Apr 20, 2023

Maven Insights: How to optimize your Maven course page for SEO

By Gagan Biyani

Co-founder & CEO of Maven

Summary

Learn how to optimize your Maven course page for SEO with lead magnets, free workshops, and detailed landing pages.

Maven's top priority this year is course marketing. We’re doing this in two ways. Providing tools and insights so you can more effectively market your course AND by marketing Maven directly to the public through various channels.

From our end, Maven is going to be driving traffic to our top courses via optimizing Google search traffic (“SEO”), paid traffic (social, search advertising and newsletters), and social media (LinkedIn primarily). Already, 25%+ of course sales are coming through Maven channels, and we’d like to see that go up much higher.

You can help. Here are 4 ways to dramatically improve your ability to get Maven traffic:

1. Publish a lead magnet

Lead magnets are simple pages optimized for collecting email leads. Maven instructors have published hundreds of lead magnets—sharing free resources, actionable guides, templates, ebooks, workshop recordings, and more. We suggest sharing a lead magnet as a way to grow your course waitlist, since these pages convert to email lead at 5-10x the rate of the average course landing page. Not only will this improve your own conversion, but we plan on driving traffic to lead magnets over the next few months. That means you're more likely to be included in paid advertising or our search engine marketing if you publish a lead magnet.

2. Host a free workshop with a promo code

After a free workshop, students who had a positive experience are more likely to enroll in your course. Capture this intent by offering an exclusive promo code in your thank you email. We’ve seen instructors who use this tactic drive as much as 30% of cohort enrollments from their workshop attendees. This is also another version of a “lead magnet” and eventually we'll market your free workshops directly to students. To learn how to host a successful free workshop, check out this article.

3. Optimize your course page for SEO

SEO is a big focus for Maven this year; we’re investing to build a big library of content that is optimized for search. We created an SEO playbook (exclusive to Maven instructors) that covers keywords 101, link building and more. Email us at support@maven.com to request the playbook.

4. Add details to your landing page

Maven students ask us all sorts of questions about courses. Here's a quick list of landing page improvements you can make:

Add course time commitment and schedule. This is critical information that not everyone puts on their landing page.
Be more specific. Don’t just TELL people what you are going to teach, but SHOW them. So instead of saying “You will learn how to get more customers”, say “You’ll learn the X framework for getting more customers.” Then explain what the X framework is on the landing page. Talk about specific case studies you’ll go into, any free content they will get. Be specific.

Update on Maven marketing experiments:

1. Marketing experiments to drive sales

Dozens of instructors have tested our experiments, with one instructor driving ~2,000 visitors to their landing page from an affiliate partner. While alumni referrals and affiliate tests need volume and time to drive results, we’ve significantly reduced the effort it takes to launch an experiment. Read more about how to create affiliate links within Maven, and reach out to support@maven.com for our playbook on how to run a marketing experiment for affiliates, alumni referrals, or student outcome tracking.

2. AI recommendations.

Maven has been experimenting with AI-generated recommendations in our weekly newsletter. Our aim was to determine if sending AI-generated personalized recommendations would have higher click rates and thus better connect students with relevant courses. The results showed a 300% increase in click rates for personalized course recommendations.

We plan to expand recommendations to continue to help you connect with the right students for your course in the Maven marketplace. If you’re interested in the technical behind-the-scenes of how we’re doing this, check out this article on the Maven blog from Shreyans, our cofounder & Head of Engineering.

I’m proud of the progress we’ve made in a few months. We launched the marketplace last September and already 25%+ of Maven enrollments are coming through maven.com, Maven emails, SEO, and Maven social channels. This works best for courses that are already optimized for marketing, so we highly recommend taking our recommendations above.