Almost overnight, most of UTI’s national organic rankings were immediately pushed down the result’s page (often below the fold), causing significant decreases in organic sessions and new student inquiries from organic search across all UTI’s Core programs. Local plays a critical role in performance because there is significantly higher propensity to convert near their campuses. UTI tasked NP Digital (NPD) with recapturing the lost organic search visibility, sessions, and inquiries for their Core Programs. In addition to the Core Programs, we were asked to grow search awareness and consideration for all New Programs and UTI’s campus expansion efforts.t.

Our roadmap to improve the UTI.com technical site health included strategies designed to improve Core Web Vitals, influence the number of results that included featured snippets and “People are also asking” results, and ultimately improve the user-experience. We implemented our proprietary “6Rs” Content Audit methodology to better optimize any existing content to align with searcher intent. This 6Rs Content Audit told us what content should be “reformatted”, “repurposed”, “refreshed”, “retired”, “redirected”, or what content should just “remain” as-is to meet user intent for different search queries impacted by Google’s recent changes. Our initial focus was on updating and re-optimizing all campus pages on UTI.edu that performed well historically. Partnering with UTI’s content team, we ideated, developed, and launched 200+ new local pages with optimized schema-markup that were rich with relevant imagery, video embeds, and other features that matched user-intent for each query. ChatGPT assisted in the localization efforts, providing information about local landmarks, things to do and driving directions to the closest UTI campus. The new pages were integrated with the existing campus hubs on UTI.edu and internal linking strategies were implemented to dynamically tie relevant blog articles to each location and program page.

• Entity coverage
• Internal linking
• AI visibility optimisation

Our focus on local results and their associated pages increased organic search inquires by +18% year-over year. Location and program pages that were hit the hardest (Houston, Orlando, Sacramento, Dallas, and Long Beach) saw session increases of 75%+ from their lowest levels in April of 2023. Our holistic local strategy increased the number of non-brand position #1 rankings on Google by 20%. While many of the national rankings were still below the map-pack, more of them existed and were helping to fill up the funnel. Additionally, all location and program pages saw significant increases in Top 10 rankings (up 66% on average). The locally focused strategy was also able to bolster the New Program Expansion efforts. Despite a lack of awareness in the marketplace, organic search sessions increased by 411% year-over-year.

• Organic traffic
• AI citations
• High-intent conversions