EBAC Case Study

We’ll start the story with a brief introduction about the client to let you understand what we are telling you about. EBAC is an educational platform dedicated to giving courses on design, fashion, marketing and programming in Latin America. Initially, the project was launched in Brazil, but then they covered Mexico, Peru and Colombia as well. The TA are startup owners, marketing experts and product managers. Now, the platform has 40k happy students and 189 interactive courses in general. Their monthly revenue is over a million US dollars, and according to the CEO of the project Rafael Steinhauser, in five EBAC will become “a company with an annual revenue of over 100 million US dollars”. The project is TOP 100 of the most promising educational startups of LATAM EdTech 2022.

EBAC’s team addressed us with an ambitious goal: they needed us to make the project the leader in commercial traffic in Brazil. At that point, the project had already been launched according to an established model: context and targeted advertising, as well as sales funnels, had been launched and adjusted, and they needed us to ensure quick and stable growth in all channels.

The main goal was to generate organic traffic on the web site. However, not only did we need to attract users, but also we were to keep them, familiarize them with the product, and create a demand for the product. Apart from that, as the brand was still dipping its toes into the market, and the niche was already dominated by established well-known competitors with a huge user community, we needed to showcase the expertise of the brand and form its positive image in the eye of the public.

If you want to estimate how effective SEO could be for a project, you need to run a comprehensive audit. We split the audit process into the following stages:

Our next step was to analyze the demand and find out what content the audience wanted. We analyzed the blog posts and selected the ones that were most frequently visited, read and commented on.

We studied how our competitors addressed the same audience and developed our own solutions, taking into account the specifics of our client’s business. Our analytical base helped us determine the range of topics that might have interested call tracking customers.

After collecting the inputs, we proceeded to arrange the workflow and create content.

We tracked traffic results in Google Search Console, and used Topvisor to monitor changes in visibility and ranking positions. We set up a dashboard, available to our client’s team as well, to visualize all the key metrics of Google Search Console, Google Analytics and Topvisor, such as:

• Tracking user sessions and requests;
• Monthly CTR;
• Tracking requests from landing pages in Google;
• Queries in Google’s TOP10;
• Visibility;
• Average ranking.

We built a team of experienced specialists. We appointed a project manager to coordinate the tasks. She was constantly in touch with the client, closely monitored the implementation of all technical assignments, updated work statuses in the pipeline table, calculated the work hours and tried to optimize them. The technical scope was taken care of by a Senior SEO, a Middle SEO, and a Linkbuilder. We also added an Analyst to the team to track the performance.

It was crucial for us to not only closely monitor the work status, but also adjust the SEO strategy in time to ensure the continuous traffic growth. For that purpose, we arranged weekly calls, during which we discussed how the work process was going, what tasks were planned, what metrics we had achieved and checked if they corresponded with the predictions. Thus, we were able to track the performance and detect any deviations. The client’s team was aware of what we were doing, and we remained informed of all the changes in client’s priorities.

Then based on the monthly metrics, we prepared detailed reports on the progress, traffic generated in a month and traffic planned for the following month.

To ensure smooth and transparent communication, we always provided the client’s team with timely feedback and access to all the links we bought, technical assignments, and guidelines at all times.

Now we work with over 1,500 commercial requests. 88% are in TOP10.

We started working on the project when visibility was at 5%. In 9 months we managed to make EBAC the leader in search requests by raising the visibility from 5 to 63%. As a result, we outperformed the metrics of the platform Udemy, which accounts for 100 mln queries and is 385th in the world’s rating.

A year into the project, we managed to increase visibility to 80% and achieved the fastest and biggest growth rate on the Brazilian EdTech market.

Our relationship with the client was based on the principle of complete trust on both sides: the client’s team acknowledged our expertise and vast experience in SEO, and implemented all the improvements and assignments immediately upon our request. It is also worth mentioning that the client’s team was technically competent and already had experience in successful launch of an educational online platform.

At the presale stage, we had estimated human resources and budget needed to achieve the above mentioned goals. The client provided us with those exact resources that helped us to exceed our most optimistic predictions.

A year into our work on the Brazilian part of the project, EBAC’s team decided to create a Latin American division by expanding to Mexico, Peru and Colombia. They offered us to continue working on the project in those countries as well and set the same SEO goals, as on the Brazilian project. However, there was a difficulty: common budget for both projects.

We started working according to the tried and tested model and managed to raise the visibility from 0 to 26% within one budget.

The further growth was compromised by the fact that initially, there were few courses on the Latin American project, and that meant few landing pages and few possibilities to place links. So, we proposed the following solution to the client’s team: apart from the SEO promotion of commercial queries, we will create a full-blown brand media for the Mexican market. It would generate information traffic, as well as improve users’ perception of the brand, create a positive brand image, mold a user community of the brand and contribute to the smooth communication with the TA.

Again we had to run a comprehensive competitive analysis but on the Mexican market this time. As we had ambitious goals to create quality content, we needed to fully understand who our reader was and how to speak with them. So apart from the traffic values, we also analyzed content types on the social media of the competitors and the users’ reaction to different types. We defined the target audience and the TOV, created a user persona and an editorial guide according to the niche and TA properties.

Based on the competitive analysis and the keyword analysis, we collected the semantics, which took into account our target audience’s interests. Later, we set up a list of topics combining low, medium and high frequency requests. Moreover, the client’s team provided us with the insights on the most frequent questions received from the clients. That also helped us select the most relevant topics for the audience.
When we realized what we should write about, we formed a team of copywriters from Latin American countries, who not only had expertise in areas of our interests, but also corresponded to the user’s profile. This approach allowed us to relate to the reader.

Our quality content created by expert authors immediately brought results: after a month since publishing the first bunch, a few of them got into TOP8 of the search.

When selecting topics of the month, we adhered to the strategy of combining informational content to promote the website based on the keywords of different frequency with selling content to create sales funnels and raise the conversion. Each article created conversion blocks: link to the course, subscription and webinars.

We also combined topics of different frequencies to raise the traffic in low frequency queries quickly and to ensure the stable growth in medium and high frequency queries.

Later we gradually increased the number of publications per month to achieve the leading positions in traffic and cover the majority of selected topics and courses on the website. As soon as we achieved the planned traffic growth, we stabilized monthly publications.

Not only did we publish useful content, but we also placed our links that helped improve visibility results as well.

We tracked the key performance metrics in Google Analytics. Among them were:

• Subscription to the mailing list;
• Course page visits;
• Banner clicks;
• Main page visits;
• Webinar page visit;
• Social media clicks.

By the time the client had addressed us to collaborate on the design, their blog consisted of 10 translated articles without conversion blocks, authors’ data, suggested articles and tags. Our task was to transform the blog into comprehensive brand media.

Brand media is a separate project with a separate purpose, and it is natural if the media design is completely different to the main page design. We collected references based on the user’s profile and started working with a team of developers and designers.

As we had already had an experience in successfully launching a brand media, we managed to create a design of the main page that the client liked and approved immediately.

Later we prepared mockups of every page: the main page, article page, author’s page, category’s page, tag’s page, 404, search page. Each category had its own sticker and color. Apart from that, we animated practically all the elements and blocks to attract users’ attention: stickers spinned, covers enlarged while being hovered, and tags became highlighted.

The website became bolder, more user friendly, and new conversion blocks were added.

The client’s team liked the design of the media for the Mexican market so much that they decided to repeat it on the Brazilian project. Our team handled the migration of over 300 articles from the old blog to the new one.

It was important for us to find developers who worked precisely with WordPress. The blog was initially created on Tilda, so while the new design was in progress, we published articles on Tilda to start generating traffic already. When the version on WordPress was ready, our content managers migrated them manually one by one.

The client’s team had a number of difficulties with the migration: they had doubts about monitoring, support and backup. We offered to take care of those tasks. We linked the media to our server and successfully migrated it from the technical domain to the main one, and the articles got transferred automatically.

We achieved a desired result: after implementing a new design, CTR increased.

We developed a detailed guide on how to manage the blog: we described editing, publishing and block adding procedures so that the client’s team could single-handedly publish articles in the future.

We also recruited an illustrator who designed covers for each of the articles. All covers had the same aesthetics that corresponded to the blog’s concept and was based on the audience’s preferences.

We issued brief technical assignments for the designer with references, which she used to prepare the artwork. And later we showed them to the client’s team for their approval.

Within 2 months into the project, the traffic growth surpassed our most optimistic predictions. Organic traffic grew by 81% from month to month. A few of the articles made it into the TOP10 list and remained there for a few months. Some articles were shown as Google’s instant answers, and it meant that they were perfectly lined with all requirements of the search engine.

We achieved to create a full-blown brand media for the Mexican market from scratch, from a mockup to regular publications of the articles.

It’s worth mentioning that the client’s team was not only open to our suggestions, but also interested in designing a quality product on their side. The client took care of landing design, useful content of the courses and keeps developing the project to this day. Thanks to the demand on the product and efficient promotion tools, key metrics grew significantly and quickly.

As this case study shows, our expertise, experience in link building, awareness of the latest trends in different markets and the most efficient approach, which consists in creating our own web site networks allow us to achieve the utmost ambitious results and ensure quick traffic growth from scratch. We are able to successfully manage any type of projects anywhere as we base our work on the principles relevant in any country, such as product-oriented approach, detailed and honest explanation of iterations, and transparent relationships with clients.