Digital PR Campaign Drives Huge Traffic Spike

To date, this team of educators and technologists has helped more than 100,000 students prepare for secondary and college-level online exams, offering personalized tutoring and online test preparation software. Originally, the organization had two domains: one for each of their most popular exams. Realizing they wanted to drive traffic to a singular location that housed all of their exams, they created a parent site in 2016.

While the original two sites drove most of their traffic and conversions, they wanted to drive traffic to their parent domain, to build authority and organic visibility with the goals of increasing conversions for all of the services they offer, not just two specific tests they now ranked for.

We began link building to the parent site immediately, which had proven successful. However, link building through guest posting is a slow process, and our client wanted to gain traffic and momentum quickly, and build links at a faster rate.

Upon exploration of our client’s site, we discovered a report that the company created by pulling data collected from over 50,000 students using their online test preparation software. This report on the top 25 most sought-after secondary schools was published annually, and it was well-suited for a digital PR campaign. The Off-Page SEO team at Portent saw this report as a chance to get coverage, both wide (across many verticals and outlets) and local (city-specific news outlets), to drive traffic quickly to the site, building the company’s backlink profile in the process.

Originally the report had been published in segments on three different landing pages. We edited the report to make it more promotable by combining all of their data and visualizations onto one page to focus the site traffic, and suggested a title change and other minor content improvements to make it more newsworthy and descriptive.

We then started building both local and national media lists and targets to promote this rich piece of data-driven content. The team crafted personalized, attention-grabbing pitches, and sought out contacts at newsdesks, media outlets, and with journalists who cover technology and education.

A total of 2,300+ personalized emails were sent over a period of two months. After that, interviews were arranged between our client’s executives and news media, who then wrote stories about the company, covering the report and linking to it.

Portent’s Off-Page SEO team built more than 177 links to the client’s site, and garnered eight brand mentions. This included coverage on MSN, which featured two links to the report and a brand mention.

Our efforts drove 3,014 (and counting) referrals to the report, which were responsible for more than 33% of the lifetime referral traffic for the entire site.