How Content Strategy Helps Serve Students

Josepf Haslam, Senior Director, Marketing: So Education Dynamics has a number of premier sites — gradschools.com and studyabroad.com have been around for 21 years — we have a lot of expertise in helping students find programs that they’re looking for. The organic channel is very important for our business. What we all understand is that the organic traffic actually converts much more effectively for the universities. Not only are they more likely to convert, but they also have a tendency to apply and enroll at a higher rate with higher quality. Would I recommend working with Conductor? I’m very adamant about it. When I recommend anything, whether it’s Conductor or a local WaWa for coffee, part of my reputation is at stake for doing that, and I fervently recommend Conductor. Conductor, quite frankly, has the best customer service out of any company I’ve ever used for anything. I mean, flat out the best. With that said, Conductor also helps us go from what I call that eye of the eagle — I can look at all 13 sites I have within the platform, understand their health, understand how they’re performing — but yet drill down very easily and effectively to the eye of the ant. I can get down at the page level and keyword level and do the optimizations I need to do. So we find it a very easy platform to use for that, and it’s also very CEO-friendly. My CEO, I can send him reports, data, and he can understand what’s happening with the platform. That’s a really big help within our company too. Katie Holcomb, Content Manager: Searchlight has really helped me in my role as a content manager, not only to track the progress of my team, but to train my writers on how to make really good content. There are a lot of topics that we have to write about that we don’t really know much about, and this helps us, through audience intent explorer, to get in the reader’s head, and really understand the landscape of what’s going on in search. Spencer Shaak, SEO Manager: We use Conductor with the writers to either put a URL in, or an actual keyword. And using audience explorer we can see pages and where the keywords rank. We can see a concrete visualization of where the keywords have increased or decreased. It helps me work with the writers more. I can really pinpoint a specific writer and the content that they’ve done, rather than going in the content management system we use and trying to find the writer, I can use Searchlight and try and narrow it down that way. I can see what type of content, what type of keywords we can hit. Josepf Haslam, Senior Director, Marketing: We’ve had excellent results. We’ve significantly increased our keyword pipeline — keywords coming to our websites, how they’re ranking — and that’s translated into tangible results for the company in terms of earnings, after tax. We actually, last year, increased our content budget over 300%, and we’re looking for another substantial increase this year. So Conductor is not only working for us, it’s literally paid off for us.