content strategy for ed-tech company coursera
Project date: November 2021-Present
Client: Coursera
industry: educational technology
services provided: content strategy, SEO, content writing
description
Coursera’s SEO and Strategic Content team works on delivering tools and content that are directly aligned to career seekers’ pathway from knowing very little about a subject (such as machine learning) to becoming an expert, by reading our content and taking our professional certificates.
objectiveS
Develop content strategy as one of the first members of the Articles team initiative. This involves taking SEO best practices and strategizing and writing content, from articles to FAQs to on-page content, to engage users in our products and services
Collaborate with product, design, and engineering partners to create solutions to increase registration and paid learners, by elevating and aligning content and design
challenge
Optimize page content, design, and layout for SEO and user experience
Strategize new content types
Collaborate with designers, engineers, product managers, brand and social
SOLution
I work with my team to audit current performance and assets, to create a strategy for improving user experience and success metrics. I lead content strategy by conducting research and discovery, planning and creating,
my process
I led experiments, including A/B testing and UX research, to gather insights about our users, triangulating this with SEO and data collected. Here are an example of that process.
Learner quote experiment
Hypothesis: Adding pull quotes from learners, and experimenting for best content, placement, and design, will lead to higher SEO ranking
Experiment: Created strategy and plan, conducted A/B testing to gain insights
Changed 20 quotes in 20 articles as a pilot test
Created style guide for learner quotes
Devised next steps and recommendations based on research insights
Synthesis: Used tools like SEMRush and Contentful to tag and gather insights. Analyzed the ranking against success metrics like new-paid-learner and new-registered-learner.
Strategy: In future phases, we can experiment with integrated approach to quotes (short blub in article text), adding learner story videos, and using the quotes elsewhere on the Coursera site
For the learner quotes, we specifically chose high-impact quotes from learners who took courses that are popular on Coursera.
The Result
From this experiment, we saw a jump in average search ranking of 8 positions for the content we tested on. As a next step, we moved forward with Degree Insider Stories, a series that features learner stories like engineer Hubert who graduated from the University of Colorado Boulder’s Master of Engineering in Engineering Management so he could become a better leader to his team. These stories are among the highest performing degree posts on social media, achieving 2% more in engagement rate and nearly double the number of visits to a traditional learner story.
As a recommendation, I advised the team continue to test quote placement and design, so draw readers’ eyes to an impactful quote on the page. Studies show that positive reviews lead to click-thrus and purchases, so this is something we will keep in mind in the coming months.