Public Speaking Coaching Company Case Study
300% Increase in Organic Traffic!
2X to 5X's
Increase in traffic to essential pages
300%
Increase in organic traffic
Improved Rankings
Significantly higher ranking for multiple important keywords
Challenges
Standing Out in a Highly Competitive Field
Everyone knows what a popular TEDx talk can do for a person’s career. Unsurprisingly, then, there are countless services targeted towards people looking to sharpen their public speaking skills. Our client’s services—particularly its focus on community—are a cut above the rest, but in a relentlessly competitive market these selling points were tough to communicate. Our task, then, was not so different from the company’s task vis-a-vis its clients. We needed to hone its narrative and forcefully express what exactly made the company unique, in order to cut through the noise and guarantee that anyone looking for public speaking training would at least consider our client’s services.
The problem was that, at least from a link-building perspective, solar panels are almost too cutting-edge for their own good. For general-interest technology sites, the subject was arguably too niche. And while there exist plenty of smaller websites dedicated to solar panel technology, these websites mostly lacked audiences large enough to move the needle for our client. It was a Goldilocks problem—finding the websites that were just the right fit for our client’s needs.
Making the Most Out of a Limited Budget
While SEO was obviously important to the company—they wouldn’t have contacted Sure Oak if it wasn’t—they were not then in a position to spend lavishly on their SEO efforts. Of course, a successful SEO campaign doesn’t necessarily require a massive expenditure—but making do with less can still be a challenge. If Sure Oak was going to help the client stick out from the crowd, we were going to have to get creative, converting limited resources into tangible, month-by-month growth.
Limited Prior SEO and Link-Building Efforts
These problems were compounded by the fact that, before starting with Sure Oak, the client’s SEO and link-building efforts had been limited to non-existent: for many crucial keywords, the client didn’t rank at all. In a sense, then, we’d be starting from scratch, with a limited budget, in a highly competitive field. It was a daunting challenge—but we were confident in taking it on.
Solution
The first thing we did was put our heads together to come up with keywords we thought would best contribute to the client’s success. Keyword-generation is both an art and a science: you’re looking for keywords that are both highly relevant to what your client’s customers will be searching for, while also not being so competitive that landing on the first page of results would be impossible.
Next came link-building. As mentioned, we were working with a limited budget here: while Sure Oak does often conduct massive link-building campaigns, our efforts here would by necessity have to be more targeted, laser-focused on yielding the highest results from just a handful of pages. That meant working closely with the client to identify potentially high-yield pages: pages that would simultaneously send the right signals to the search engines while at the same time significantly boosting the client’s traffic.
That limited budget also meant that we couldn’t focus on optimizing every single one of the client’s pages—instead, we concentrated our efforts on the pages with the highest likelihood of generating a conversion.
Results
The results were precisely as we’d hoped. In the space of just six months, organic traffic to the client’s domain has nearly tripled, from 654 to 1,953.
Organic Traffic
Meanwhile, keyword growth was even more impressive: the client now ranks on the third page for “public speaking coach”—a highly competitive keyword with over 1200 searches a month—and in the fourth position for “Ted Talk Presentation Guidelines” (having started all the way back at 94!).
Organic Traffic to Targeted Pages
And our decision to make the most of a limited budget by focusing on a select few pages has paid off handsomely as well: traffic to one important page has increased by a magnitude of 5X, while another has more than doubled and yet another has nearly tripled.
Organic Traffic to Ted Talk Prep Page
About the Public Speaking Coaching Company
The TEDx-style talk is its own unique art form, and mastering its conventions can bring significant rewards—from regular paid speaking gigs to book deals and beyond. Of course, mastering those conventions is far from easy—which is where our client comes in. Over the years this public speaking coaching company has helped hundreds of people in the worlds of business and entrepreneurship hone the skills required to effectively deliver moving, engaging, and thought-provoking public speeches.
In part, they do this by enlisting actual current and former TEDx speakers to impart the tricks of the trade to their clients. These TEDx veterans—along with the company’s regular staff—walk would-be speakers through every stage of the process. They help aspiring speakers to locate their own unique stories—the stories that only they are equipped to tell—and then help them shape those stories in such a way that they’ll cut through the noise and make a meaningful impact on a wide audience. Once the speaker’s talk is online—whether through TEDx or a different channel—they show the speaker how to leverage it to build their brand, grow their audience, and generate monetizable opportunities.
But perhaps the most important thing this client offers is community: members receive access to an exclusive app and platform where they can talk through the challenges of public speaking, and every single week they’re granted the opportunity to practice in front of their peers.