Case Study · Enterprise learning platform / edtech SaaS
NovoEd: Two Relaunches, a Domain Consolidation, and Top 3 Rankings
+81% monthly organic sessions in year one
NovoEd, an enterprise learning platform, was a six-year SEO engagement running April 2019 through April 2025, spanning two full site relaunches and a www to non-www domain consolidation. The work started with a site averaging 8 to 9 second load times and title tags duplicated by a URL-handling flaw. Monthly organic sessions grew 81 percent in the engagement's first year (April 2019 to April 2020), and by November 2023 NovoEd held position 2 for its top category keyword while outranking tracked competitors on 6 of 9 priority keywords.
Results SnapshotThe Situation
The Challenge
When the engagement began in April 2019, NovoEd had real authority in the enterprise learning space and a technical foundation that was not keeping up. The homepage failed W3C validation with 113 errors and 20 warnings. A URL-handling flaw let the same page resolve at multiple addresses with no rewrite rule in place, spawning duplicate title tags, and short titles and missing meta descriptions were widespread. Roughly 150 auto-generated blog tag pages, many holding only one or two posts, were soaking up crawl budget. The top 180 organic pages averaged about 600 words, and the homepage and key hub pages each needed another 200 to 300 words to compete for non-branded keywords.
Speed was the loudest problem. Average page load over the trailing year sat at 8 to 9 seconds, and one page test recorded roughly 1,300 requests and an 18-second load, driven largely by tracking pixels and scripts. There was no custom 404 page, and redirects were an inconsistent mix of 301s, 302s, and 307s.
Underneath it all was a structural issue that outlasted the quick fixes: traffic was heavily branded. As late as November 2023, non-branded queries were driving only a small fraction of the site's monthly organic clicks.
The Work
What Was Done
Foundation first
I delivered a full technical audit in April 2019, followed by a site architecture plan and five on-page optimization batches through fall 2019, each with per-page recommended titles, H1s, and internal links.
Two relaunches, protected end to end
For the 2020 relaunch I crawled the Pantheon staging environment, built the redirect map from Search Console page data, and then ran monthly post-launch audits from July through October 2020, tracking more than 800 line items to a verified done status. Those audits caught 1,716 internal links pointing at redirects, seven pages canonicalizing to 404s, and broken URLs sitting in the XML sitemap. The 2025 redesign got the same treatment: a 25-sheet pre-launch issues workbook on the staging site covering 42 short titles, 27 duplicate titles, 49 low-content pages, and 18 missing H1s, with each issue prioritized and assigned to either SEO or dev, then a full post-launch audit in April 2025.
Redirect engineering as a discipline
Across the engagement I cleaned up redirect chains, remediated legacy HubSpot-era 404s, executed the www to non-www domain consolidation in December 2022 with 221 redirect rules, delivered a 462-rule redirect file in January 2023, and closed out legacy and blog cleanup redirects in December 2024.
A page speed program
A two-phase effort in fall 2022 reworked caching and asset delivery through WP Rocket, converted images to WebP, and benchmarked the results against competitor page speed data.
A monthly on-page engine
In 2023 I ran nine monthly optimization batches covering 91 pages, each with current-versus-recommended titles, H1s, and meta descriptions built from live Search Console keyword data, with a companion tracker logging 130 URLs through to completion.
Competitive intelligence at scale
Gap analyses in 2022 and 2024 mapped the battlefield. The February 2024 analysis quantified 23,602 keywords across five LMS competitors, with NovoEd ranking for just 1,174 of them, and that 22,428-keyword gap became the roadmap for the next content phase.
Structured data and SERP features
I deployed VideoObject JSON-LD across 19 video pages, validated in Search Console, and delivered FAQ, carousel, and product schema templates plus a Compare Learning Platforms page concept.
Reporting that told the truth
A monthly deck tracked traffic by year, non-branded clicks, priority keyword positions, and head-to-head competitor rankings, including in the months when the numbers were down.
The Payoff
Results
All growth is shown relative to the client's own baselines, with time windows as labeled. Figures come from NovoEd's monthly reporting (Google Analytics organic sessions) and Google Search Console. This was a collaborative engagement alongside NovoEd's marketing and development teams, so these numbers reflect growth during the partnership. Exact traffic figures and keywords are confidential to the client; performance data available on request.
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly organic sessions | April 2019 baseline | +81% year over year (April 2020) |
| Monthly organic sessions | August 2019 baseline | +97% vs the equivalent 2019 month (August 2022) |
| The site's top category keyword | Position 2 (November 2023, up 1 spot in 90 days) | |
| A second priority category query | Position 3 (November 2023, up 4 spots in 90 days) | |
| An emerging industry term | Position 3 (November 2023) | |
| Priority keywords outranking tracked competitors | 6 of 9 (November 2023) |
Monthly organic sessions rose 81 percent over the engagement's first year and stood 97 percent above the equivalent 2019 month three years in. Not every stretch was up and to the right: 2023 sessions ran below 2022 in every reported month, and the monthly reporting said so plainly, pairing the decline with query-level diagnosis of where impressions had fallen. The reporting addressed the dip openly rather than burying it, and the engagement continued through a second full relaunch in 2025.
Tools used: Google Search Console, Screaming Frog SEO Spider, SEMrush, Google Analytics and GA4, WordPress with Yoast SEO, WP Rocket and Imagify, the Redirection plugin, Pantheon staging environments, PageSpeed Insights, the W3C validator, and schema.org JSON-LD.
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