How a University Went From 0 to 84 Page One Rankings in Just 8 Weeks

Most content marketers know that improving Google SERP rankings is a potent strategy for boosting organic website traffic, ultimately leading to more prospects, conversions, and revenue.

However, historically, ascending Google's ranks has been a daunting task, especially in competitive landscapes, often taking months or even years. DemandJump aims to change this through Pillar-Based Marketing (PBM).

PBM combines a few key elements for exceptional organic search results:

1. A data-backed strategy that pinpoints topics, keywords, and exact phrases that searchers are actually looking for. With PBM, there’s no more guessing at what content to write.
2. An interlinking network of content made up of pillars, sub-pillars, and supporting blogs that uses both short-tail and long-tail keywords to signal your authority to search engines and humans alike.
3. Helpful, educational content that directly answers your customers’ questions.

Pillar-Based Marketing eliminates content guesswork, aligns with Google's user-friendly content focus, and can yield triple-digit growth in top 100 keywords within months. Here's the story of how a manufacturing company made it happen.

The Goal

The University of Iowa Tippie College of Business set out to establish themselves as thought leaders and take organic market share around the topic of 'MBAs'. 

The Plan

This is where DemandJump’s marketing strategy platform comes in. The platform shows you the exact content to create to increase first page rankings and drive outcomes.

With the help of the DemandJump platform, the Tippie College of Business team ran Topic Insight reports to better understand their organic search performance, how other universities were stacking up, and what keywords mattered most to their target audience.

From there, they chose “Why should I get an MBA” as their first pillar to focus on. Once this was decided, DemandJump’s Pillar Summary tool empowered their content team to understand exactly what their target audience was searching and asking.

The Tippie College of Business team was able to quickly and conveniently aggregate those keyword insights into helpful content briefs to begin writing and publishing. In other words, the platform gave them the exact keywords and phrases to use to reach their target audience.

Throughout this process, it was critical for the team to understand exactly what their audiences were searching and what questions they had related to their offering. This knowledge allowed them to create human-centric content that would be truly helpful and meaningful to real people researching real solutions. The best content writers know that you’re not just writing for search engines—you’re writing for the people who use search engines to find the information they need day in and day out.

The Results

In just days they saw significant increases in rankings and traffic for their pillar topic.

• Within days of the content going live they saw an increase from 0 to 57 page one rankings.
• Within 8 weeks they were up to 84 page one rankings, and by 3 months they were up to 137 page one rankings for queries related to their pillar topic.

• Within days they were ranking in the top 100 for 225 queries related to their pillar topic.
• By 3 months they were ranking in the top 100 for 481 queries.

With the help of DemandJump, the Tippie College of Business team was able to generate a strategy, create content, and have visibility into how individual content was contributing to its overall strategy. Congrats to the University of Iowa Tippie College of Business—we’re looking forward to your continued success!

DemandJump: Content Made Easy

The results that the team continues to deliver are impressive, to say the least. But, they aren’t the only ones seeing this kind of growth. Every day, DemandJump’s customers are increasing their page one rankings, taking back organic search market share, and getting more eyes on their offerings. The fact is, DemandJump makes it easy to do.

Ready to see it for yourself? Create a free account to start running insights and developing content that ranks today!