Online Trading Academy – A Smart Investment in SEO

The Goal

Online Trading Academy Success

Go Fish Digital has supported Online Trading Academy’s digital marketing efforts since 2010. This has included support for SEO, PPC, link building, and several other services over the decade-long engagement.

As part of our technical SEO agency’s strategy, we identified an opportunity to help Online Trading Academy (OTA) increase its overall organic traffic by folding its large, active blog from a subdomain into a subfolder. We then developed and provided unique technical solutions to overcome challenges associated with this change, such as hosting a LAMP stack as a sub-directory on an IIS-managed domain.

The end result of all the technical SEO recommendations after just three months was a 49% increase in total organic traffic to the OTA website.

The Strategy

Objective

Online Trading Academy (OTA) is a leading financial education company providing investing and trading education online, as well as in its 30 brick-and-mortar training centers. OTA’s goal was to reach more of their target audience: individuals seeking financial investment strategies and analysis. By hiring Go Fish Digital, the organization sought to improve its rankings in Google’s organic search results for key phrases, in turn reaching more prospects.

Execution

Our implementation started with a technical SEO analysis. This analysis identified many opportunities which led to many onsite changes and adjustments. We also found a great opportunity that required a more significant technical solution.

OTA hosted a collection of lessons related to financial topics that included new articles each week on a subdomain. While the sub-domain was receiving some traffic, it was not ranking as highly as we believed it should for target keywords. Based on our experience, we knew that migrating the free lessons site to a sub-directory on tradingacademy.com would help improve rankings, as the content would receive more authority through the primary domain. This is something that we encourage clients who have a strong root domain, and also create good content on a sub-domain, to do.

We provided detailed guidance, planned the SEO strategy related to the move, and monitored changes and progress during, and after execution.

The Results

This Technical SEO effort not only helped OTA increase traffic and drive revenue, but the root domain inherited more PageRank than the subdomain previously possessed. Our technical approach saw an almost overnight improvement in rankings and significant increase in search traffic. Organic search traffic to the ‘Lessons’ section of the website increased by 49% the first quarter after the migration.