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Rising to the top of Google: SEO strategy development for a flight school in the US

The Big Lab team works in three countries: the UAE, the USA and Russia. Part of our team in the US is the My Digital Family digital marketing agency which performs all kinds of work on business promotion with the help of digital tools and specializes in expert SEO. 

We have developed an SEO strategy for the ATP.Academy flight school, our client from the US. This strategy will powerfully outperform the most established and confident competitors in Google SERPs. 

We describe in details development of an SEO strategy for a flight school in the United States in the blog of the My Digital Family website. You can read a detailed description of the case study by following the link or learn about the recommended types of work for effective SEO in this recap.

The purpose of a flight school’s SEO strategy

Development of SEO strategy becomes a roadmap in accordance to which further works on the project are being performed. All types of works that need to be carried out in order to achieve the results required by the client are prescribed in the strategy: traffic growth from organic SERPs, sales increase. 

With a strategy in place, the team can focus on priority tasks and consistently implement the necessary changes. At the same time, the client understands what exactly and in what period of time is performed within their project. 

The development of SEO strategy for a flying school is made on the basis of preliminary analysis of the market, the search results of Google in the US and competitors’ websites. Based on the analysis, the following conclusions were made. 

  • The market for flight school services in the United States is highly competitive. 
  • According to the data from SimilarWeb, there are websites with high traffic (about 890,000 visits per month) in this niche in Google search results.
  • The level of search demand for token queries (“flight schools”, “flight school Florida”) reaches 51,000 queries per month (according to Ahrefs), the competition of the topic is high (in the orange and red zones).
Traffic volume of competitor websites, according to SimilarWeb
Traffic volume of competitor websites, according to SimilarWeb (Photo: screenshot)

To achieve the objectives of the project set by the client, an SEO strategy for a flight school has been developed. This strategy is designed to bring the maximum pool of commercial requests to the top of Google and to provide the school with a constant flow of leads from organic SERPs.

Elements of SEO strategy

The following stages of work on the project have been distinguished as part of the work on the strategy.

Building of the semantic core

The broadest possible semantic core will include the following queries.

  • Commercial. They are used by potential customers who are already ready to purchase the service.
  • General. High-frequency queries without informational and commercial “tails”.
  • Local. They indicate interest in buying the service in a particular city or state.
  • Branded. All queries with the brand of the flying school, the names of instructors who could become “brands” themselves. 
  • Image. High-frequency queries by which the website can rank at the top of Google, as well as queries related to reviews about the company and its reputation. 
  • Informational. Traffic queries that allow to capture potential customers at the top of sales funnel and to work through the maximum of low-frequency keywords.

Further, after the primary building of the semantic core, it is planned to expand semantics through synonyms, competitors parsing and expanding the directory with additional pages of services. Informational semantics is worked out in the website blog and FAQ section.

The level of competition by token queries is high, Ahrefs data
The level of competition by token queries is high, Ahrefs data (Photo: screenshot)
International SEO

A proposal was made to implement language versions of the website for target audiences outside the US who have difficulties with obtaining relevant information about the flight school and its services because of language barriers. 

Since the company is interested in selling its services to pilots from Latin America, Canada and Europe, it was decided to make several language versions of the website in Spanish and Italian. Also the websites were deployed in the local .fr and .de domain zones for the most interesting European countries (in terms of demand for the school’s services).

Promotion works

There are four blocks of priority works distinguished in the search engine optimization of the website. These works will be carried out simultaneously.

  • Technical optimization. Correction of technical errors, optimizing meta tags, introduction of micro-parsing, working through the structure of the website and correct navigation, the implementation of internal linking and increase in the website speed.
  • Content optimization. Filling the website with high-quality, useful and expert content. First of all, filling with flying school services cards (commercial catalogue), then informational and overview pages, legal information and data about the organization.
  • Working through the YMYL factors. Based on the Google requirements to the websites of commercial themes, we are planning to strengthen the image of the company through publications in the media, quality filling and updating of the company’s business card on Google Maps, attracting expert authors for writing the content.
  • Link profile. We plan to place high-quality links from the websites of authoritative media, thematic blogs and our client’s website-partners.
Additional promotional works

To strengthen communication with the target audience, especially those who have already interacted with the website, we plan to use retargeting advertising, addressing special offers to potential customers and “asleep” audience.

Project analytics

We regularly evaluate the effectiveness of our work by analyzing the data: website positions, traffic and its sources, the number of sales. We conduct basic web-analytics weekly and often look at strong competitors, hence we do better than they do. 

Here is a brief fragment of the “SEO strategy development for a flight school in the US” case. To read the full article click here.

Автор -Written by Tatiana Torskaya

Content marketer, SEO specialist, head of content creation department at Big Lab