#1
Google Position
Reached in four months and held for more than two years
Client
RMIT University
The Challenge
RMIT Online competes in one of the most contested categories in Australian search. Every university with an online program chases the same few searches, and the person typing “online mba” is close to a decision worth a full degree’s fees. In August 2022, RMIT Online’s MBA page drew an estimated 233 organic visits a month. For a program of that value, most of the demand was going elsewhere.
Scope
- Authority Building
- Content
- SEO Strategy
- Reporting
Results
612%
Organic traffic to the MBA page
August 2022 to February 2025 (Ahrefs).
12 of 14
Tracked MBA searches in Google’s top three
August 2022 to February 2025 (Ahrefs).
One of Australia’s largest Universities took its Online MBA page to the top of Google.
The gap we found.
The page was visible, but not where decisions get made. Before the campaign, “online mba”, “mba course online” and “online mba australia” were all well below the top three positions where most clicks go. Google needed stronger signals that this page deserved to rank alongside long-established competitors.
What we did.
Over the campaign we placed 245 human-written articles on relevant Australian publications, from business and education titles to national names such as Australian Geographic and Reader’s Digest Australia, and regional mastheads including The Border Mail and the Illawarra Mercury. Seventy-four of them pointed to the MBA page, so the effort landed where it would count most rather than spreading thinly across the course catalogue. Placements and rankings were reported monthly against the searches that mattered.
What it means.
The searches that matter most in a category are the hardest to win and the easiest to lose. RMIT Online won them and kept them, with gains that compounded for more than two years instead of fading after a spike. For an enterprise marketing team, that is the difference between search as a cost you buy again every quarter and search as an asset that keeps earning.
