Private training organizations: the best SEO performance

As a result of the health crisis, demand for remote training was extremely strong throughout 2020. To meet it, training organizations (or TOs) had to adapt very quickly and offer 100% online programs. This forced-march digital transformation was not without consequences for the professional training market. But some organizations came out ahead and managed to establish their online presence in an environment that is nonetheless highly competitive.

This unprecedented situation prompted us to ask the following question: “Which training organizations rose to this challenge most successfully?” We therefore conducted a sector study to analyze the SEO performance of the leading private training organization websites in France.

Download our full SEO study on private training organizations for free.

The methodology

To conduct our study, we selected 100 private training organization websites, drawn from the Xerfi Precepta studies catalog “ Private training organizations: strategies and changes by 2015“.

Based on the analysis of their traffic, we were able to produce four rankings:

The largest number of visits on Google.fr in January 2021,

The best SEO traffic gains compared to the previous year,

The largest number of indexed content pages,

The best ratios between indexed content and content that captures SEO traffic.

To better understand what internet users expect from private TOs, we also produced a barometer and a semantic study. This work is based on data from the 20 most-visited organization websites in France.

Clustering the 5,839 keywords from these websites allowed us to identify the major themes in the sector as well as the new traffic opportunities for TOs.

Finally, in the last part of the study, we compared the SEO quality of two pieces of content from private organization websites that ranked for the same query. To do this, we relied on our solution, Semji Platform, which assessed the optimization level of each piece of content against various SEO criteria and assigned it a Content Score. The goals of this analysis: to highlight the SEO criteria of ROI-driven content and to show that the content with the best Content Score is the one most likely to generate traffic and conversions.

For this study, we also relied on data provided by the traffic analysis tools SEMrush, Ahrefs, Google and Advanced Web Ranking. Differences may therefore exist between these mathematical estimates and the actual performance of private training websites.

Feel free to contact us with any questions about our methodology.

Top 100 most-visited private training organization websites in France

The top leaders

The first ranking in our study is that of the top leaders, namely the websites that capture the most SEO traffic. In the lead is the site of the organization Wall Street English with 406,065 SEO visits for the month of January 2021. Next, relatively far behind, come the sites of Sciences Po (which includes a continuing education program) and Cegos with 271,034 and 124,349 visits respectively.

This ranking can be explained, in part, by the strong popularity of English-language training but also by the very large number of resources provided by these 3 websites: blog articles, topic sheets, practical guides, etc.

The top game changers

Among the sites that draw a lot of traffic, there are also those whose number of visits skyrocketed during 2020. Among these game changers, ESCP Europe stands out as the big winner with growth of more than 389K%! A record! Second in the ranking, the website of IFG shows a traffic increase of about 315%. On the bottom step, the site of Infrep still posts growth of 229%.

This sharp increase in traffic is explained in particular by the special context of 2020, which generated very strong demand for remote training. Demand that ESCP Europe was able to meet by relying, like the two other game changers, on an effective content strategy and numerous 100% online training offers.

Download the full study to discover the rest of the ranking.

The SEO barometer: our assessment of the training sector

Why produce an SEO barometer?

The SEO barometer makes it possible to gauge the volume of demand by looking at the number of queries. It thus helps to uncover the most popular themes and keywords, the number of content pieces produced for each query, and seasonal traffic peaks.

It is an essential tool for understanding the developments and major trends in a market.

This barometer was all the more interesting to produce given the unprecedented context of 2020 and its consequences for private TOs. In March 2021, Synofdes, the national union of training organizations, published the results of a study conducted on the year 2020 on the impact of lockdown on training organizations.

The result: 3 out of 4 organizations managed to maintain their activities through remote learning, and 88% of leaders say they adapted well to the situation. Nevertheless, according to the union, this finding needs to be put into perspective because the situation would be more worrying in the medium term. Indeed, it notes that 54% of the structures were said to be running at a loss and 5% were even considering filing for bankruptcy. 50% of organizations were also said to have given up on investing.

Faced with this critical situation, an online presence is more than ever a solution for many TOs to sustain their economic activity. This barometer thus highlights the way in which some private organizations adapted to this exceptional situation.

Online training: growing demand from internet users

The barometer tells us about the audience figures for the 20 most-visited private TO websites. These alone account for:

• 5K keywords in January 2021
• 1.3 million searches
• 213K euros/month in traffic value.

These results demonstrate the importance of the professional training market. Several factors can explain these large audiences:

• Prolonged period of inactivity due to lockdowns,
• Increase in career changes,
• Support policies for professional training,
• Strong competition in the job market,
• Rising selection criteria from recruiters, etc.

Among the themes with the highest monthly search volumes, we find:

• Assistant (55K)
• Remote training (37K)
• Training center (29K)

At the top of these themes, the term “assistant” comes up in about 55,000 monthly queries. [analysis]

The term “Remote training” is among the most searched terms in January 2021. The explosion of career changes, the various lockdowns, and the introduction of the curfew are all reasons that explain this strong demand from internet users.

Quite logically, the “Training center” theme also stands out strongly and shows that internet users are looking to train with recognized and certifying professionals. All the other popular themes in the field of professional training can be found in our sector study.

To go further in this semantic study, we also extracted the main keyword from each cluster and assessed its search capacity, month by month, throughout 2020.

It emerges that some keywords like “remote training” were searched more at certain times of the year. For example, for 2020, it was mainly in April that the query “remote training” reached its search peak. September, October and November are also months of intense searches across all themes.

To find all the results, feel free to download the full study.

Which training organizations really capture traffic with their content?

It’s a fact: in organic search, producing content is not enough to generate traffic. The proof: only 9% of content on the internet captures SEO traffic (source: Ahrefs). The remaining 91% thus miss out on many traffic and conversion opportunities.

The proof lies in these two rankings we produced:

• The top producers: the private TOs that produce the most content on their websites,
• The top performers: the organizations that capture the most traffic relative to the number of content pieces produced.

The top producers

Among the private training organizations that publish the most, the site of Sciences Po ranks well ahead of the field. With 162,000 content pages, the organization offers a very large number of resources of all kinds: blog articles, program details, explanatory content about courses, how organizations work, pages aimed at businesses and a great many educational resources. Global Knowledge and EM Lyon Business School come just behind with 53,200 and 40,300 pages respectively.

The top performers

This ranking shows how much content production is not an end in itself but aims to meet the expectations of internet users. Here, we calculated the ratio between the number of indexed content pieces and the number of content pieces that generate traffic. The best in this area: Educatel, Wall Street English and Karis Formation, whose ratio is between 35 and 40%. These training organizations therefore managed to produce very high-quality content while meeting the search intent of their audience, an essential condition for being visible on Google’s results page.

Ifocop.fr VS. educatel.fr: which content is better optimized and why?

2 pieces of content, 1 same query, 1 winning piece. In the last part of our study, we analyzed two pieces of content using the Semji platform, two pages from competing sites, ifocop.fr and educatel.fr, both ranking for the keyword “career change.” Our solution assigned each of them a Content Score based on various criteria essential to organic search:

• Content length,
• Alignment with search intent on the topic,
• Answers to internet users’ questions,
• Richness of vocabulary and of the topics covered,
• Etc.

The goal of this analysis is to highlight the essential criteria of content optimized for search engines. Feel free to check out the full result of the comparison in our study.

If you too want to assess the SEO quality and relevance of your web content, request a personalized demo of Semji without further delay!