Case Study

Canadian Association of Public Schools – International (CAPS-I)

"HEM staff are incredibly responsive and creative, always finding ways to bring our ideas to fruition!"

Bonnie McKie, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR.

Website traffic and SEO restored to new heights following multilingual website rebuild

Challenge

As one of the first ports of call for education agents/consultants and families around the globe looking to send students to public schools in Canada, The Canadian Association of Public Schools – International (CAPS-I)depends heavily on its online presence. The association’s website serves as a valuable source of information for its audience, and as a key driver of enrollment for the 124 school districts that make up CAPS-I’s membership.

In 2018, however, that online presence was beginning to struggle. The redesigned website was not particularly mobile-friendly and had several notable layout issues which eroded search and user experience. Shortly after a website redesign, the association observed a significant drop in organic traffic, with an 85% decrease between Q1 of 2017 and Q1 of 2018.

Even more alarmingly, the percentage of CAPS-I’s organic traffic that came from international locations had also decreased significantly from 78% to just 42% due to the association’s website hosting service negatively impacting the site’s SEO authority by intentionally blocking access in some of CAPS-I’s key source markets/countries. Unwilling to provide market access due to ‘security’ concerns and with the website built using a proprietary platform, it was clear that CAPS-I would need a new website solution and partner.

Objective

With a history of collaboration and partnership, CAPS-I approached Higher Education Marketing (HEM)for help. After discussions with key stakeholders, we proposed solutions to address these issues and meet the following objectives:

1. Create a new mobile-friendly website for CAPS-I that is capable of supporting a multilingual
framework and hosting on a diﬀerent server.

2. Diagnose the site’s SEO issues and use optimization techniques to recover lost traﬃc.

Fulﬁlling these objectives would involve several steps, as well as input from web designers,
developers, and SEO experts on the HEM team.

SOLUTIONS

a) Creating Multilingual Sitemaps and Architecture

Our proposed sitemap reorganized the site in a new, streamlined architecture which removed any unnecessary or messy URLs. As CAPS-I’s website is available in several different languages, we then recreated the sitemap for each one. This included the localization of URL strings, something which was not done consistently on previous multilingual versions of the CAPS-I site. Having URLs in the language of the searcher can be vital for SEO.

b) Improving the CAPS-I Website Design

To improve the design of the CAPS-I website, HEM created new WordPress templates for both mobile and desktop that gave the site a sleeker, cleaner, more modern look and improved the responsiveness of the mobile template

c) Optimizing the Website for Search and UX

We reviewed the URLs, page titles, and H1s of each page to ensure they were optimized in accordance with SEO best practices.

The Canadian Association of Public Schools – International (CAPS-I) is a non-profit organization serving member school districts, educational agents and prospective students around the world. When it needed to upgrade its website to make it accessible worldwide, it turned to HEM Education Marketing Solutions. Ever since the successful completion of that project, CAPS-I has remained a client of the agency.

“HEM has been crucial in helping our very small team to provide services to both our members and clients,” says Bonnie McKie, Executive Director, CAPS-I. “They offer the perfect blend of expertise in web design and marketing, combined with strong knowledge of the international education sector in Canada.”

The association serves 130 publicly funded school districts across the country, setting the standard for quality international student programs. Their website is a resource for agents, students and parents to identify appropriate educational opportunities, depending on the student’s language choice, geographic preference and interests. In 2018, it put out a call for proposals to revamp its website and make it available in key student source markets around the world.

“We decided HEM was the best fit, given their focus and expertise in supporting institutions in the international education sector,” McKie says. “They understood what was required to work with our public K-12 sector members.”

The new website has been a huge win for the association. “Our site has been praised by everyone because it is so dynamic, user-friendly and informative,” she says. “School district members appreciate the leads that they receive from their online profiles.”

In addition to the website, CAPS-I has engaged HEM to work on several projects over the last few years, including the implementation of HEM’s proprietary customer relationship management (CRM) software to track leads. The firm has supported CAPS-I’s digital marketing campaigns overseas and domestically to help recruit more homestay hosts in Canada. HEM has also supported the Association’s development of a newsletter for agents to keep them informed about the international education landscape in Canada.

“HEM have been a pleasure to work with from the outset,” McKie says. “They really take the time to get to know their clients and thoroughly understand their needs.”

To read more about the details of the proposed solution, services implemented and the results download the extended version of the case study by clicking here

It has truly been a pleasure working with Higher Education Marketing through the development and relaunch of our association’s website and further enhancements. We have been so impressed by how quickly and effectively our association’s new HEM website was able to recover its organic traffic and how well the new layout and functionality has been received. HEM staff are incredibly responsive and creative, always finding ways to bring our ideas to fruition!

Bonnie Mckie

Executive Director

CAPS-I

Visit Canadian Association of Public Schools – International's website here:

https://www.caps-i.ca