Case Study
A New Online Graduate Degree School Builds an SEO Strategy from the Ground Up
Scope
Overview
When the University of San Diego (USD) launched its online graduate degree school in 2015, they were starting from scratch. No website, no digital marketing presence, and certainly no search engine-optimized content that would help attract prospective students and drive leads, applications, and enrollments.
As a full-service digital marketing agency focused on higher education, Vital brought website design and development expertise to the table, combined with an understanding of the complex needs of a school operating within a larger university environment. We also knew that higher institutions often struggle with SEO, so we would need to bake in search-engine-friendly best practices from the very beginning.
Ten years later, we continue to enjoy a strong relationship with USD Online Degrees, which has grown from two to 14 graduate degree-granting programs, and enjoys a healthy average of 152K organic sessions every month.
152K
Organic sessions every month
Goals:
When they came to us, USD Online Degrees had a few broad, but pressing, goals:
- Build a website that would showcase their new brand
- Promote their flagship degree programs
- Drive organic traffic to the website to support lead, application, and enrollment goals.
Challenges
Like many schools within a university, the new website would be on a subdomain, onlinedegrees.sandiego.com. With no domain authority, we knew we would need to both create content that was optimized to rank in organic search and build links back to that content to start building authority.
Additionally, one of the two programs USD Online Degrees was launching with posed challenges of its own. The school’s online Master of Education program was entering a crowded, competitive space with many high-authority universities already ranking for keywords we wanted to target — especially bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) keywords that indicated a high level of intent to enroll in an MEd program.
Our Solutions
We took a two-pronged approach to tackling these challenges.
1. Build the site to be SEO-friendly from day one
In addition to the basics of technical SEO best practices, such as optimizing page load speeds, building mobile-friendly pages, and making sure the sitemap structure was easily crawlable by search engines, we knew that USD Online Degree’s blog would be a major engine for search-optimized content. As such, we took care to include a link in the utility navigation and make sure the URL structure didn’t bury it within multiple subdomains (as is surprisingly common with higher education institution blogs).
2. For the MEd program, a focus on links and authentically valuable content
The upside of the competitive nature of the Master of Education program was that we knew exactly who the audience was for this degree — teachers. And while BOFU keywords that indicated that searchers were actively looking for master’s degree programs would be hard to rank for out of the gate, our higher education content strategy experts had a creative workaround that we’d already proven effective for our roster of higher education clients.
Instead of targeting those difficult BOFU keywords, we would create content that would naturally be valuable to teachers who might not be actively searching for a master’s degree program but who were looking for ways to improve their skills and advance their careers. We also created enriched, downloadable content such as:
- Resume and cover letter guides
- Classroom management resources
- Guides to state licensure requirements
We created CTAs to download these resources within our blog posts — in exchange for filling out a lead-generation form, of course.
These strategies served several purposes at once:
- Because the content was valuable and informative, other blogs and websites would naturally link to it, helping build USD Online Degrees’ domain authority.
- It introduced the brand and the program to an audience that would see the value of a master’s degree in order to meet their career goals.
- By offering premium downloadable content that was highly relevant to our blog visitors, we generated top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) and middle-of-the-funnel (MOFU) leads that we could then nurture through automated email campaigns.
- Those leads increased the value of our search-optimized TOFU content and enabled USD Online to see a higher return on investment (ROI) than they would by targeting highly competitive BOFU keywords.
Results
Starting from zero has the advantage of making tangible improvements a breeze! But of course we weren’t satisfied with just any improvement from baseline — USD Online Degrees needed significant, high-converting traffic to make their new programs viable in the long term.
Here are some of the measurable SEO gains that resulted from our collaboration:
USD Online Degrees Website
- From 0 to ~20,000 organic website sessions per month
- From 0 to 100s of organic leads per month
Top Performing Blog Posts
39 Examples of Artificial Intelligence in Education
- 17,00 sessions/month
- 3,500 keywords
- 1,000+ backlinks
6 Best Degrees for a Future in Artificial Intelligence [+How to Choose]
- 1,100 sessions/month
- 240 keywords
10 Traits of Successful School Leaders
- 1,600 sessions/month
- 280 keywords
- 130 backlinks
Top Paying Cybersecurity Jobs to Watch in 2025
- 1,100 sessions/month
- 2,800 keywords
- 75 backlinks
Conclusion
In the midst of constantly changing SEO “rules,” following a few simple principles has allowed our partnership with USD Online to remain highly effective in driving organic traffic to their now 14 graduate degree program offerings. As AI becomes more sophisticated in its ability to both generate content and curate search results, our focus on the human art of connecting with our audience’s true needs and interests enables our clients to stay ahead of the competition.
That’s one of the things we love about higher education marketing. Our clients offer something truly valuable to people — an education — so search engine optimization becomes an exercise in empathy, backed by strategic and technical expertise. In the case of USD Online Degrees, the Vital team’s ability to empathize with prospective students enables an effective and creative approach to SEO that continues to play an important role in USD Online Degrees’ growth and success.
Vital did an incredible job designing and building a website that empowers my team to meet our most important goals. From increasing prospective student leads to making it simple to launch and promote new academic programs, the site strikes the perfect balance between powerful functionality and ease of use. It looks
great, too.”
— Jaclyn Kezirian
Marketing Director, University of San Diego Online
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