How #ARM Worldwide boosted admission rates and traffic by 166% for RICS
RICS School of Built Environment (RICS SBE), Amity University, is an industry-led academic institution that offers unique courses such as MBA in construction management, which provide industry insights and practical experience.
The days of queuing in long lines for college admission are a thing of the past. The current generation favours doing tasks digitally. Thus, to spread knowledge about these unique and comprehensive courses over the internet and find individuals who are well suited for them, RICS joined hands with #ARM Worldwide.
Challenges
- Due to factors like overpopulation and extreme disparities in skill gap, countries like India have a very competitive work and employment environment. This competition gets more fierce as someone climbs the hierarchy in their respective field to prove they are an irreplaceable asset. This has led to a spike in interest in management-oriented courses, with thousands of colleges taking in over 3 lakh students annually. Marketing and Finance are the most dominant fields for these courses. The robust MBA and BBA courses provided by RICS were comparatively harder to discover as they targeted a niche field of BE, therefore, the admission rates were pretty low.
- Before the assistance of the #ARM Worldwide team, the website was generating very low traffic when compared to the competitors. This issue snowballed into sup-par discoverability of the institute, and consequently, the enrolment rates through the website remained unsatisfactory. Low admission rates and lack of brand presence can lead to a loss of goodwill, thus this challenge had to be remedied as soon as possible.
GOAL
The #ARM Worldwide team set a goal of 150% annual growth and driving in more enrolments. To achieve this, the #ARM Worldwide team focused on:-- Increasing the organic traffic received by the website.
- Driving up the enrolment rates for the MBA & BBA courses by utilizing robust SEO strategies and improving the organic lead generated by 10%.
Strategy
Niche yet Notable The #ARM Worldwide team conducted extensive research on the trends and the rankings of the keywords being utilized by other institutions. There are various colleges offering MBA courses in finance, advertising, etc, however, the building & real estate industry-specific courses provided by RICS were their USP. As they were the thing that separated them from the competition, #ARM Worldwide built a strategy around them. To further foster this niche, the #ARM Team researched and identified websites with relation to education and course selection, such as student forums, exam-prep sites, and other trustworthy websites, and initiated an aggressive backlinking campaign on the websites with high domain authority. Reaching The Pinnacle By accounting for factors such as examination and graduation dates of various colleges and the month of result declaration, the #ARM team was able to capitalize on the strategy at the peak time-frames. Through effective planning and keyword optimization, the aggregate efforts of approximately 40 keywords assisted in achieving the 1st page of Google SERP. The #ARM SEO team suggested that RICS optimize their admission portals and enrolment forms, as their robust courses are the primary traffic generator. Pivoting the niche from a hindrance to a strength assisted in further cementing the RICS brand in the education sphere. This was done to achieve more enrolment rates and drive more traffic to the website by attracting students that were actively looking to join the course. The on-page components were further polished to act as a backbone for the robust strategies proposed by the #ARM SEO team. This required activities such as optimizing the site’s meta tags, the various headings and the images to be more SEO compliant so that more keywords could be infused in the published content. Furthermore, the #ARM team put substantial efforts into optimizing the off-page content such as blogs and guest posts, as well as short-form content such as Q&As and short articles to cover all the bases. Lead Generation The primary focus was on targeting the keywords related to “Admission”, PAA queries and optimizing the website pages & blogs around the same. Also, admission-related search queries were infused in the off-page activities, in the descriptions, headings and other tags of the site. Aside from this, a preliminary set of criterias were created, on the basis of which the candidates would be selected. They are:-- Percentage results from a recognized board,
- History of participation in Extracurricular activities,
- Financial Background
Results
The toiling work and efforts put in by the members of the #ARM Worldwide team paid dividends. Through sheer effort and considerate planning, the metrics achieved by the team for RICS were beyond the most hopeful estimates, showcasing the flawless execution of the #ARM Strategy. Organic Growth The goal of 150% organic growth had been comfortably achieved, and the exact growth was 166%. Traffic At the end of the year, RICS the traffic hike from 3.3k to 10.4k, a substantial improvement of 315%. A substantial role was played by the keywords optimized with reference to “MBA/BBA Enrolment, as 70% of all the organic traffic was through the program pages.
- 40 keywords that ranked in the top 10 rankings.
- 17 Keywords between the 11th and 30th ranking
- 3 Keywords between 31-50 ranking.
