What if the key to dominating search rankings in an AI-driven world wasn’t just about keywords, but about crafting content that machines love as much as humans do? This was the challenge facing our client, a renowned international university in Malaysia.
With AI overviews and algorithm updates reshaping the search landscape, the university realised its existing SEO strategies were no longer enough.
Despite having strong academic content, the site lacked the concise, structured, and authoritative elements needed to rank highly in AI-driven search results. We started working with the client in March 2023 and adopted a cutting-edge approach: combining SEO with Large Language Model Optimisation (LLMO).
And the results..
- Organic traffic: Grew by 269.91% from 23,510 in March 2023 to 87,000 in November 2024.
- Market leader: Surpassed competitors in non-branded organic traffic, with the nearest competitor achieving only 36,860 traffic in the same period.
- Improved keyword rankings: 80% of targeted keywords ranked on the first page, making the university a top choice for prospective students.
Our strategies
- Content tailored for AI and LLMO
- Optimisation for AI overviews: Rewrote key landing pages with concise, authoritative, and semantically rich content designed to rank in AI-powered summaries.
- Structured data implementation: Added schema markup to boost the site’s relevance and ensure accurate data extraction.
- User intent mapping: Refined content to match user intent for high-volume, non-branded search queries, ensuring the university’s programmes became the top choice in relevant searches.
- Advanced keyword strategy
- Focused on non-branded keywords with high intent.
- Conducted competitor gap analysis to identify and capitalise on underserved topics.
- Building topical authority
- Developed content clusters, targeting related keywords to establish expertise in key academic fields.
- Created internal linking silos to strengthen topical authority for specific disciplines.
- Technical SEO enhancements
- Improved site speed and mobile usability to meet Google Core Web Vitals benchmarks.
- Fixed crawl errors and optimised indexing to ensure all key pages were discoverable and ranked efficiently.
- Competitor benchmarking and trend analysis
- Analysed competitors’ performance and AI-focused trends to refine content strategies.