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An online school with courses in a health-adjacent field wanted more students from organic search. Education sites of this kind sit in Google's YMYL category, where the search engine expects clear expertise, transparency about who teaches and accredits the programmes, and content that answers a prospective student's questions completely. The school's site had good courses and weak SEO: no structure around what people search, few landing pages, technical errors, and none of the trust elements YMYL sites are expected to show.
The goal was set in numbers from the start - grow organic traffic and the number of keywords ranking in Google's top positions - with a baseline measured in March 2022.
We began with a deep competitor analysis: which schools ranked for the programme, course and career queries the client wanted, what their pages contained, and how their sites were structured. From that and from keyword collection we designed an intuitive SEO structure for the site - programme hubs, individual course pages, career and outcome pages, FAQ and admissions content - and expanded it with new landing pages for the queries the school had no page for.
A technical audit ran alongside: crawl errors, indexing problems, speed and mobile issues were fixed. Then we added the elements competitors were missing but YMYL sites need - instructor credentials, accreditation and outcome information, clear policies, author details on educational content, and structured data that tells Google what each page is.
The new structure and landing pages were rolled out over the spring, each written to answer the questions a prospective student asks before enrolling, and each internally linked from the relevant hub. Rankings were tracked across the full keyword set so progress could be measured against the March baseline rather than anecdotally.
Between March and July 2022 the picture changed completely. Keywords in the top 3 went from 5 to 13; keywords in positions 4-10 from 42 to 111; keywords in positions 11-20 from 68 to 139; total tracked keywords ranking from 381 to 893. Organic traffic doubled compared with the level before the work began.
Two details of the structure explain the jump in rankings. First, every course page gained a companion 'career' page answering what graduates do, what they earn and which employers recognize the programme - queries with far more search volume than the course names themselves. Second, hub pages were given real content and internal links rather than serving as menus, so authority flowed to the course pages beneath them. Neither required new courses; both required understanding what a prospective student types into Google at each stage of deciding.
Schools, clinics and training providers in Vancouver face the same YMYL bar. The formula here - a structure built from real queries, landing pages for every gap, technical cleanliness and visible trust signals - is what North SEO applies to education and healthcare clients.
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