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italki is a global language learning community that connects students with over 20,000 teachers for personalized 1-on-1 online language lessons. Founded in 2006, italki has evolved from a language exchange social network into a robust marketplace offering lessons in more than 150 languages. With over 5 million learners from 180 countries, italki emphasizes a community-driven approach, aiming to make language learning enjoyable and culturally immersive. The platform values diversity, empathy, progress, growth, resilience, and passion in its mission to enhance language fluency worldwide.
Our strategy to drasticaly improve italki’s organic traffic involved high-level industry-relevant link building and search intent optimization. We focused on improving the rankings of their revenue-generating pages as well as expanding the semantic by supporting their content and already established pages. With a big brand like this the opportunities are a lot but the efforts in terms of research, outreach and facilitation of quality backlinks is more demanding if results are to be seen, which we saw as a great opportunity.
Through our comprehensive research, we found that the following strategies would provide the best results:
In December 2023 their monthly organic traffic was 574,826 which has increased to 806,866 - about 230,000 additional organic visitors on a monthly basis.
In December 2023 italki ranked for 590 000 keywords in total. By June 2024, this number had increased to 664 000. More importantly we see an increase of almost in the 5000 keywords for which Italki has entered the first page (4-10 position) and almost 1000 keywords for which it has entered the top 3.
In the span of 50 days we facilitated 17 backlinks just from (unlinked) branded mentions which was highly effective, especially for such a big website with many pages and a large link profile.
Interested in seeing what links we have built from the strategies? Reach out and we showcase a few in detail.
We began with analyzing italki’s website positions in search engines and closely analyzing website traffic. This provided essential insights into their online presence and user interactions.
After that we executed a more in-depth analysis of their revenue-generating pages so we can determine the next steps and move forward to the link earning & outreach.
With the extensive feedback and information from italki we were ready to move forward with the implementation of the strategies.
A significant part of our research involved analyzing italki's competitors. With such a large industry there were numerous competitors but just a handful of big players with the biggest brand being Duolingo. This not only provided us with an overview of how competitive the industry is but also helped us uncover additional valuable link opportunities based on the competitor's link profiles. Here is an example of the scale efforts the biggest brands in the industry were putting in:
After the analysis, we were ready to reverse engineer the competitor's link profiles. Once the information was segmented we cross-checked the domains with Italki's existing referring domains and left out only the best and most relevant domains taking into account Domain Rating, Website Traffic (+source) the Reffering Domains/Linked Domains ratio and the relevancy of the website. After that, we kicked off the outreach and relationship building.
With this case study, we wanted to demonstrate how Above Apex builds long-term relationships with companies while integrating the link-building & Digital PR vertical into the brand’s content marketing roadmap, and italki’s business goals. Most importantly, by improving the rankings of their revenue-generating pages, expanding the semantics and ranking more of their high-value pages, we achieved a drastic increase in the brand’s exposure, user base, and MRR. We continue to work with italki and support their efforts to become the number one language learning marketplace for students and teachers on the market.
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