The story of how we revolutionized Skillshare's SEO strategy, propelling them to global prominence as a creative powerhouse
1.45M
per month.
30X
in 7 years.
I was growth marketing hire #1 at Skillshare in 2016 and immidiately saw the opportunity the company had in transforming their growth with SEO. However, at the time the SEO profile of Skillshare was a mess. As an open platform the comapany was struggling with user generated spam being hosted on the site (think NSFW content from spammers). Finally Google decided to lay the hammer down and gave us a manual penalty until we addressed the issues. On top of that, the company lacked a real SEO strategy and so hadn't invested in it properly in years. However, Skillshare had a huge SEO opportunity. They had hundreds of new classes being added to the platform each month - all of which presented keyword opportunities.
.svg)
We first rolled executed what our CPO liked to call the "Brilliant Basics". We fixed the spam penalty issue, implemented technical improvements that increased site speed and improved crawl-ability of the site. We then went after the bottom funnel, highly competitive category search terms like "online design classes" by adding SEO content on page and optimizing the pages for conversion. All of this was done right before the organic wave that was the pandemic when many people were going online to learn new skills. So the investment in SEO at the right time allowed us to capture way more of the online learning wave than we ever could have imagined. Lastly, we rolled out a comprehensive SEO blog strategy and expanded into new languages both of which unlocked another step change in organic traffic.
Fast forward 7 years and the company is now driving 1.5mm+ in organic traffic which is 30X the trafffic we had in in 2016. Skillshare is now at the top of the search results pages for some of the most competitive terms in the creative learning space and is also ranking for keywords in numerous languages and markets around the world. The organic growth the company saw over the last 7 years helped turn the startup into one of the biggest creative learning compmanies in the world.
.svg)
