Case Study: Improving Organic Traffic for Laterna

The partnership between Lanterna and YDA

Lanterna signed on for full SEO services in 2020. During this time, the team as a collective assisted and worked alongside Lanterna to increase their market share in the industry. This was successfully done, despite the market being significantly down compared to last year. One of our key goals was to ramp up organic traffic to the Lanterna website, despite a decrease in search demand for related topics.

Lanterna | Digital Marketing Case Study | YDA

The challenge

Search demand for Lanterna and tutoring-related searches sharply declined over April and May. This is due to the Covid-induced global economic downturn. Search demand has not yet recovered to pre-lockdown search demand.

This meant YDA had the challenging task of increasing the number of users visiting the Lanterna website through organic search, even though there are fewer people searching for the relevant branded and non-branded keywords.

To do this, we would need to increase both branded and non-branded visibility and organic sessions by creating a better understanding of the site by search engines and humans.

The approach

The approach was to ensure search engines (mainly Google) had a better understanding of the website. This would increase the website’s visibility in the search results for both branded and non-branded searches. The following summarises the main actions taken to increase Google’s understanding of the site and, in effect, increase organic traffic to the site:

Unique page titles and descriptions for all pages targeting search terms.
Strategic link building targeting highly competitive search terms. Use of local SEO (location-specific linking building) to create a better understanding of the global service.

The result

Google’s understanding of the website drastically increased. This resulted in the site seeing an increase in visibility (impressions) in the search results (SERPs), particularly for branded searches.

The site also saw an increase in rankings for highly competitive search terms, such as online tutoring, IB Math, international baccalaureate.

This increase in rankings resulted in the following increases in organic traffic to the site year on year: 38 % year-on-year increase in keyword visibility in the target market 54% year-on-year increase in average session duration

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) about how to increase organic traffic:

I hear about SEO all the time but what is it?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s the practice of optimizing your website or store and its content to improve visibility and rank on search engine result pages, leading to higher-quality organic traffic. However, it also extends to online marketplace and ecommerce stores as well.

SEO involves various techniques, including keyword research, on-page optimization and inserting those keywords into your content, technical improvements, link building, and content creation.

Broadly put, it combines a technical backend aspect and a more content-driven front-end approach with a few tasks overlapping in-between. These strategies collectively enhance a website’s relevance and authority in the eyes of search engines, and ultimately, customers.

What is organic traffic?

Organic traffic refers to the number of visitors that come to a website through search engine results, without any payment for advertising. Organic traffic is considered to be the most important form of traffic for a website because it is targeted and can lead to new customers, email subscribers, or followers.