About Magoosh
Magoosh provides affordable, accessible test prep for students studying for several major entrance exams such as the GRE, GMAT, SAT, and ACT. Students access study resources and live academic help through an online learning environment to ensure they are prepared for their exams.
A good percentage of our students find Magoosh via organic search. "As a marketing channel, SEO is very important for us," says Naomi Tepper, Senior Manager of Content Marketing.
"We have a blog for every single exam that we support. These blogs provide anything a student needs to know while studying: study schedules, diagnostic tests, etc. Our whole goal is to help support students who are studying for these exams. We want to make sure they know they have a study partner."
After using Topic to optimize a set of 4 blog posts, Naomi saw an average 180% increase in new users year-over-year for the optimized content and the team now uses Topic in their everyday writing process.
The Challenge
"At Magoosh, we have a 13-person content marketing team. Our goal is to make sure the team is creating content that is both useful to students and findable through Google. We try to put the best content we can out there in the world."
However, "One of the biggest drags on our content marketing process is SEO scoping: identifying search intent, doing keyword research, and analyzing competitors. Historically, we used a variety of tools to create our own content briefs, which was an important but time-consuming process.
“Ranking on Google is more complicated than it used to be. You have to be very aware of what the users are searching for, how to best answer their queries, and how to position your piece. Because if your content doesn't rank on page one, or even in many cases positions 1-3, you're not going to reach your audience."
The Solution
Naomi started searching for a solution to streamline the research process.
"We were looking for a tool that could take care of all the heavy lifting. What made Topic appealing was that it could do that and also be accessible for anyone on our team. The hope was that it would speed up our content development process while also improving our rankings."
As a test, Naomi and her team took 4 blog posts and optimized them exclusively with Topic.
Luckily, the process was relatively simple. "It's the kind of tool that anybody on our team can understand and pick up quickly. Unlike other SEO tools that sometimes feel like they require a Ph.D. to understand."
Topic's Content Briefs provided guidance on what students would be interested in learning the most, allowing the writers to naturally enhance their outdated content and make it more valuable. The writers then used the Content Grader to find and fill in gaps for each post.
The Results
After three weeks, the results spoke for themselves.
"On one blog post, we increased new users by over 300% year-over-year, and added 70 page-one keywords, and 40 keywords in positions 1-3. We also achieved position 2 for our primary keyword."
"What impressed us the most is the fact that it effectively achieved better rankings and traffic without a lot of extra work."
Topic is now an essential part of Magoosh’ content creation process.
"I like that Topic is listening to users and creating a better product. It's a unique opportunity to be a part of something that's developing and growing."
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Topic has allowed us to streamline our content scoping process while still creating content that ranks.
