Skip to main content
Press release and news

Insytful at Velocity: An SEO case study with Canterbury Christ Church University

Danielle Mee

Zengenti

4 October 2024

Skip to

Every year, Zengenti organises a conference for our community called Velocity. The annual event showcases the newest features introduced to Insytful and Contensis. While also providing a networking opportunity for peers facing similar challenges.

It was Insytful’s second year attending Velocity. In addition to roadmap updates and sharing valuable content to enhance community knowledge, we also had our first Insytful case study.

Insytful super users, Canterbury Christ Church University (CCCU), presented “Winning the search engine optimisation (SEO) battle”.

Winning the SEO battle: An SEO case study with CCCU

Presented by SEO lead, Lauren Podd and Web developer Reem Khider, the team outlined their SEO strategy and the success they’ve had because of it.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): Search Engine Optimisation is the art of optimising content for better visibility on major search engines, such as Google, when a user searches for a relevant term.

Two ladies, stood on a stage giving a presentation in front of a screen
Lauren and Reem presenting at Velocity 2024.

The presentation focused on their SEO journey, using Insytful to enhance the University’s website performance and creating content to improve user experience.

Creating an SEO strategy

The newly implemented SEO strategy focused upon international segmentation and personalisation, tailored content to feature in SERPs and entity SEO.

Search Engine Results Page (SERP): SERP stands for Search Engine Results Pages and is the page you see after entering a search query into search engines such as Google, Bing or Yahoo.

SEO strategy results

Since the implementation of their strategy, the team has noticed:

  • An increase in pages per session to 5.4 - compared with the industry HE average of 2.4
  • A decrease in bounce rate to 44%, compared with the industry average of 55%
  • 15,282 increase in views
  • 28,586 increase in users
  • 290,583 increase in events
A woman stood at a podium, presenting about entity SEO to a crowd of people sat down
Lauren presenting about entity SEO

Working with Insytful to improve their technical SEO

Making Insytful part of their SEO strategy has significantly improved their organic search engine results. During their presentation, the team recognised that accessibility and performance play an important role in SEO.

How did they do it?

Working collaboratively as part of a small team alongside Insytful, CCCU were able to identify accessibility and performance issues and focus on fixing broken links, too.

Performance updates to improve SEO

Starting with performance fixes, the team focused on improving cumulative layout shift (CLS).

CLS: Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is a Google Core Web Vital metric measuring the stability of visual content on a page. The user experience metric measures any unexpected page layout shifts that occur when a visitor interacts with a page.

The ideal CLS score is 0, meaning your page has no layout shifts.

A bad CLS score indicates that the website has a poor user experience and is unreliable, causing users to leave quickly. Improving the CLS score was an essential technical SEO fix for CCCU because page experience is a ranking factor in Google.

By enhancing its CLS score, CCCU improved its website's performance, organic SEO and user experience.

Accessibility updates to improve SEO

If you weren't already aware, making your website more accessible improves your SEO score. That is because accessibility and SEO both focus on improving user experience.

The accessibility changes that the team focused on were:

  • Adding alt text.
  • Correct use of Aria-labels.
  • Sufficient colour contrast ratio.

The results since working with Insytful

The Canterbury website has seen improvements across all areas in Insytful.

Most notably, accessibility and SEO have scores of nearly 100, indicating that the team's focus on these areas is paying off. Here’s a breakdown of the team’s success in numbers.

Overall site improvement

Overall site score: In February 2024, was 79.

Overall site score: In October 2024, is 86.

SEO score improvements

SEO score: In February 2024, was 97.

SEO score: In October 2024, is 99.

Accessibility score improvements

Accessibility score: In February 2024, was 80.

Accessibility score: In October 2024, is 97.

Performance score improvements

Performance score: In February 2024, was 76.

Performance score: In October 2024, is 77.

Content quality score improvements

Content quality score: In February 2024, was 64.

Content quality score: In October 2024, is 69.

How to recreate Canterbury's SEO success

With a small team and limited resources, CCCU still have made big SEO gains.

Their SEO success has been down to implementing an SEO strategy, staying consistent with their approach and using Insytful to audit their website.

Working with Insytful to improve your website's SEO

Audit your web content and expose SEO issues holding your site back. Insytful checks your site for any technical SEO errors, including:

  • Page crawlability
  • Broken pages and links
  • Metadata
  • Spelling mistakes
  • Missing alt text

Plus other SEO issues.

A close up of cupcakes with white butter cream topping, with Insytful logos on top.
A selection of Insytful branded cupcakes at Velocity 2024.

Free resources to improve your website's SEO

Winning the SEO battle is not easy, but there are free tools and resources out there which can help. Including:

Start improving your website today.

Danielle Mee

Zengenti

Press release and news
4 October 2024