Centriq Training Taps Local Search Intent for Big Growth

The Challenge

Centriq Training partnered with emfluence to help them grow organic search visibility and organic search performance for centriq.com. Centriq Training had rolled out a new IT career program, and they were specifically interested in leveraging SEO to grow the number of new leads for the new program. However, due to external circumstances, the Centriq Training team needed to increase organic search traffic without updating content within the main structure of their website.

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The Solution

Given the external restrictions on making updates to user-facing copy on the main structure of Centriq Training’s website, emfluence decided the best approach to growing organic search traffic for the new IT career program would be to create completely new pages for Centriq Training’s Kansas City and St. Louis locations. These new pages, in conjunction with “behind the scenes” SEO updates like business listings optimizations, JSON-LD schema, 301 redirects, and metadata updates, would facilitate the type of organic search growth Centriq Training was hoping to achieve for their new IT career program without interfering with the existing copy on their website.

The decision to create completely new location pages for Kansas City and St. Louis allowed emfluence to better highlight and locally target Centriq’s new offering. These pages gave search engines additional context about Centriq’s offerings and the locations where those offerings were relevant—that helped give the site more visibility to relevant people searching in the target regions.

While new to the site, the new IT career program pages matched the overall look and feel of Centriq Training’s website. Leaning heavily on a prominent call to action at a space above the fold and case studies featuring other students who had completed training and testimonials as well as key information about prospective employers for people who complete the program.

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The Results

The best way to see if the changes made an impact on overall new leads for the IT careers program was to look at organic traffic to service pages, goal completions (form fills), and the unbranded keyword performance for the service pages.

Based on these metrics, the updates resulted in:

1. 68% increase in organic entries to new IT career service pages YoY after the location pages launched (Feb 19th – Dec 31st)
2. 140% increase in organic new IT career program contact form completions upon entry to a service page YoY after the location pages launched (Feb 19th – Dec 31st)
3. 169% increase in clicks and 182% increase in impressions for unbranded search queries referencing a service page for the 5 months after the launch of the location pages. (Ex: “it school kansas city”, “trade schools near me”, “it training st louis”)

The site continues to gradually grow from all of these updates. The last two months (Nov and Dec) saw the most organic new IT career program contact form completions in the site’s tracked history and every month in 2019 saw an increase in organic traffic compared to its 2018 counterpart.