The challenge

My client is an online education provider that offers qualifications online. It drives most of its revenue through its site, so performance here is critical. The site previously ranked for around 10,000 commercial, high-value keywords. but over the last twelve months, this had changed, and the business experienced a significant 49% year-on-year drop in organic traffic. The business suspected that content updates made in late 2022 had caused ranking losses, particularly affecting visibility for its most high-value terms like “online courses”. To compensate for this, they had increased paid search budgets to a level which was less than ideal.

With a large website covering diverse course categories, qualifications, levels, and awarding bodies, the internal team wanted external support to diagnose and validate why previously strong-performing pages had lost search visibility. This validation would need to be backed up by actionable insights to reverse the decline.

The work

The audit took a multi-layered approach:

Data analysis: Combining the most useful and relevant data from the sources above, I identified patterns in the traffic decline and ranking losses across specific pages and keyword groups. This pointed to key periods when the losses began, and which pages, products and queries were impacted the most, versus those which hadn’t seen the same declines.

Manual content review: Through comprehensive manual auditing, I identified critical shortcomings in the affected pages:

• EEAT shortcomings: The updated content lacked sufficient expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness signals that Google prioritises for a YMYL (Your Money, Your Life) site like this in education.
• Content depth issues: Pages that previously performed well had become thinner and less detailed over time, with key sections removed, impacting performance (particularly against competitor sites, which had been consistently improving over the same period).
• Terminology misalignment: Specific language and terminology used on the pages no longer matched how users were searching or how the educational sector was framing these topics. The differences were slight but enough to cause some minor confusion to search engines.

Strategic recommendations and walk through with the team: I collated these findings into a digestible report, along with the raw data used. This provided detailed documentation of the data and issues identified, prioritising issues by expected impact and effort, with clear guidance on how the internal team could replicate this audit process for other categories if needed. I guided the internal team through this document so they understand each of the key findings and how to address them.

The audit delivered the external justification the client needed, pinpointing exactly why their content had lost visibility. By identifying EEAT gaps, content depth issues, and terminology drift as the primary culprits (among several other ‘should have’ and ‘nice to have’ items), I gave their team a clear roadmap for recovery.

The proof-of-concept approach validated the methodology and initial feelings from the internal team. This allowed them to build fixes into the development roadmap not only for the most commercially-focused pages, but the rest of the site.

Achievements