advice monitored particularly around internal linking 
• Content advice tightened where possible and discussed with stakeholders

We slowly saw nice results with many rising positions.

• Technical training: + 32% organic traffic vs last year
• The other courses: +8.5% organic traffic vs last year

This showed that the pilot was definitely successful and, above all, the implementation from team Windesheim was really excellent!

Overall, organic traffic grew by +30%:

How to proceed now?

These are great results that are not a drop in the ocean, but actually help Windesheim in new applications of students within the technical programmes. This was of course a pilot project, but eventually led to a larger collaboration between Windesheim and Onder.

Wondering if we can do something for you too? Then feel free to contact us!