Oppidan Education SEO Case Study 📚

Oppidan Education, founded in 2016 by Walter Kerr and Henry Faber, is a London-based organisation providing academic mentoring and personal development for children. With a team of around 200 mentors, including teachers and professionals, they offer one-on-one mentoring and school programmes aimed at building confidence, resilience, and life skills. Partnering with over 100 schools globally, Oppidan focuses on mentoring over traditional tutoring, fostering self-confidence and a love of learning in students.

Website Migration Recovery: We focussed on reverse engineering their initial migration actions from November 2022 to discover what SEO steps had not been followed.

Keyword Analysis: We used our analytical tools and skills to identify what keyword rankings they had lost, and set out a plan on how to recover them with a targeted SEO strategy.

Content Improvements: We also focussed on improving content to increase its quality & usefulness, and improve the number of ranking queries for their blog content.

Recovering Lost Keywords

The biggest challenge we faced on this campaign was recovering Oppidan’s lost keywords following a poorly handled migration which left them with just ranking 32 keywords, from an original number of 170, and a fraction of their original organic traffic.

We worked through this with them in a staged and managed way: firstly identifying and explaining the issues, and then enacting the fixes ourselves. We first identified all lost keywords, which helped inform our picture of what happened as well as a content strategy designed to get them back.

We also identified which URLs hadn’t been correctly redirected, and carried out all required redirects and missed technical actions, a plan of action designed to get Oppidan out of the hole and back where they should be as quickly as possible.

Living Within Our Means

As is often the case with SEO campaigns for smaller businesses, resource internally was relatively tight. At Oppidan, their team was a core of just four people with more than enough on their plates as it was. At StudioHawk, one of our key pillars is “Getting Things Done” so we helped things out by taking the initiative and implementing as much as we could ourselves.

A big aspect of this lack of resources came in the form of a lack of a team of web developers, so a lot of the technical SEO work (such as identifying and implementing missed redirects, restructuring the blog into more of a content hub, adding related post widgets, and adding comprehensive schema markup to the site) was navigated and implemented by our team.

Finding Our Voice

Another big challenge that we tackled revolved around working with Oppidan in order to find their unique, authoritative brand voice whilst also maintaining search engine ranking potential.

We identified that, rather than ‘mentor’ the more searched for term was ‘tutors’ (for example, ‘Eton Entrance Exam Tutor’ was much more searched after than the word ‘Eton Entrance Exam Mentor’), however Oppidan wanted to use the term mentor as this was a big part of their USP; a mentor is far more than just a tutor, and we felt this was important to get across.

This did, however, mean we were unable to target the higher volume terms, which restricted the bigger traffic opportunity, but this didn’t hold us, or Oppidan, back. We focussed on bringing in traffic via keywords related to well-known institutions such as Eton, conducting competitor research, and briefing and enacting page improvements as well as supporting content.