Thrive Services Used

Project Overview

This Baptist theological seminary needed a complete website redesign and strategic digital marketing plan. Its existing site, although functional, was outdated, lacked user-friendliness and failed to effectively represent the institution’s values, mission and the depth of its theological programs.

Thrive Internet Marketing Agency built a custom website and launched combined organic marketing and paid advertising campaigns to optimize the client’s search visibility and increase engagement. Our efforts resulted in a whopping 285% increase in overall traffic sessions and a 707% boost in interaction rate.

The Results

+285%

Overall Traffic Sessions

+339%

Organic SEO Traffic

+707%

Interaction Rate

+39%

Ad Clicks

Since the website redesign and ongoing digital marketing efforts, the seminary has seen a significant improvement in its traffic sessions, keyword rankings and preview day registrations.

For about a year, we focused on Spanish language keyword rankings and were able to rank for these keywords:

seminarios teológicos en español – Position 4
seminario teologico online – Position 4
seminarios cristianos – Position 5
estudio teologicos – Position 5
Seminario – Position 10
Southwest Espanol – Position 21

The client’s AWR visibility score also moved 226 positions up from September 2021 to August 2023.

Sessions: +85%
Organic SEO Traffic: +339%
New Users: +276%

Returning Users: +4.4K%
Goal Completions: +100%
Events Per Session: +100%

Meanwhile, our PPC advertising efforts have led to very positive increases in awareness, with impressions growing from 59,018 in August 2022 to 248,477 in August 2023.

Search Impression Share: +25%
Ad Clicks: +39%
Conversions: +7%
Interaction Rate: +707%

Impressions: +22%
Cost Per Click: -28%
Click-Through Rate (CTR): +13%

Overall, our tailored digital marketing solutions have allowed this institution to advance its mission and reach more prospective students during enrollment seasons.

The Execution

User-friendliness was a priority for Thrive. The client wanted to ensure their target audience could easily navigate the website to find information about programs, courses, events and resources. Improving the user experience was key to fostering engagement and retention.

Once the new website was launched, our SEO efforts focused on:

Local listings management
Link building

Optimization of new landing pages
Optimization for Spanish language landing pages

For paid advertising, our initial focus was promoting specific degrees, growing awareness and leads/applications. We noted a significant increase in preview day registrations once the new strategy was introduced. This is relevant to the client as it has a high enrollment rate on the preview days.

We have seen good growth in key metrics across all the campaigns and have also begun creating awareness and lead generation campaigns for Spanish-speaking audiences with language-targeted strategies.

We continue this focus to date and have introduced new strategies, including:

Growing preview day awareness and registrations
YouTube marketing

Remarketing
General Display for awareness