OUR WORK CQF
Working with CQF to grow organic search traffic
The Certificate in Quantitative Finance (CQF) is a globally recognised online quantitative finance course designed to transform your career by equipping you with the specialist quant skills essential to success.
CQF SEO Results
It didnt take long for our efforts to take hold in Google, and we have seen some wonderful improvements in metrics across the board.
+36%
Increase in Website Sessions YoY
+64%
Increase in Goals YoY
+26%
Increase in Conversion rate YoY
The challenge
CQF wanted to compete in Google for core commercial and transactional keywords, as well as a selection of much more difficult informational keywords.
GROUND ZERO
The CQF website had never had any SEO consideration, so we were starting from scratch.
LOW WORD COUNTS
The CQF website had never had any SEO consideration, so we were starting from scratch.
TECHNICAL ISSUES
The website itself needed some serious TLC to get the page speed up and pass core web vitals before we could address items such as Schema and Meta Data.
The CQF website has to compete with the course landing pages from many prominent universities, making a top 3 search ranking position for these types of phrases extremely challenging as these education domains have incredibly strong domain authority and are well-known in the market.
The SEO plan of action
After careful analysis and consideration, we agreed that there were several important areas that needed addressing
CONTENT
At this level, CQF’s content needed to be of a higher quality and length than the competitors. We needed to update existing content and produce fresh content for both transactional/commercial keywords and informational keywords, so that we grow our digital footprint for anything Quant Finance related.
IMPROVE THE BACKLINK PROFILE
The backlink profile of each individual page needed to stronger than the competitors. The backlinks themselves needed to have a global footprint, and to come from authoritative sources with high Domain Rating as we will be competing with a selection of well-established universities and course providers.
TECHNICAL SEO
We needed to ensure the CQF website was fit to load and serve users globally, on any device and with a very fast load time. Our technical audit highlighted a number of issues and areas for improvement, and we created a plan with the CQF technical team to tackle those.
Huge keyword ranking jump
In Summer 2023 our work took a significant step forwards with many more keywords now ranking in Google.
We secured the Rich Snippet
9 months into the project we managed to achieve the rich snippet for Quantitive Finance – a phrase with 40,000 searches per month.
The results
We successfully overtook several major universities on search results pages.
We have had great success in getting the vast majority of CQF’s core keywords onto Page 1 of the Search Engines, and CQF’s organic traffic continues to grow month on month. This has resulted in:
326%
increase in net organic keyword portfolio
164%
increase in organic keywords in positions 1-3
23%+
increase in Google Analytics goal completions
Moving into the next phase of work, we are shifting gears and plan to go after even more difficult search phrases with much higher monthly keyword search volumes.
“The team at MintTwist have been a joy to work with. They produced a solid approach to help address our immediate SEO priorities and were there to guide us through both our understanding of some of the more complicated SEO principles, as well as implementing the recommended changes.”
Marlen Klepin
Marketing Manager, CQF