Preply is one of a handful of companies that dominate the $15 billion online language learning market. Its platform connects individual and business users with around 50,000 human tutors teaching more than 50 languages.
How Persona-Focused SEO Brings Preply 25k New Visitors Every Month
Preply is also an SEO juggernaut. The company’s success has in significant part been built on the back of its massive search presence.
Animalz and Preply teamed up in mid-2023 to help the company accelerate its growth following the $70 million in funding the Ukrainian company raised last year.
The Challenges of Growth From a Huge Baseline
Preply has well over 1,000 search-optimized pages. These include location-focused pages such as “English classes in NYC,” knowledge level-based pages like “English course for beginners,” bottom-of-the-funnel SEO such as “Guide to the best language learning apps of 2024,” and more.
SEO assets bring in millions of search visits every month. Maintaining such an SEO presence is an effort in itself, but growing further required tackling several key challenges first.
1. The Search For a New Audience
Preply did a great job at capturing high-intent BOFU traffic. Pages such as “English course for adults” and “12 best online Italian courses in 2024” have brought in visitors that the team regularly converts into paid users.
But there are only so many people who explicitly search for personalized language lessons.
And many other language-learning platforms are after the same audience. The organic competition was fierce, making it challenging to maintain top rankings for BOFU keywords.
Unlocking growth required identifying a new audience higher up the funnel. The kind of audience that might need to learn a new language soon because of their specific life circumstances. And then creating brand awareness among this group to ensure Preply is at the top of their minds when they decide to learn a new language.
2. Plateaued Traffic Growth
Preply’s organic traffic plateaued for much of the first half of 2023. According to Ahrefs data, the site hovered around 870k keyword rankings with occasional ups and downs.
Sites with huge content libraries, like Preply, need to regularly refresh their content to maintain top spots in search results. But doing that for over a thousand pages is challenging.
And growing traffic further beyond millions of search visits every month requires bold thinking. A few new articles per month won’t cut it.
Surveys, Personas, And Revenue Metrics: Data-Led Content Tactics
Preply and Animalz teamed up to figure out a way forward. The solution involved analyzing the internal data and customer research to identify relevant content lanes.
Equally important was refreshing existing revenue-generating articles. And lastly, Animalz was also to analyze data and identify additional topic clusters with revenue potential.
1. Analyze the Audience Profiles
Preply’s team identified a specific type of TOFU audience it believed was worth going after. The audience is in specific life circumstances that make it important to learn a new language soon.
The team organized a survey and several internal workshops to validate an initial hypothesis and learn more about this new audience. These efforts resulted in the creation of 4 different target personas. For each persona, Preply identified key information, including:
- Why they need to learn a new language
- Where language learning fits into their life plans
- Which tutor hourly rate they are comfortable with
- How many learning sessions per week they have time for
- What they like about Preply’s platform
- What they don’t like about Preply’s platform
These and other details were organized in a succinct document that was to inform our content strategy.
2. Produce Persona-Focused SEO Content
Animalz used the survey findings to identify 100+ topics that align with each persona’s pain points and interests. This extensive content roadmap could fuel Preply’s SEO engine for up to a year.
We then started creating persona-focused content. Each piece was personalized by:
- Tying the topic back to the persona’s pain points
- Positioning language learning as a solution to their challenges
- Highlighting product features readers like
- Addressing challenges readers have when using Preply
- Underlining the price flexibility of Preply’s tutors
- Mentioning that it’s up to users to set the pace of learning
- Ending with a CTA to trial relevant language tutors
After 6+ months of regular publishing, these persona-focused SEO articles started to bring 25k new visitors each month. This translates into 300k new visitors each year.
Some articles performed particularly well. For instance, the “20 best countries to live in” piece ranks for 800+ keywords and, on average, brings well over 7k new search visitors per month.
Persona-focused articles also enjoyed significant engagement. Because we optimized them for a highly specific persona, readers felt understood and clicked with the content.
These articles also thrived on social media. Their click-through rates from various social platforms were 2X to 3X above those of other articles. And Preply’s social team had dozens and dozens of articles to fuel its content engine for many months ahead.
3. Refresh Revenue-Generating Articles
Animalz also helped Preply extract more value from its existing content library. We did that by first identifying articles that fit these two criteria:
- Lost traffic over the last six months
- Used to or still drive revenue
The goal was for selected articles to regain traffic and drive more conversions. We delivered on these two goals by improving articles in several ways:
- Adding more relevant content to cover topics thoroughly
- Restructuring articles to make them skimmable and improve flow
- Further optimizing SEO content with secondary keywords
- Integrating product mentions more explicitly to drive trial signups
- Adding visuals, images, graphs, downloadable assets, and other resources
These efforts helped Preply solidify and expand its best articles’ SEO footprints. In some cases, the results were dramatic. For instance, one such article brought in nearly 178% more conversions just one month after it was refreshed.
4. Identify Revenue-Generating Topic Clusters
Lastly, we analyzed Preply’s traffic data to identify revenue-generating topic clusters. This was a multi-step process:
- Step 1: List all the conversion-driving articles
- Step 2: Find articles with formulaic titles where certain components, like languages, can be easily replaced
- Step 3: Based on the replaceable component, check for the existence of similar topics with SEO potential in a given cluster
- E.g., most common words in French and German, best podcasts for learning Mandarin and Spanish, etc.
- Step 4: Map out an entire topic cluster if applicable
Our assumption was that if a topic was driving conversions for learners of one language, then it was likely to deliver similar results for other languages.
Animalz identified 114 new topics across 15+ topic clusters. Covering these topics will help Preply enjoy a significant conversion and traffic boost.
The Power of Audience Research
Most marketers pay lip service to the importance of knowing your audience. In reality, few do. Except for a few ICP job titles and random pain points, many teams have limited knowledge of their target audience.
That’s not good enough. You want to know how your audience thinks, what they like or dislike about your product, what circumstances push them to purchase, and more.
Preply has shown that investing in audience research upfront through surveys and workshops pays substantial dividends. It enables content partners, such as Animalz, to craft effective content programs that bring qualified visitors and support conversions.
Content marketing informed by customer insights is more likely to contribute to the bottom line. And that success helps convince the leadership team to support your future initiatives.
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