Aspirational Academics

SHL

UK, US

Creative/Outreach, Tech SEO

Recruitment

1296

LinkScore Tooltip copy here
45

Linking domains

Where's the best place to study if you want to maximise your odds of being hired by the world’s biggest names in tech, banking, and the media? It partnership with SHL, we used LinkedIn to analyse the educational backgrounds of over 800,000 employees from places likes Google, Bank of America, and the Guardian.

Objectives

1. Increase organic search rankings in the UK and the US to help boost web traffic.
2. Grow market share in the US, where our client didn’t have any prominent presence.
3. Achieve top-tier, authoritative, editorially valid links that increase natural site authority.

Strategy

Our recommended 12-month strategy was a technical and content-focused approach:

• We created and outreached five full-scale, highly interactive pieces of content, the main purpose of which was to generate backlinks from top-tier news and industry publications.
• These campaigns were US and UK focused.
•Simultaneously, we took a deep dive into the technical and on-page aspects of the client’s site, enabling us to come up with a holistic SEO strategy. Key tasks included:
• Full-scale technical SEO audit & support with the implementation of our recommendations.
• Keyword research and content strategy, followed by on-page content optimisations.

Methodology

We analysed over 800,000 LinkedIn profiles to discover where professionals working in tech, banking, and the media went to university. We also created rankings for the most popular public and private universities in the US and Russell Group and non-Russell Group universities in the UK by sector. We explored the Oxbridge backgrounds of employees of some of the top newspapers in the UK as well.

Our analysis led us to uncover some interesting facts, for example, that nearly half (42.7%) of the bank workers in our analysis who went to a university in the UK went to a Russell Group university. We also revealed the top universities for employees of the GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft) tech giant group; Stanford University for instance topped our ranking of the most popular universities for Google employees.

The final campaign was a beautifully designed and data-driven piece packed with interesting angles to take to journalists.