CASE STUDY: DEPARTMENT FOR EDUCATION
Implementing SEO
& digital strategy to save schools millions
Did you know UK schools spend £75 million a year on staff recruitment. The DfE had a plan to change that, they just needed a team to make it happen.
3–MINUTE READ
IN A NUTSHELL
Client
Department for Education / M (experiential marketing)
Services
-
Digital marketing strategy
-
SEO strategy
-
Web UX
-
Brand strategy
-
Content strategy
Difference
-
220% uplift in organic traffic.
-
Gained 37 basis points in % audience share on our nearest competitor.
-
Reduced the site's bounce rate from 26% to 4%.
-
Increased page one ranking for keywords from 8 to 49.
Solving a resource gap: I had recently helped the experiential marketing agency M win a place on the coveted UK Government Digital Services framework – enabling them to pitch for Government contracts. Their head of digital, Nick Clarke brought me back in to lead the pitch for their first contract: SEO and digital strategy for the Department for Education (DfE).
The DfE had a nationwide problem. UK state schools had no choice but to shell out over £75m every year to recruitment companies just to find new staff. The Department for Education wanted to eliminate those costs so they set up a free, teacher-recruitment website called Teaching Vacancies.
We won the pitch with a combined UX, SEO and paid ad strategy to help Teaching Vacancies overtake its private competitors and become the go-to online resource for teacher recruitment.
I led the implementation and within six months we helped the site grow its organic traffic by 220% and increase its Google page one rankings for over 40 keywords. Here’s how we did it...
In six months, our SEO implementation
increased organic traffic 220%.
Workshopping for insights. Open conversations with the DfE team allowed me to better understand the specific challenges of marketing a Government service, and to crystallise the team’s knowledge of their audience, which revealed some immediate actionable insights.
Fixing the basics for a strong SEO foundation. Our SEO auditing software provided an immediate list of technical improvements for the website along with metadata optimisations and back-end fixes, which we quickly shared and implemented.
Learning from the competition. By analysing their main competitors, we uncovered new tactics to optimise the site’s user-experience for job-seeking teachers and built a content strategy to keep that audience coming back.
Plotting user journeys from other DfE sites to increase organic traffic.
The DfE’s digital footprint that wasn't driving a highly relevant audience through to Teaching Vacancies. I audited it and found dozens of relevant points across their blog, parallel campaigns and social media channels to link to Teaching Vacancies and boost their traffic.
Creating a personalised site experience. Search query analysis and competitor research revealed that teachers care more about job location than anything else. So we created hundreds of unique URLs and landing pages, personalised to locations across the UK and unsurprisingly our traffic shot up. The improved URL structure also boosted the quality score with Google Ads, increasing our paid search ranking and conversions.
Re-positioning the brand. Having optimised the website experience for teachers, I worked on tailoring the brand identity. Acknowledging the deficit to our competitors in terms of trust and the numbers of jobs listed on the site, I developed a brand identity that played to our strengths and the ethos of our audience; moving our core messaging away from ‘The official site for teaching jobs’ and appealing directly to the values we shared with our audience, with the message: 'Free for schools, better for teaching'. I developed digital content across PPC, Social and PR around the new brand messaging.
