British Council
British Council’s TeachingEnglish website is the world’s largest online English teaching community, offering a plethora of learning resources and lesson plans for English teachers and teacher educators globally.
With such a large website to manage and maintain, the TeachingEnglish team needed help with their SEO, content and user journey. And that’s where we came in.
Gathering our teams together, we helped to produce a comprehensive digital audit report that covered several key areas, including:
- Keyword research and benchmarking performance
- Website analysis, technical review and user journey
- Content audit and content strategy
- Off-site recommendations, including social media platforms
36,294
files crawled
4,812
pages audited
122
page report
Getting the house in order
The purpose of the digital audit was to help the British Council team better understand keyword and customer journey mapping for their main audiences – teachers and teacher educators – to help inform their on-site and off-site strategies.
We started by crawling the website, uncovering thousands of files. We distilled them down to a smaller number of active, HTML web pages relevant to users’ searches, which became the focus of our on-site recommendations. We reviewed the top pages on the TeachingEnglish website and made specific recommendations to further improve performance, incorporating best practices across the whole site.
Looking at what terms the TeachingEnglish audience was searching for, we recommended keywords and primary areas where they should appear to maintain and improve site rankings.
Toxic backlinks were also identified and highlighted for removal.
Recommending technical improvements
When we looked at the website, we made recommendations about upgrades to software and tools, as well as identifying areas where best practice was needed.
A big focus was put on ways to improve the navigation, user journey and mobile performance of the website, so many of the recommendations put forward by our Developers linked to these areas.
Creating a dashboard for easier reporting
The final stage of the project involved creating a reporting dashboard for the British Council team so they could monitor their KPIs in real time.
Using Looker Studio, we made sure the dashboard was fed with all the metrics the team needed to measure the ongoing website performance. We also held a workshop to make sure everyone understood how the dashboard worked and how to find the insights they needed.
Looking to the future
Following the completion of the audit, the British Council team had everything they needed to make the updates their website needed to improve its search performance and user journey.
We have just completed our first piece of work with AB. It was search engine optimisation, which I knew nothing about. They have managed a highly effective project and helped us learn throughout. Their report, dashboard and presentation were engaging, actionable and very clear. We are delighted.
Since then, we have started working to make monthly improvements to the SEO performance of the website, hold best practice workshops and complete a comprehensive social media audit of the TeachingEnglish channels.
In need of a digital audit?
Whether you’d like to work on your website’s SEO, your social media channels or your paid ads (or all three!), a digital audit is definitely the place to start. Get in touch with us and we can help you!
